Endnote 3 – The Fury of Babylon: Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction

British Museum 21946, 18–20. In the first edition of Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626–556 B.C.) (London: British Museum, 1956), pp. 68, 85, D.J. Wiseman restored Ashkelon (isû?-qi?-[erasure]-il–lunu) as the name of the captured city. Later W.F. Albright, accompanied by Wiseman and A. Sachs, reexamined the tablet in the British Museum and concluded that Wiseman’s reading was correct. More recently, A.K. Grayson, in reviewing P. Garelli and V. Nikiprowetzky’s Le Proche-Orient Asiatique: Les Empires Mésopotamiens in Archiv für Orientforschung 27 (1980), declared the reading of the name Ashkelon to be “very uncertain.” He apparently convinced Wiseman that the earlier reading was “uncertain” (Wiseman, Nebuchadrezzar and Babylon, Schweich Lectures of the British Academy, 1983 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], p. 23, n. 158). In 1992, my colleague Peter Machinist asked I. Finkel, curator of cuneiform in the British Museum’s department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, to check the tablet once again for the name of the captured city. In a letter dated November 11, 1992, Finkel confirmed that the city referred to is indeed Ashkelon. For details, see Lawrence Stager, “Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction: Kislev 604 B.C.E.,” in “A Heap of Broken Images”: Essays in Biblical Archaeology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, forthcoming).