Image Details
Yigael Yadin, the Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands, Vol. II, New York: Mcgraw, 1963
Archers at the ready, the military forces of Sargon II attack the fortified city of Ekron in this drawing of a late-eighth-century B.C.E. relief from Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad. The Philistines defend the city from the bastions of the inner wall, while a crenelated outer wall holds back the enemy army. Ussishkin believes that historical accounts like this relief, as well as an Assyrian cuneiform tablet describing events that occurred in 701 B.C.E. and speaks of the “royal city of the Philistines” being surrounded by “great towers,” indicate that Ekron was surrounded by a massive wall, but not until the eighth century B.C.E. The original stone relief has been lost; only this 19th-century drawing of it remains today.