Bonus 44 - Annals of Sargon

King Sargon II’s prism commemorating his founding
of his capital city, Dur-Sharrukin (Korsabad).
Used with permission of OIM.

In 1842 to 1944 Paul-Émile Botta and Eugène Flandin excavated the annals of king Sargon II 1. and published the tablet in 1849 in their work Les Monuments de Ninive.  The first translation of the text was completed by Hugo Winckler in 1889.2.

Reproduction of the stone panel from the
Palace of Sargon II (710-705 BC) in Khorsabad, Iraq.
Courtesy of the OIM. Original in the British Museum

 

The Sargon Annals state:

“The city of Samaria I besieged, I took; 27,280 of its inhabitants I carried away; fifty chariots that were among them I collected.”3.

The Bible states:

In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes (2 Kgs 17:6 ESV).

Footnotes

• 1. Victor Harold Matthews, Don C. Benjamin, Old Testament parallels: laws and stories from the ancient Near East. Paulist Press, 2006, 185-88. 
• 2. Olmstead, A. T. "The Text of Sargon's Annals.” The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 47 No. 4 (1931), 259-80. 
• 3. Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin, The Story of Assyria from the Rise of the Empire to the Fall of Nineveh (New York, N.Y.: Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 247.

 For Further Study

• Layard, A. H. Nineveh and its Remains-1, vol. 2. London, J. Murray, 1849. PDF