For millennia, hundreds of vivid bas-reliefs adorned the walls of the Nineveh palace of the legendary eighth-century BCE Assyrian king Sennacherib, depicting daring conquests richly described in Assyrian sources and the Hebrew Bible.
In 2016, Islamic State terrorists entered the palace, in modern-day Mosul, Iraq, and systematically smashed the artifacts. The long-surviving sculptures had enabled modern scholars to compare biblical information on Sennacherib with historical sources and archaeological findings since the 19th century. Had they not been destroyed, they would have likely had more to offer.
Among the treasures broken in the terror group’s campaign of destruction was a slab of stone that had adorned Sennacherib’s opulent throne room, which scholars long ago concluded depicts the Assyrian siege of the Philistine city of Eltekeh.
But new research analyzing photographs and drawings of the largely overlooked bas-relief before its destruction suggests that it actually shows Jerusalem, making it the oldest-known depiction of the city.
Current scholarship holds that the Madaba map, a mosaic found in a sixth-century CE Byzantine church in modern-day Jordan, is the oldest rendering of Jerusalem to survive to modern times. But the study, published in October in the prestigious Journal of Near Eastern Studies by University of South Africa researcher Stephen Compton, suggests that the southwest palace in Nineveh was home to a depiction 1,200 years older than the one in Madaba.
“This is a unique image of the Assyrian army leaving a foreign city and leaving it intact, and it fits with both Sennacherib’s account of what happened in Jerusalem and the Bible,” Compton told The Times of Israel via telephone.
The throne room contained at least 33 carved panels showing the exploits of Sennacherib, whose reign lasted from 705 to 681 BCE.
“Sennacherib’s throne room was the largest room of the palace, 167 feet long,” Compton said.
British archaeologists carried out systematic excavations of the site as early as the mid-19th century, documenting their finds in detailed drawings. The most well-preserved slabs were moved to London and remain on display at the British Museum.
They include bas-reliefs from another room in the palace that depict Sennacherib’s destruction of the Judean city of Lachish, likely during the same campaign in 701 BCE in which he would lay siege to Jerusalem.
Sennacherib’s Annals record that military campaign — the Assyrian king’s third — in which his army swept through Phoenicia and down the Levantine coast, eventually attacking the inland kingdom of Judah, which was backed by Egypt, a major Assyrian rival.
According to accepted research that campaign is depicted on the right wall of the throne room in a series of slabs showing three conquered sites, though the identity of the places seen has been the subject of a longstanding debate among researchers.
The section includes slab 28, which depicts an elaborate city wall and a single figure holding an object atop a stately building. Researchers generally associated that carving as showing the Assyrian defeat of Egypt at Eltekeh, a town in the Judean lowlands where Sennacherib recorded a major military victory over the Egyptians and Philistines.
Some two decades ago, Swiss scholar Christoph Uehlinger considered the possibility that slab 28 might actually depict Jerusalem, but did not reach a definitive conclusion one way or the other.
In his study, Compton takes the idea a step further, offering a new evaluation of the sequence of images and offering several arguments to support the claim that Jerusalem is the correct interpretation of the now-smashed slab, its city wall surrounded by the Assyrian army, the city’s royal palace within, and the solitary figure that of the Bible’s King Hezekiah.
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| A closeup of a figure possibly depicting King Hezekiah in a rendering of slab 28 of the throne room of the Southwest Palace in Nineveh (modern Mosul), Iraq, created by British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard around 1850 |
‘Trapped like a bird’
Among the arguments offered by the PhD candidate is the fact that the picture appears to jibe with accounts of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem. While the Biblical narrative and the Assyrian annals diverge somewhat on what happened, both sources refer to a conflict that ultimately leaves Jerusalem intact.
“Normally in Assyrian reliefs, you would see cities being looted and burned, and [Assyrian soldiers] carrying away the treasures and captives,” said Compton.
But slab 28 shows a standing city, and no chaotic battle scenes raging inside it.
In the Bible, Hezekiah is said to have paid a heavy tribute to Sennacherib to leave the city. After the Assyrian king besieged Jerusalem anyway and vowed to destroy it, his army was struck by an angel of God and lost 185,000 men in one night.
“So King Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and retreated, and stayed in Nineveh,” reads verse 19:36 in II Kings.
In Sennacherib’s Annals, the king boasts of sequestering the King Hezekiah in the city, but not sacking it, saying “I trapped Hezekiah in his royal city, Jerusalem, like a bird in a cage.”
Compton notes that the singular individual seen atop a building appears to be a monarchic figure standing alone.
“In this image, right of his throne, there is an individual holding a standard, and a standard is a symbol of royalty,” Compton noted. “Normally, you would have defenders inside the city, shooting arrows, throwing rocks. In this unique instance, you have what appears to be a king as the only individual.”
Compton also noted the architectural style depicted in slab 28, which shows evidence of corbels, protruding stones used to support a raised area larger than the base it stands on.
“It’s quite sophisticated,” he said. “These towers go up, and support a room on top of the towers, that is wider than the tower base supporting the room, so it’s been corbelled out. There is a second level of supporting battlements atop the tower. So it’s twice corbelled.”
“If you look at Sennacherib’s reliefs, there are all sorts of architectural styles, but there are only three reliefs that show this style,” he added.
According to Compton, aside from slab 28, it also appears in the bas-relief depicting Lachish, which features identical twice-corbelled towers.
Scholars have not yet reached a consensus on how to interpret the third city, but the image includes what Compton described as interesting aquatic features likely representing a moat and a river, leading some researchers to identify it with ancient Gath.
At the time of Sennacherib, excavations indicate that Gath was culturally Judahite and Sennacherib’s inscription described the city as having been previously Philistine, but held by Hezekiah.
According to Compton, if the two other cities exhibiting the same architectural style are interpreted as Judahite, it is reasonable to suggest the one depicted on slab 28 is Judahite as well.
In the image, a large space separates the city wall from the building inside where the figure is standing, seemingly representing the dry moat that archaeologists say separated the Temple Mount from the City of David and royal palace below. That’s how the Assyrian attackers, who later ancient sources suggest approached Jerusalem from the north, would have seen the city.
“The Assyrians tended to depict cities with their distinguishing features that really made them stand out,” Compton said. “We know from Isaiah 10 and from [Roman-Jewish historian] Josephus that the Assyrians invaded from the north, and that’s the perspective the artist chose.”
“Looking from that perspective, you have the Temple Mount in the foreground, and the old City of David, the original settlement of Jerusalem, in the background,” he added.
The Ushu connection
Compton’s theory also includes a reevaluation of the first stone in the sequence, which had been interpreted as depicting the Phoenician city of Tyre until the idea was largely dismissed in the 1990s. But he also discards the competing theory that the slab shows the Philistine city of Jaffa.
Instead, Compton proposes that the city must be identified with Ushu, another Phoenician center, supporting the idea that the wall depicts the three kingdoms in their order of conquest.
“Phoenicia was the very first kingdom that Sennacherib conquered in his third military campaign,” he said. “[Art historian] John Malcolm Russell had already identified the second kingdom on this wall as Philistia, the second kingdom Sennacherib conquered.”
“Then by default, you would think the third kingdom would be Judah,” he added.
He noted that Ushu and Jerusalem are linked elsewhere in the room.
“In the throne room, there were two bulls with inscriptions by the main entrance,” he said. “The inscriptions only name one Phoenician city, Ushu, and one Judahite city, Jerusalem, and I think that when you look at the wall, you see Ushu and Jerusalem.”
Some scholars disagree with Compton’s suggestion that slab 28 shows Jerusalem.
“I think he is wrong,” said Prof. Danel Kahn from the University of Haifa, an expert on Assyrian history who authored a book on Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah for Cambridge University Press in 2020.
Kahn, who believes a different carving in the Nineveh palace depicts Jerusalem, explained that in the past he had once also backed the slab 28 theory, but has since changed his mind.
“[Compton] does not take into account that the slab is on the same wall as the battle against the Egyptians that happened at the plain of Eltekeh, and the image is supposed to depict a city somewhere close to the plain,” he told The Times of Israel via telephone.
Kahn believes the city should be identified with Ekron, another Philistine city in the Judean lowlands, whose king pledged loyalty to Sennacherib and was reinstated, according to Assyrian sources.
“The environment depicted shows a plain rather than mountains, so it fits Ekron much better than Jerusalem,” Kahn said.
Compton countered that Assyrian artists often depict different events that may have taken place far apart from each other in what appears to be a single scene, meaning it need not be somewhere in the lowlands. His paper includes an analysis of the longest image from a different hall of Sennacherib’s palace, which features events occurring in different times and places without any separation, a style called continuous narrative that was popular in the ancient world, which he maintains was used in the throne room as well.
“When you’re looking at this wall, in the same picture, you see Philistia and the city to the right of it, and there’s no break between but rather the [Assyrian] army traveling between the two places, so it had been assumed that the city on slab 28 was part of the Philistia battle scene [in the plain of Eltekeh],” he said.
Modern scholars, he said, had been biased by artistic conventions “where we visually express different events by putting cartoon-style blocks around them, and then we have one square after the other.”
“If you look at Sennacherib’s throne room, you’ve got one event, this battle in Phoenicia, then you have the army traveling in between, and this other image of the city,” he said. “This doesn’t mean that the city is part of that battle scene. The traveling in between shows the passage of time and separates the two events. It’s two different places, one is Phoenicia and the other is Judah, Jerusalem.”
German Assyriologist Stefan Maul, a professor at Heidelberg University, said he was also not convinced by Compton’s interpretation.
“I do not find the arguments persuasive,” he said.
Maul and his team have been working since 2018 to document and preserve what was left of ancient Nineveh following the defeat of Islamic State terror group.
Among the items destroyed by the terror group was slab 28. Compton’s analysis is based on renderings of the drawing dating back from the mid-19th century, as well as more modern studies, including a picture of the slab taken by Russell, the art historian, in 1990.
Kahn, who is currently working on an academic article on Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah in his annals and reliefs, believes that Jerusalem was depicted on a series of seven slabs elsewhere in the throne room that went missing or were severely damaged even before ISIS came on the scene.
“These slabs were in the part of the room closest to the throne, closest to the king, so they were the highlight of the scene,” he said. “It is there that we should look for Hezekiah’s capitulation to Sennacherib.”
According to Kahn, some high-resolution pictures taken by a team of archaeologists in 2011 captured faint images of the remains of the slabs, invisible to the naked eye.
“They show people taken captives with a mountainous background,” he said. “It fits Jerusalem better.”
Three years after those images were taken, Mosul fell to Islamic State terrorists as the Iraqi army collapsed. The extremist group, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, terrorized the city’s populace and destroyed Nineveh’s ancient treasures, as it did elsewhere across its so-called caliphate.
According to Maul, the terrorists had objected to Iraqis’ identification with pre-Islamic cultures.
“Iraq is a state that has no real ethnic or religious identity; there are Kurds, Yazidis, Sunnis, and Shiites,” he said. “When it became independent, it was very obvious that the one thing which united all its different people was the pride in the fact that Iraq had been the cradle of human civilization, and ancient Near Eastern cultures became very important.”
“When ISIS troops arrived in Mosul in 2014, they immediately started to destroy the ancient Near Eastern cultural heritage and this identity in order to create a new radical Islamic identity,” he added.
Maul pointed out that the first site targeted by ISIS was the Nabi Younus shrine built on what was, according to an ancient tradition, the tomb of the biblical prophet Jonah. In late antiquity, the site was a Christian center featuring a monastery, which was turned into a mosque in the 12th century CE, with the tomb enclosed.
Mosul was recaptured in 2017 by Iraqi, Kurdish and US-backed coalition forces after months of intense fighting that left large parts of the city, which straddles the Tigris River, in ruin.
Since then, Maul and his team have been working on both the shrine, under which they discovered an additional Assyrian palace, and Sennacherib’s site, spending about 12 weeks a year in the country, divided into two seasons. The fieldwork also entails educating a new generation of local archaeologists.
In the palace’s ruins, they have collected some 8,500 bigger pieces and over 10,000 smaller pieces of slabs.
“[The throne room] was a heap of debris,” he said. “We decided that the only thing we could do was to clean, measure, and number every single fragment according to a grid of squares, safeguard them.”
The archaeologist built a special storage facility over 20 meters long to preserve the remains.
They have also begun reconstructing some slabs in one of the smaller rooms, but it will take years to complete the task.
“We decided not to start with the Throne Room itself, but with a small room next to it, in order to gather experience with a limited corpus of fragments,” he said. “From a scientific point of view, the bas-reliefs are already known, but I think we have the responsibility to ensure that in the end, ISIS will not have succeeded in reaching its goal.”
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