Jerusalem. The Biography

avid propagandists, whose triumphalist decorations on the walls of their palaces advertised Assyrian victories and the gruesome deaths of their enemies – mass-impalings, flayings and beheadings. The courtiers of conquered cities paraded through Nineveh wearing the heads of their kings on ghoulish necklaces around their necks. But their depredations were probably no more vicious than other conquerors: the Egyptians, for example, collected the hands and penises of their enemies. Ironically Assyria’s most brutal era was over; Sennacherib preferred to negotiate if possible.
    Sennacherib buried records of his achievements in the foundations of his palaces. In Iraq, archaeologists have found the remains of his city, revealing Assyria at its apogee, made rich by conquest and agriculture, administered by scribes whose records were preserved in royal archives. Their libraries contained collections of omens to aid royal decision-making, and of incantations, rituals and hymns to maintain divine support, but also tablets of literary classics such as the
Epic of Gilgamesh
. Worshipping many gods, revering magical figurines and spirits and calling upon the power of divination, the Assyrians studied medicine, writing prescriptions on tablets that read: ‘If the man is suffering from the following symptoms, the problem is …Take the following drugs …’
    Israelite prisoners, toiling far from home in the resplendently gaudy cities of Assyria with their Babel-like ziggurat towers and painted palaces, saw them as metropolises ‘of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!’ The prophet Nahum described ‘the crack of whips, the clatter of wheels, galloping horses and jolting chariots!’ Now those eight-spoked chariots, those vast armies and Sennacherib himself were marching on Jerusalem, swooping down, says Deuteronomy, ‘like a vulture in flight’.
    HEZEKIAH’S TUNNEL
     
    Hezekiah knew what horrors had befallen Babylon; he frantically built fortifications around Jerusalem’s new quarters. Sections of his ‘broad wall’, 25 feet wide, survive today in several places but most impressively in the Jewish Quarter. He prepared for a siege by ordering two groupscraftsmen to hack a tunnel 1,700 feet through the rock to link the Gihon Spring outside the city to the Siloam Pool, south of the Temple Mount below the City of David, which now, thanks to his new fortifications, lay inside the walls. When the two teams met up deep in the rock, they celebrated by carving an inscription to record their amazing achievement:
     
[When the tunnel] was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through. While [they were] still [excavating with their] axes, each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to cut through, [they heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellows, for there was a fissure in the rock on the right [and the left]. And when the tunnel was driven through, the quarrymen hewed [the rock], each man toward his fellow, axe against axe; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits and the height of the rock above the heads of the quarrymen was 100 cubits. *
     
    North of the Temple Mount, Hezekiah dammed a valley to create one of the Bethesda Pools to deliver more water into the city, and he seems to have distributed food – oil, wine, grain – to his forces, ready for siege and war. Jar handles have been found at sites across Judah marked
lmlk
– ‘for the king’ – stamped with his emblem, the four-winged scarab.
    ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,’ wrote Byron. Sennacherib and his vast armies were now very close to Jerusalem. The Great King would have travelled, like most Assyrian kings, in a hulking three-horse chariot, shaded under the royal parasol, horses splendidly caparisoned with shimmering headcrests while he himself would have worn a long embroidered robe, a flat hat with a pointed peak, a square-cut, long, braided beard and rosette bracelets, and often carried a bow in his hands and a sword at his belt in a scabbard decorated with lions. Hesaw himself more as a lion than a biblical vulture or Byronic wolf – Assyrian kings wore lionskins to celebrate their victories in the Temple of Ishtar, decorated their palaces with lion sphinxes and avidly hunted lions as the sport of great kings.
    He bypassed Jerusalem to besiege Hezekiah’s second city, fortified Lachish, to the south. We know from the