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Assyrian Tributes

I besieged and conquered Samerina.
I took as booty 27 , 290 people who lived there.
I gathered 50 chariots from them.
And I taught the rest [of the deportees] their skills.
I set my governor over them, and
I imposed upon them the [same] tribute as the previous king.
—Sargon II, king of Assyria, cited in Younger,
“Deportations of the Israelites”

Thus, the Assyrian king Sargon II (r. 722 – 705 bce) summarized
his successful campaign against the kingdom of Israel, which had
existed for nearly two centuries.^1 Sargon, not the first Assyrian ruler to
wage war against Israel, had managed to conquer its capital, Samaria
(Samerina), deported a number of its inhabitants, and turned what
was left of it into another Assyrian province.^2 The event marked a high
point in Assyrian history; by the end of the eighth century, the Assyr-
ian Empire was a world power, “a colossus: the largest and most
complex political structure the ancient Near East had known up to its
period.”^3 The capture and destruction of Samaria was certainly a
moment to remember. Contemporary scholars summed it up
with brutal brevity: “It was all over. Two stormy centuries had come to
a catastrophic end.”^4 This chapter discusses the context and circum-
stances within which the Israelite kingdom was destroyed and some of
its people deported—theur-text for the subsequent millennia of