Image Details

Detail of a wall relief depicting the siege of Lachish, from the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. Although most occupants of Lachish were apparently deported, a number of them were brutally slaughtered. In this photograph, three unlucky citizens are impaled on long, sharp rods by Assyrian attackers. James L. Starkey, who excavated Lachish in the 1930s, discovered a mass burial of 1,500 men, women and children who may have died during the siege.