The Assyrian Captivity

In the year 740 BCE, the Assyrian monarchs, and their powerful army, successfully invaded the kingdom of Israel, thus marking the beginning of what historians would later referred to as the Assyrian captivity. By design, it also began a series of events that would eventually lead to mass deportations from Samaria, which was formerly a city located in northern Israel, and the end of Israel’s northern ten tribe kingdom. This was a campaign embarked by the monarchs: Tiglath-Pileser 3 and Shalmensser 5, whom had been the original invaders, and the project was ultimately completed by Sargon 3 and Sennecherib 3. After 20 years, the mass deportation of thousands of Israelite families into the Assyrian empire and the complete dissolution of the unity maintained between the ten tribes had come to fruition. While this most certainly sounds positively dreadful, a subscriber to the glass half full ideology would assert that at the very least, the Assyrians Regime never managed to take Jerusalem, which is located due south of Samaria, and because of this the Assyrians were unable to lay claim to the southern parts of the Israeli empire; though, this was not for a lack of trying.

Geopolitical Map:

Source: JoelHoldsworth

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Luckenbill, Daniel David. Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylon, Oriental

Institute University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1926.