200,150 people, great and . [56], In preparation for his attack on Elam, Sennacherib assembled two great fleets on the Euphrates and the Tigris. The overwhelming majority of scholars accept Arad-Mulissu's guilt as a matter of fact. (Adaside dynasty1700722 BCE)Bel-bani Libaya Sharma-Adad I Iptar-Sin Bazaya Lullaya Shu-Ninua Sharma-Adad II Erishum III Shamshi-Adad II Ishme-Dagan II Shamshi-Adad III Ashur-nirari I Puzur-Ashur III Enlil-nasir I Nur-ili Ashur-shaduni Ashur-rabi I Ashur-nadin-ahhe I Enlil-Nasir II Ashur-nirari II Ashur-bel-nisheshu Ashur-rim-nisheshu Ashur-nadin-ahhe II, Second Intermediate PeriodSixteenthDynasty Shortly thereafter, the severe weather forced Sennacherib to retreat and return home. Shortly after Sennacherib inherited the throne in 705BC, Marduk-apla-iddina retook Babylon and allied with the Elamites. 701. . [116] The conflict is presented as something akin to a holy war: God's war against the pagan Sennacherib. If Sargon was the son of Tiglath-Pileser and not a non-dynastic usurper, Sennacherib would have grown up in the royal palace at Nimrud and spent most of his youth there. [37], Portions of the Assyrian army were away in Tabal in 704BC. [92][96], As was traditional for Assyrian kings, Sennacherib had a harem of many women. Though the biblical narrative holds that divine intervention by an angel ended Sennacherib's attack on Jerusalem by destroying the Assyrian army, an outright Assyrian defeat is unlikely as Hezekiah submitted to Sennacherib at the end of the campaign. The Assyrian army's diversion from its course could then be interpreted by the Babylonian chroniclers as an Assyrian retreat. Several inscriptions call him "foremost of all rulers" (aared kal malk) and a "perfect man" (elu gitmlu). Sennacherib's own account of the destruction reads:[75], Into my land I carried off alive Muzib-Marduk, king of Babylonia, together with his family and officials. [50] The ancient Greek historian Herodotus describes the operation as an Assyrian failure due to a "multitude of field-mice" descending upon the Assyrian camp, devouring crucial material such as quivers and bowstrings, leaving the Assyrians unarmed and causing them to flee. The second king of the Sargonid dynasty, Sennacherib is one of the most famous Assyrian kings for the role he plays in the Hebrew Bible, which describes his campaign in the Levant. The murder of the king caused some resentment against him by his own supporters which delayed his potential coronation, and in the meantime, Esarhaddon had raised an army. This negative view of Sennacherib endured until modern times. [51] An alternative hypothesis, first advanced by journalist Henry T. Aubin in 2001, is that the blockade of Jerusalem was lifted through the intervention of a Kushite army from Egypt. The rebel Shuzubu, hunted by Sennacherib in his 700 BC invasion of the south, had resurfaced under the name Mushezib-Marduk and, seemingly without foreign support, acceded to the throne of Babylon. However, Sennacherib king of Assyria came and marched into Judah. The Nineveh described in Sennacherib's earliest accounts of its renovation was a city which at that point only existed in his imagination. To take the city, the Assyrians constructed a great siege mound, a ramp made of earth and stone, to reach the top of Lachish's walls. If the battle was a southern victory, the setback faced by the Assyrians would have to have been minor as Babylon was under siege in the late summer of 690 BC (and had apparently been under siege for some time at that point). Sennacherib's troops seems to have been remembered later, in a greatly mod-ified form, by the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories, 2.141), who recount-ed that: "Sennacherib . His reliefs show larger scenes, some almost from a bird's-eye point of view. [106] By examining the inscriptions and comparing them to those of other kings and non-royal inscriptions, it is possible to infer some aspects of Sennacherib's character. Because Babylon, well within his own territory, had been the target of most of his military campaigns and had caused the death of his son, Sennacherib destroyed the city in 689BC. [91], Besides the palace, Sennacherib oversaw other building projects at Nineveh. [33] A minor 704BC[34] campaign (unmentioned in Sennacherib's later historical accounts), led by Sennacherib's magnates rather than the king himself, was sent against Gurd in Tabal to avenge Sargon. His appointment as king of Babylon and the new title suggests that Ashur-nadin-shumi was being groomed to succeed Sennacherib as the king of Assyria upon his death. The latter fleet was then used to transport the Assyrian army to the city of Opis, where the ships were then pulled ashore and transported overland to a canal that linked to the Euphrates. Bel-ibni now faced the open revolts of two tribal leaders: Shuzubu (who later became Babylonian king under the name Mushezib-Marduk) and Marduk-apla-iddina, now an elderly man. List of biblical figures identified in extra-biblical sources, Military history of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, "Sin-ahhe-eriba [SENNACHERIB, KING OF ASSYRIA] (RN)", "The Annihilation of Sennacherib's Army: A Case of Septicemic Plague", "New sources for Sennacherib's "first campaign", "The Great City: Nineveh in the Age of Sennacherib", "The Murderer of Sennacherib, yet Again: The Case against Esarhaddon", "Sennacherib's Southern Front: 704-689 B.C. Isaiah 40:31 New King James Version (NKJV) 31 But those who wait on the Lord Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings. Writing in 1978, Reade assessed Sennacherib as a king who stands out among Assyrian rulers as open-minded and far-sighted and that he was a man "who not only coped effectively with ordinary crises but even turned them to advantage as he created, or attempted to create, a stable imperial structure immune from traditional problems". [13] Sargon claimed he was himself the son of the earlier king Tiglath-PileserIII, but this is uncertain as Sargon usurped the throne from Tiglath-Pileser's other son ShalmaneserV.[16], Sennacherib was probably born c. 745BC in Nimrud. The royal educator, Hunn, would have educated Sennacherib and his siblings. [18] Though Tashmetu-sharrat was the primary consort for longer, Naqi'a is more well-known today for her role during Esarhaddon's reign. If mru rt means "pre-eminent" such a title would befit only the crown prince, and if it means "firstborn", this also suggests that Ashur-nadin-shumi was the heir. [45], Sennacherib's account of what happened at Jerusalem begins with "As for Hezekiah like a caged bird I shut up in Jerusalem his royal city. [92] Esarhaddon's influential mother, Naqi'a, may have played a role in convincing Sennacherib to choose Esarhaddon as heir. [76], After the final war with Babylon, Sennacherib dedicated his time to improving his new capital at Nineveh rather than embarking on large military campaigns. [9], Despite the seemingly inconclusive end to the blockade of Jerusalem, the Levantine campaign was largely an Assyrian victory. [38] However, Sennacherib also realized that the anti-Assyrian forces were divided and led his entire army to engage and destroy the portion of the army encamped at Kutha. Many of Sennacherib's reliefs are exhibited today at the Vorderasiatisches Museum, the British Museum, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris. Arda-Mulissu and Nabu-shar-usur survived this purge, escaping as exiles to the northern kingdom of Urartu. [49] [93] Despite his dismissal, Arda-Mulissu remained a popular figure, and some vassals secretly supported him as the heir to the throne. Sennacherib (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: Sn-ahh-erba[3] or Sn-a-erba,[4] meaning "Sn has replaced the brothers")[5][6][a] was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from the death of his father SargonII in 705BC to his own death in 681BC. In the biblical account, however, Sennacherib was already at Libnah in Judah when he received the news that the Egyptians were coming (2 Kgs 19:8-9). Thereafter, he moved to attack the contingent at Kish, winning this second battle as well. Tashmetu-sharrat is likely to have been the mother of at least some of them. With the aid of surviving Chaldean troops, Hallutash-Inshushinak took the city of Sippar, where he also managed to capture Ashur-nadin-shumi and take him back to Elam. After the Assyrians had seized many of Judah's most important fortified cities and destroyed several towns and villages, Hezekiah realized that his anti-Assyrian activities had been disastrous military and political miscalculations and accordingly submitted to the Assyrians once more. [30] His reaction to his father's fate was to distance himself from Sargon. When Sargon's wife Ataliya died, she was buried hastily and in the same coffin as another woman, the queen of the previous king Tiglath-Pileser. Both the blockade of Jerusalem and the siege of Lachish probably prevented further Egyptian aid from reaching Hezekiah, and intimidated the kings of other smaller states in the region. In the Levantine War, the states in the southern Levant, especially the Kingdom of Judah under King Hezekiah, were not subdued as easily as those in the north. [80] Sennacherib described his defeat of the Babylonian rebels in the language of the Babylonian creation myth, identifying Babylon with the evil demon-goddess Tiamat and himself with Marduk. [111] Elayi, writing in 2018, concluded that Sennacherib was different both from the traditional negative image of him and from the perfect image the king wanted to convey himself through his inscriptions, but that elements of both were true. [72] In 1982, Assyriologist Louis D. Levine wrote that the battle was probably an Assyrian victory, though not a decisive one and that though the southerners had been defeated and fled, the Assyrian advance on Babylon itself was temporarily halted. Sennacherib was the king of Assyria from 704-681 BC and was famous for his building projects. From the sources, it appears that bad news easily enraged Sennacherib and that he developed serious psychological problems. Sennacherib surrounded the cities that had high walls around them. In the spring of 701 bc, King Senake-eriba of Assyria, better known to history as Sennacherib, embarked on a vigorous campaign to crush a coalition of vassal states that had been raised against him. [40] Sennacherib's inscriptions state that over two hundred thousand prisoners were taken. The Assyrian campaign (described as an act of aggression rather than as a response to Hezekiah's rebellious activities) is seen as doomed to fail from the start. Dutch shares Tim Sheets research and word, on WAR EAGLE. Sennacherib, on a magnificent throne, watches as prisoners are brought before him and sometimes executed. Ultimately, Sennacherib decided to destroy Babylon. [23], During the expansion of Assyria into a major empire, the Assyrians had conquered various neighboring kingdoms, either annexing them as Assyrian provinces or turning them into vassal states. [87], The earliest inscriptions discussing the building project at Nineveh date to 702BC and concern the construction of the Southwest Palace, a large residence constructed in the southwestern part of the citadel. Some months later, the Assyrians attacked and captured the southern city of Uruk. [75] Although Sennacherib had once anxiously considered the implications of Sargon's seizure of Babylon and the role that the city's offended gods may have played in his father's downfall, his attitude towards the city had shifted by 689 BC. [76], During the destruction of the city, Sennacherib destroyed the temples and the images of the gods, except for that of Marduk, which he took to Assyria. Many women inscriptions state that over two hundred thousand prisoners were taken palace, Sennacherib king of Assyria 704-681. War: God 's war against the pagan Sennacherib ] Sennacherib 's earliest accounts of its renovation a! 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