The taxman cometh: Jerusalem dig shows tribute system after biblical revolt against Assyria
Remains of buildings and a collection of stamped jar handles for the first time offer clues to how agricultural produce in the Jerusalem area was distributed to the empire
The Assyrian Empire’s siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE is mentioned in the Bible, in Assyrian records and later, by ancient historians such as Herodotus. By scholarly consensus, the siege is one of the most well-known biblical episodes and is considered to have definitely, historically occurred.
As part of unifying the empire under its new ruler King Sennacherib, the Assyrians moved to quash rebellions by states in the region, including the Kingdom of Judah then ruled by King Hezekiah. According to the biblical account, the Assyrians ravaged the country surrounding Jerusalem and laid siege to the city, but his army was disrupted by a plague that caused thousands of deaths among his troops.
Both the Bible and Assyrian records agree that the Assyrians did not conquer Jerusalem. They returned home after Hezekiah agreed to continue to pay tribute to the empire while maintaining nominal independence.
Now, recent excavations near the Jerusalem neighborhood of Arnona have shown, for the first time, clues to how the Assyrian campaign impacted the economy in the Jerusalem area and how these Judean tributes were organized, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said Wednesday.
The dig was undertaken ahead of the construction of Mordot Arnona, a new neighborhood in southern Jerusalem being built near Kibbutz Ramat Rachel. The excavation revealed two large 8th-century BCE agricultural administrative buildings, one destroyed and the other built on its ruins shortly after, along with 180 ceramic jar handles engraved with Hebrew inscriptions indicating ownership of the contents.
“We discovered remains of a significant royal administrative center from the days of King Hezekiah, and perhaps even from the reign of his father, King Ahaz,” excavation directors Neria Sapir, Natan Ben-Ari and Benyamin Storchan said in an IAA statement.
This center “functioned in the last third of the 8th century BCE but was destroyed down to its foundations and buried under a massive heap of stones,” the archaeologists said. “The stone pile formed a platform upon which a subsequent structure was erected… Large building stones originating from the early structure were deliberately incorporated into the heap.”
The destruction of the first and the subsequent construction of the second is interpreted “as a statement by the Assyrian imperial government intended to convey a political-diplomatic message to the surrounding region and make it clear ‘who is really in charge’ by overhauling the administrative structure and its function,” the archaeologists said.
“As the Assyrians were still interested in the agricultural produce and taxes Judah could provide, they did allow for the existence of an independent Judahite administration… but intensified its heavy economic demands,” the archaeologists said.
Both structures were “monumental public buildings” that were used to consolidate agricultural production in the area before it was sent to Jerusalem or elsewhere, and the inscribed jar handles offer a clue as to how this agricultural production was reorganized after the rebellion, Ben-Ari, a PhD student at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told The Times of Israel.
In total, 180 handles were discovered, most of them engraved with a stamp saying “Belonging to the king.” This was common practice at the time, as the Kingdom of Judah administered the “concentration and management of the agricultural produce farmers used to pay taxes to the kingdom,” produce that was “transported and delivered in large ceramic storage jars,” the IAA said.
However, 17 of the handles were inscribed with individual names such as Menachem Yubna, Peqach Tavra and Tzophen Azaryahu. These kinds of handles were only found in the early building that was destroyed by the Assyrians, Ben-Ari explained.
It’s likely that the disappearance of the handles with private names is “connected to the rebellion” and the “redistribution of agriculture” that occurred after, he said.
These “private stamp impressions” were probably part of an administrative system that operated before the Assyrian military campaign, “as part of the Kingdom of Judah’s preparations, led by King Hezekiah, to rebel against Assyria, at which time taxation to the Assyrian Empire ceased,” the archaeologists explained.
After the rebellion, the private impressions disappeared and the general jug handle impressions “differ from the earlier types and mark the return of Assyrian taxation” after the campaign, they said.
“The amount of these handles and the names are important, it seems they were government officials or administrators in senior positions” who were receiving some of the agricultural production, likely olive oil or wine, which was then diverted to the Assyrians after the invasion, Ben-Ari said.
The jug handles are currently on display to the public at the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel, the IAA’s newly opened headquarters in Jerusalem.
The latest findings are connected to other recent work in the area, including in Ramat Rachel, Arnona and Armon Hanatziv, which “has changed the archaeological picture” of the region by giving deeper insights into how “the Judean Kingdom controlled the area and the redistribution of products,” Ben-Ari noted.
King Hezekiah ruled the Kingdom of Judah from around 716 to 687 BCE and is said to have witnessed, in 722 BCE, the Assyrian Empire’s conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel and subsequent consolidation of the empire’s control of the region. At the time, the Assyrians were a major empire, the equivalent of a superpower that controlled areas from what is now Iran to Egypt. The Kingdom of Judah was one of several much smaller states that paid tribute to the empire in exchange for autonomy.
Portrayed as a righteous religious reformer in the Bible, Hezekiah, after joining regional efforts to contest Assyrian control after a regime change in the empire, stopped paying the required tribute and then faced an invasion. Several archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem, especially the Broad Wall, or Hezekiah’s Wall, have been understood as part of the king’s preparations for an Assyrian siege, although recent research has called into question the chronology of the wall’s construction.
In 2021, a team of Israeli and US researchers published an investigation into the Assyrian siege and destruction of Lachish, which also took place in 701 BCE during the conflict. Lachish at the time was the second-largest city in Judah. The efficient Assyrian army constructed a huge stone siege ramp to access the fortified hilltop city and breached the gate in just a few weeks, the researchers said.
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