Historical Tales

Esarhaddon’s expedition from Palestine to Egypt in 671 BCE: A trek through Negev and Sinai

By Karen Radner

Fundstellen: Gesammelte Schriften zur Archäologie und Geschichte Altvorderasiens ad honorem Hartmut Kühne, edited by D. Bonatz, R. Czichon, R and FJ Kreppner (Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, 2008)

Introduction: Hartmut Kühne has contributed much to our steadily increasing knowledge of the historical geography of the Ancient Near East; this is especially so for the Habur region which he literally “put on the map”. I would like to use the present occasion to present him with an investigation into yet another corner of the world, the Sinai and Negev, in an attempt to make sense of the puzzling itinerary of Esarhaddon’s march from Palestine to Egypt in 671 BCE, resulting in the Assyrian conquest of Egypt. Who will ever know for sure, but some of the army personnel stationed at Dīr-Katlimmu/MagdÁlu (Tell Sheikh Hamad), the site which Hartmut Kühne has brought back from oblivion, may well have been part of the troops that eventually reached the other MagdÁlu located on the Isthmus of Suez.

A fragmentarily preserved text from Nineveh with a year-by-year account of Esarhaddon’s military operations contains the fullest available description of his tenth campaign, the expedition to Egypt in 671 BCE. The account is inscribed on a beautifully written clay tablet of which unfortunately only a small part survives, about a fourth of the complete text (b = 13.5 cm, l = 18.3 cm). It is rather more poetic than the average campaign report found in Assyrian royal inscriptions, including Esarhaddon’s. It is also less concerned with following the actual sequence of events and instead of mapping out the route of the army from A to B to C, the account sometimes anticipates later episodes and also jumps from location to location without mention of the path taken. I would like to thank the Trustees of the British Museum for the opportunity to study the original in October 2006, on which the following new edition is based.

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