Overview
Several of Sargon II's inscriptions claim that he conquered Samaria, capital of the kingdom of Israel, deported its population, took chariots into his army, resettled the city with people from elsewhere and made it an Assyrian province. The fullest versions are the Display Inscription from Khorsabad, the Khorsabad Annals (Room II) and the Nimrud Prism. Shorter titularies on bull colossi and pavements call him 'conqueror of Samaria and all of Bīt-Ḫumria (Israel)'.
The numbers are not uniform. Exemplars of the Display Inscription give 27,290, 27,280 and apparently 24,280 deportees with 50 chariots. The Nimrud Prism has '[20?]+27,280', read tentatively as 47,280, with 200 chariots. In the Annals of Room II the whole passage, number included, is restored from those other texts.
2 Kings 17:3-6 and 18:9-10 name Shalmaneser as the king who besieged Samaria for three years, and say 'they took it'. The Babylonian Chronicle credits Shalmaneser V with destroying a city whose name is usually read Šamara'in. Sargon, who came to the throne within weeks of Shalmaneser's death, claims the conquest for himself.
In its own words
(23) From the beginning of my rule (722 B.C.) to the fifteenth (707 B.C.) of my years of reign I accomplished the defeat of Khumbanigash of Elam in the environs (?) of Dur-ilu; I besieged and captured Samaria; I carried away (24) 27,290 of its inhabitants, I collected there 50 chariots; the remainder of them I permitted to retain their goods (?), put my governors over them, and upon them the tribute of former kings (25) I laid.R. W. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (New York, 1912), p. 331 (Sargon's 'General' = Display Inscription ll. 23-25)
What the evidence shows
- Display Inscription (RINAP 2 no. 7) l. 23b-25: URU.sa-me-ri-na al-me ak-šud ... 27 LIM 2 ME 90 UN.MEŠ a-šib ŠÀ-šú áš-lu-la 50 GIŠ.GIGIR.MEŠ ... 'I surrounded (and) conquered the city Samaria. I carried off as booty 27,290 of its inhabitants, conscripted fifty chariots from among them...'
- RINAP 2 note: 'Various exemplars of text no. 7 line 24 have 27,290, 27,280, and apparently 24,280.'
- Khorsabad Annals, Room II (RINAP 2 no. 1) ll. 11-17: only fragments survive ('LÚ.URU.sa-me]-ri-na-a-a', 'people of Samaria'); the conquest and the '27,280/27,290' figure are restored from nos. 7 and 74. RINAP 2 describes these lines as 'heavily restored from the following texts'.
- Nimrud Prism (RINAP 2 no. 74) iv 25-41: the Samarians had allied with a king hostile to Sargon; '[20?]+27,280 people, together with their chariots and the gods who helped them' taken as booty; 200 chariots conscripted; 'I restored the city Samaria and made (it) greater than before. I brought there people from the lands that I had conquered'.
- Frame (RINAP 2) on the Prism figure: 'For the proposal that the number in the Nimrud Prism was 47,280, see Na'aman, NABU 2000 ... but note that his reference to the Khorsabad Annals ... is misleading since the number there is totally restored.'
- Annals and Display Inscription l. 33: in Sargon's 2nd year Ilu-bi'dī of Hamath 'incited the cities Arpad, Ṣimirra, Damascus, (and) Samaria to rebel against me'.
- Room XIV Display Inscription (no. 8) l. 15: 'I plundered (ašlul) the city Šinuḫtu, the city Samaria, and all of the land Bīt-Ḫumria'. Frame notes that ašlul can also mean 'I carried off as booty/captives'.
- Babylonian Chronicle (BM 92502) i 27-28, as translated by Rogers 1912: 'On the twenty-fifth day of Tebet Shalmaneser took his seat on the throne in Assyria, and the city of Shabarain was destroyed.' The copy was made in the 22nd year of Darius (Wiseman 1956: 500/499 BCE if Darius I).
Open questions
- Who took Samaria, Shalmaneser V or Sargon II? For Shalmaneser: 2 Kings 17:3-6 and 18:9-10, and the Babylonian Chronicle, which RINAP 1 summarizes as recording that Shalmaneser 'conquered or devastated Samaria'. For Sargon: his inscriptions repeatedly claim the conquest, the deportation and the resettlement. Hayim Tadmor (JCS 12, 1958) credited the 722 capture to Shalmaneser and put Sargon's own action against Samaria in 720, with the Hamath revolt. Bob Becking (The Fall of Samaria, 1992) argued for two captures, one by each king. Eckart Frahm (The Last Days of the Kingdom of Israel, 2018, pp. 55-86) re-examined what Sargon's inscriptions attest. (These positions are summarized from the literature; the three works are cited but not summarized here.) RINAP 2 (Frame 2021) leaves the question open: 'Exactly when Samaria fell ... [has] been [a matter] of intense scholarly discussion.'
- Is 'Shabarain/Šamara'in' Samaria? Rogers (1912) printed the Chronicle's city name as 'Shabarain'. The later RINAP 1 overview reads the same line as Shalmaneser having 'conquered or devastated Samaria'. The Chronicle names no region, so the identification rests on the reading of the name and on the biblical parallel.
- How many were deported: 27,290, 27,280, 24,280 or 47,280? The Display Inscription exemplars disagree with one another, the Prism's first digit is broken, and the Annals' figure is a modern restoration. Nadav Na'aman (NABU 2000) proposed 47,280 for the Prism. The texts themselves do not settle it.
Sources
- Grant Frame, The Royal Inscriptions of Sargon II, King of Assyria (721-705 BC), RINAP 2 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2021), text nos. 1 (Annals, Room II), 7 (Display Inscription), 8, 13 and 74 (Nimrud Prism); online at Oracc link editio princeps
- C. J. Gadd, 'Inscribed Prisms of Sargon II from Nimrud', Iraq 16/2 (1954): 173ff., doi:10.2307/4199590 link editio princeps
- R. W. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1912), pp. 209-210 (Babylonian Chronicle) and 324-331 (Sargon) link translation
- D. J. Wiseman, Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626-556 B.C.) in the British Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1956), p. 2 (on BM 92502) link study
- Hayim Tadmor, 'The Campaigns of Sargon II of Assur: A Chronological-Historical Study', Journal of Cuneiform Studies 12 (1958): 22-40, 77-100, doi:10.2307/1359580 link study
- Bob Becking, The Fall of Samaria: An Historical and Archaeological Study (Leiden: Brill, 1992), doi:10.1163/9789004668836 link study
- Eckart Frahm, 'Samaria, Hamath, and Assyria's Conquests in the Levant in the Late 720s BCE: The Testimony of Sargon II's Inscriptions', in The Last Days of the Kingdom of Israel (BZAW 511; De Gruyter, 2018), 55-86, doi:10.1515/9783110566604-004 link study
- Hayim Tadmor and Shigeo Yamada, RINAP 1 Introduction, 'Historical Overview: Shalmaneser V' (Oracc) link study
Corrected from the earlier edition of this page
- Old entry says the number 27,290 'aligns closely with the biblical account'. The Bible gives no number for the deportation from Samaria (2 Kgs 17:6; 18:11). The figure is Assyrian only, and it varies between exemplars (27,290 / 27,280 / 24,280; Nimrud Prism possibly 47,280).
- Old entry says the annals 'document the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel' as a settled fact of Sargon's reign. Whether Shalmaneser V or Sargon II took Samaria is disputed on primary evidence (2 Kgs 17:3-6; Babylonian Chronicle; Sargon's own claims), and in the Room II Annals the relevant lines are restorations.
- Old entry: 'Material: Clay tablets; Current Location: Iraq Museum'. The Samaria passages are on stone wall slabs from Khorsabad (many lost in the Tigris in 1855 and known from Botta's copies) and on a clay prism from Nimrud, not on 'clay tablets'. The Iraq Museum location was not verified.
- Old entry: 'Discovery: Iraq, 19th century'. The Khorsabad texts came from Botta's (1843-44) and Place's (1852-54) excavations; the Nimrud Prism came from the British excavations at Nimrud and was published in 1954.
- Old entry's biblical links include '2 Kings 18-19 (Sennacherib's siege)'. That is the 701 BCE campaign against Judah, not the fall of Samaria; the relevant verses are 2 Kgs 17:3-6, 17:24 and 18:9-11.
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