Sennacherib

Sennacherib (c. 745–681 BC) ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 705 BC until he was killed. His name, in Neo-Assyrian Akkadian, means "Sîn has replaced the brothers." He was the second king of the Sargonid dynasty and is well known for appearing in the Hebrew Bible, which recounts his military campaign in the Levant. He also famously destroyed Babylon in 689 BC and rebuilt and expanded Nineveh, the last major Assyrian capital.

Despite being one of the most powerful Assyrian kings, Sennacherib struggled to control Babylonia, the empire’s southern region. Much of his trouble there came from the Chaldean chief Marduk-apla-iddina II, who had been Babylon’s king until Sennacherib’s father defeated him. Soon after Sennacherib took the throne in 705 BC, Marduk-apla-iddina recaptured Babylon and formed an alliance with the Elamites. Sennacherib regained the south in 700 BC, but Marduk-apla-iddina kept causing problems. He likely encouraged Assyrian vassals in the Levant to rebel, which sparked the Levantine War of 701 BC, and he also fought against Bel-ibni, Sennacherib’s appointed king in Babylonia.

When the Babylonians and Elamites captured and killed Sennacherib’s eldest son, Aššur-nādin-šumi—whom Sennacherib had made his vassal king in Babylon—Sennacherib campaigned against both regions and subdued Elam. Because Babylon, located well inside his own territory, had been the focus of so many of his campaigns and had caused his son’s death, he destroyed the city in 689 BC.

During the Levantine War, the southern states, especially the Kingdom of Judah under King Hezekiah, proved harder to subdue than those in the north. The Assyrians invaded Judah. The Bible says divine intervention ended the siege of Jerusalem when an angel destroyed the Assyrian army, but an outright defeat seems unlikely, since Hezekiah submitted to Sennacherib at the campaign’s end. Contemporary records, even from Assyria’s enemies, do not mention an Assyrian defeat at Jerusalem. Still, the siege was at least inconclusive, and the Greek historian Herodotus claimed the Assyrians failed there.

Sennacherib moved the Assyrian capital to Nineveh, where he had lived most of his time as crown prince. To make it a capital worthy of his empire, he launched one of the most ambitious building projects of the ancient world. He enlarged the city, built massive walls, many temples, and a royal garden.