Sargon II: The King Known Only from Isaiah

The short verdict. Sargon II was one of Assyria's great kings. He ruled from 722 to 705 BCE, built his own capital, and left annals that describe the revolt and capture of Ashdod, the event Isaiah 20:1 uses to date a prophecy. Fragments of an Assyrian victory stele have even been found at Ashdod itself. Verdict: Confirmed.

One verse

"In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him,) and fought against Ashdod, and took it…" (Isaiah 20:1, KJV)

This is the only place the Bible names Sargon. Isaiah uses the year as a date stamp for a prophecy. Later ancient writers barely mention him, so for centuries that verse was nearly all there was.

When 19th-century scholars tried to fit Sargon into Assyrian history, many concluded that "Sargon" must be an alias for a king already known from the Bible, usually Shalmaneser, Sennacherib or Esarhaddon.

Khorsabad (1843)

In 1843 Paul-Émile Botta, the French consul at Mosul, was digging at Nineveh without much success. Local villagers told him about a mound a short way to the northeast, at the village of Khorsabad. There his workmen found walls lined with carved reliefs and gateways guarded by colossal human-headed winged bulls.

Botta believed he had found Nineveh, and his great publication (with the artist Eugène Flandin, 1849–50) was titled Monument de Ninive. In fact he had found Dur-Sharrukin, "Fortress of Sargon". Finds from the palace formed the first exhibition of Assyrian sculpture, which opened at the Louvre in 1847.

Reading the name

Cuneiform was only just being deciphered. In 1845 Isidore Löwenstern suggested that Sargon built the palace, but from faulty readings. In 1847 Adrien de Longpérier confirmed the builder's name as Sargon. Even so, the debate continued, and Assyriologists did not fully accept Sargon as a king in his own right until the 1860s.

Who Sargon was

• Name. Šarru-kīn, usually translated "the true king" or "the legitimate king".
• Reign. 722–705 BCE.
• Capital. Building at Dur-Sharrukin began in 717 BCE. The city was inaugurated in 706.
• Death. In 705 BCE Sargon was killed in battle in Tabal, in Anatolia. His body was never recovered, which meant he could not receive a proper burial. The court moved on, and his capital was largely abandoned.

That abandonment is part of why Khorsabad was such a rich find: a royal city that stood nearly empty for some 25 centuries, its walls still carrying Sargon's inscriptions and annals.

Two wars that touch the Bible

Samaria

Sargon's inscriptions claim that he conquered Samaria, capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, and deported its people. The figure is given as 27,290 in the Khorsabad annals and 27,280 on the Nimrud Prism.

The Bible tells it a little differently. 2 Kings 17:3–6 says Shalmaneser besieged Samaria for three years, then says only that "the king of Assyria took Samaria". Most historians think Shalmaneser V captured the city around 722 BCE, and that Sargon, who came to the throne that year, claimed the conquest, possibly after putting down a later revolt that Samaria joined. Royal inscriptions were not modest.

Ashdod

This is the war Isaiah dates his prophecy by. According to Sargon's records:

1. Azuri, king of the Philistine city of Ashdod, rebelled around 713 BCE, and Assyria replaced him with Ahi-Miti.
2. Ashdod rebelled again and made a usurper named Yamani king. He looked for support from Egypt and Judah.
3. In 711 BCE the Assyrian army crushed the revolt and took the city. Yamani fled to Egypt, and was later handed back to Assyria.

Isaiah 20 fits that setting closely. Isaiah walks "naked and barefoot" as a sign that Egypt and Cush will be led away captive (Isaiah 20:2–6). The message to Judah is not to rely on Egypt, which is exactly the mistake Ashdod made.

"Tartan"

Older readers, including the King James translators, took "Tartan" as a man's name. It is actually the Assyrian title turtānu, the commander-in-chief. Isaiah says Sargon sent his turtānu, and the word he uses is that officer's real rank.

The Ashdod fragments (1962–63)

During the 1962–63 excavations at Ashdod, Moshe Dothan's team found three small fragments of a basalt victory stele with cuneiform writing. The surviving pieces do not preserve the king's name, but their wording matches Sargon's known inscriptions, and scholars agree that they come from a monument he set up after taking the city.

Where scholars stand today

Sargon is one of the clearest "doubted, then found" cases. A king named once in the Bible, and long treated as someone else, turned out to be a major Assyrian emperor with his own capital city.

See also: Belshazzar, the king the critics called fiction.

Sources and further reading

• Paul-Émile Botta and Eugène Flandin, Monument de Ninive (Paris, 1849–1850)
• Moshe Dothan, "Ashdod: Preliminary Report on the Excavations in Seasons 1962/1963," Israel Exploration Journal 14 (1964)
• Hayim Tadmor, "The Campaigns of Sargon II of Assur: A Chronological-Historical Study," Journal of Cuneiform Studies 12 (1958)
• Mordechai Cogan, The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating to Ancient Israel (Carta, 2008)
• Andreas Fuchs, Die Inschriften Sargons II. aus Khorsabad (Cuvillier, 1994)