The Assyrians had a mighty and well-equipped army that, in the early eighth century BCE, rapidly quelled growing rebellion in the Southern Levant. However, the rigorous method employed by Garfinkel and his team, including photogrammetric analysis of aerial photographs and creating a detailed digitally map of the relevant landscape, produced a practical model that accounts for all available information about that battle. There have been several conflicting views on how the formidable task of constructing the ramp was achieved. Garfinkel’s analysis provides a vivid account of the construction of the massive ramp that was built by the Assyrians so that they could haul battering rams up to hilltop city of Lachish, breach its walls, and totally overrun the city. In 701 BCE Lachish was attacked by the Assyrian army, led by King Sennacherib. Lachish was a flourishing Canaanite city in the second millennium BCE and had been the second most important city in the Kingdom of Judah. They published their findings in Oxford Journal of Archaeology.

The outstanding amount of data includes biblical texts (2 Kings 18:9–19:37 2 Chronicles 32 Isaiah 36–37), iconography (stone reliefs depicting Assyrian battle scenes) and Akkadian inscriptions, archeological excavations, and 21st century drone photographs. Carroll and Michael Pytlik of Oakland University, USA, drew on a rich number of sources about this historical event to provide this complete picture. Madeleine Mumcuoglu of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU), and Professors Jon W. The team, led by Professor Yosef Garfinkel and Dr. Now, for the first time, a team of archaeologists has reconstructed how the Assyrian army may have built the ramp and used it to conquer the city of Lachish. While today, air power and bunker busters help win the war, back in the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, it was all about the siege ramp, an elevated structure that hauled battering ramps up to the enemy’s city walls and let the Neo-Assyrians soldiers wreak havoc on their enemies.Ĭonstructed in Israel, the Assyrian siege ramp at Lachish is the only surviving physical example of their military prowess in the entire Near East. They accomplished this feat with military technologies that helped them win any open-air battle or penetrate any fortified city. Back in the day, the Assyrians were one of the Near East’s superpowers, controlling a land mass that stretched from Iran to Egypt.

Ancient warfare 2 researcher