The Great Display Inscription of Sargon II
A summary of Sargon II’s reign carved around the walls of five rooms of his palace at Khorsabad. In it the king says that he besieged and conquered Samaria and carried off 27,290 of its inhabitants.
See the object at oracc.museum.upenn.edu ↗Introduction, sources and bibliography (RINAP 2, text no. 7) ↗
Sargon II built a new capital, Dur-Sharrukin, at modern Khorsabad near Nineveh. The stone slabs lining the rooms of its palace carried reliefs and long inscriptions. This one, which scholars call the Display Inscription or Prunkinschrift, ran around Rooms I, IV, VII, VIII and X. It refers to the king’s fifteenth year, 707 BC, and to the festivities at the city’s completion the year after. It arranges his wars by region, not by year.
Lines 23–25 are Sargon’s claim to the Fall of Samaria: he surrounded and took the city, deported 27,290 people, took fifty chariots into his own army, set one of his officials over those who remained and imposed the former king’s tribute on them. Copies in the different rooms vary slightly in the number. Like all Assyrian royal inscriptions it is written to glorify the king. It does not mention Shalmaneser V, whom the Babylonian chronicle and 2 Kings credit with the attack on Samaria.
Cited in
- 722/721 BC, estimated date