Sennacherib's Description of Lachish and of Its Conquest

When Sennacherib's conquest of Lachish is considered, the vivid reliefs depicting that event which were found in the ruins of his palace at Nineveh immediately come to mind.' These are, however, simply pictorial representations; they do not include any verbal description of any significant length of the events depicted. For instance, the cuneiform label which accompanies one of the scenes says little beyond the fact that Sennacherib conquered Lachish. Thus, the search for a text which provides a parallel literary description of this conquest takes one beyond the confines of the room of palace reliefs and into the Neo-Assyrian archives. Until now, this search has not been very rewarding. The entry in the annals for Sennacherib's western campaign of 701 B.C. does not mention the city of Lachish,2 nor has it been thought that any other extant text mentions that city's conquest by Sennacherib. The suggestion of the present study is that just such a text has indeed been found. However, because of difficulties with the text, it has not been recognized for what it is. In fact, because of the document's fragmentary nature its two main pieces were previously looked upon as two different texts, both of which were attributed to Assyrian kings other than Sennacherib-one to Tiglath-pileser III,3 and the other to Sargon II.* N. Na3aman has brought these