The second king of the Sargonid dynasty, Sennacherib is one of the most famous Assyrian kings for the role he plays in the Hebrew Bible, which describes his campaign in the Levant.
61 Facts About Sennacherib
2.
Shortly after Sennacherib inherited the throne in 705BC, Marduk-apla-iddina retook Babylon and allied with the Elamites.
3.
Sennacherib transferred the capital of Assyria to Nineveh, where he had spent most of his time as crown prince.
4.
Sennacherib expanded the size of the city and constructed great city walls, numerous temples and a royal garden.
5.
Sennacherib later replaced him with a younger son, Esarhaddon, in 684BC, for unknown reasons.
6.
Sennacherib ignored Arda-Mulissu's repeated appeals to be reinstated as heir, and in 681BC, Arda-Mulissu and his brother Nabu-shar-usur murdered Sennacherib, hoping to seize power for themselves.
7.
Historically, the most popular view has been that Sennacherib was the son of Sargon's wife Ataliya, although this is considered unlikely.
8.
The Assyriologist Josette Elayi considers it more plausible Sennacherib's mother was another of Sargon's wives, Ra'ima; a stele from Assur, discovered in 1913, specifically refers to her as the "mother of Sennacherib".
9.
Sennacherib's only known sister, Ahat-abisha, was married off to Ambaris, the king of Tabal, but probably returned to Assyria after Sargon's first successful campaign against Tabal.
10.
The name probably derives from Sennacherib not being Sargon's first son, but all his older brothers being dead by the time he was born.
11.
The vast responsibilities entrusted to Sennacherib suggests a certain degree of trust between the king and the crown prince.
12.
In reliefs depicting both Sargon and Sennacherib, they are portrayed in discussion, appearing almost as equals.
13.
Sennacherib oversaw domestic affairs and often informed Sargon of the progress being made on building projects throughout the empire.
14.
Sennacherib never disobeyed his father, and his letters indicate he knew Sargon well and wanted to please him.
15.
Sennacherib had a great deal of experience with how to rule the empire because of his long tenure as crown prince.
16.
Sennacherib immediately abandoned Sargon's great new capital city, Dur-Sharrukin, and moved the capital to Nineveh instead.
17.
Sennacherib spent much time and effort to rid the empire of Sargon's imagery.
18.
Unlike Sargon and previous Babylonian rulers, who had proclaimed themselves as shakkanakku of Babylon, in reverence for the city's deity Marduk, Sennacherib explicitly proclaimed himself as Babylon's king.
19.
However, Sennacherib realized that the anti-Assyrian forces were divided and led his entire army to engage and destroy the portion of the army encamped at Kutha.
20.
Sennacherib's inscriptions state that among the captives taken after the victory was a stepson of Marduk-apla-iddina and brother of an Arab queen, Yatie, who had joined the coalition.
21.
Sennacherib described Bel-ibni as "a native of Babylon who grew up in my palace like a young puppy".
22.
Sennacherib corresponded with and sent gifts to western rulers like Hezekiah, probably hoping to assemble a vast anti-Assyrian alliance.
23.
The resistance in the southern Levant was not as easily suppressed, forcing Sennacherib to invade the region.
24.
Sennacherib was forced to release the imprisoned king of Ekron, Padi, and Sennacherib granted substantial portions of Judah's land to the neighboring kingdoms of Gaza, Ashdod and Ekron.
25.
Sennacherib then hunted for Marduk-apla-iddina, a hunt so intense the Chaldean escaped on boats with his people across the Persian Gulf, taking refuge in the Elamite city of Nagitu.
26.
Victorious, Sennacherib attempted yet another method to govern Babylonia and appointed his son Ashur-nadin-shumi to reign as Babylonian vassal king.
27.
In 694 BC, Sennacherib invaded Elam, with the explicit goal of the campaign being to root out Marduk-apla-iddina and the other Chaldean refugees.
28.
In preparation for his attack on Elam, Sennacherib assembled two great fleets on the Euphrates and the Tigris.
29.
Sennacherib met his enemies in battle near the city of Halule.
30.
The passage describing the seizure of the property of the gods and the destruction of some of their statues is one of the few where Sennacherib uses "my people" rather than "I".
31.
Sennacherib attempted justifying his actions to his own countrymen through a campaign of religious propaganda.
32.
Sennacherib described his defeat of the Babylonian rebels in the language of the Babylonian creation myth, identifying Babylon with the evil demon-goddess Tiamat and himself with Marduk.
33.
Sennacherib's goal was the complete eradication of Babylonia as a political entity.
34.
When Sennacherib made the city his new capital it experienced one of the most ambitious building projects in ancient history, being completely transformed from the somewhat neglected state it had been in before his reign.
35.
Whereas his father's new capital, Dur-Sharrukin, was more or less an imitation of the previous capital of Nimrud, Sennacherib intended to make Nineveh into a city whose magnificence and size astonished the civilized world.
36.
Sennacherib called this palace the ekallu sa sanina la isu, the "Palace without Rival".
37.
The Nineveh described in Sennacherib's earliest accounts of its renovation was a city which at that point only existed in his imagination.
38.
Sennacherib's reliefs show larger scenes, some almost from a bird's-eye point of view.
39.
Sennacherib constructed beautiful gardens at his new palace, importing various plants and herbs from throughout his empire and beyond.
40.
Besides the palace, Sennacherib oversaw other building projects at Nineveh.
41.
Sennacherib built a large second palace at the city's southern mound, which served as an arsenal to store military equipment and as permanent quarters for part of the Assyrian standing army.
42.
Sennacherib massively expanded the city to the south and erected enormous new city walls, surrounded by a moat, up to 25 metres high and 15 metres thick.
43.
When his eldest son and original crown prince, Ashur-nadin-shumi, disappeared, presumably executed, Sennacherib selected his eldest surviving son, Arda-Mulissu, as the new crown prince.
44.
Sennacherib forced Arda-Mulissu to swear loyalty to Esarhaddon, but Arda-Mulissu made many appeals to his father to reinstate him as heir.
45.
Sennacherib noted the increasing popularity of Arda-Mulissu and came to fear for his designated successor, so he sent Esarhaddon to the western provinces.
46.
Except for Esarhaddon, who is known to be Naqi'a's son, which of Sennacherib's wives were his children's mothers is unknown.
47.
The main sources that can be used to deduce Sennacherib's personality are his royal inscriptions.
48.
Sennacherib assumed several new epithets never used by Assyrian kings, such as "guardian of the right" and "lover of justice", suggesting a desire to leave a personal mark on a new era beginning with his reign.
49.
When Sennacherib became king, he was already an adult and had served as Sargon's crown prince for over 15 years and understood the empire's administration.
50.
Unlike many preceding and later Assyrian kings, Sennacherib did not portray himself as a conqueror or express much desire to conquer the world.
51.
The brutal retribution and punishment served to Assyria's enemies described in Sennacherib's accounts do not necessarily reflect the truth.
52.
Sennacherib described all of his campaigns, even the unsuccessful ones, as victories in his own accounts.
53.
Sennacherib was fully convinced that the gods supported him and saw all his wars as just for this reason.
54.
Frahm and the Assyriologist Julian E Reade have pondered the idea that Sennacherib could be classified as a feminist.
55.
Sennacherib might have wanted to shift power away from powerful generals and magnates to his own family, having encountered powerful Arab queens who made their own decisions and led armies.
56.
Evidence of the increased standing of the royal women includes the larger number of texts referencing Assyrian queens from Sennacherib's reign compared to queens of earlier times, and evidence that Sennacherib's queens had their own standing military units, just like the king.
57.
Sennacherib is presented as akin to a ruthless predator, attacking Judah as a "wolf on the fold" in the famous 1815 poem The Destruction of Sennacherib by Lord Byron:.
58.
Some large objects with Sennacherib's inscriptions remain at Nineveh, where some have even been reburied.
59.
Letters associated with Sennacherib are fewer in number than those known from his father and the time of his son Esarhaddon; most of them are from Sennacherib's tenure as crown prince.
60.
Many of Sennacherib's reliefs are exhibited today at the Vorderasiatisches Museum, the British Museum, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris.
61.
Elayi, writing in 2018, concluded that Sennacherib was different both from the traditional negative image of him and from the perfect image the king wanted to convey himself through his inscriptions, but that elements of both were true.