纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 021拉吉浮雕（6）

This practice of mass deportation was standard Assyrian policy. They shifted large groups of troublesome people from their homelands to resettle them in other parts of the Assyrian empire, including Assyria itself. Deportation on this scale must have been logistically challenging - but the Assyrian army had been through so many campaigns by now that this programme of moving people had been refined to a point of industrial efficiency.

The strategy of shifting populations has been a constant phenomenon of empire ever since. Perhaps our nearest equivalent - just about in living memory - is Stalin's deportation of peoples during the 1930s. Like Sennacherib, Stalin knew the value of moving rebellious peoples out of strategic areas and relocating them far away from their homelands. Military historian Anthony Beevor puts these two imperial heavies - Sennacherib and Stalin - in historical perspective:

"Well I think one sees the way that in the past, for example in the deportation of the Judeans after the siege of Lachish, rulers wished to establish their total power. It was a demonstration of their supremacy.

"By the twentieth century there was much greater element of notions of treason, particularly political treason, as one saw with Stalin and the Soviet Union. When it came to the real waves of deportations which were punishing whole peoples, this was because Stalin suspected that they had collaborated with the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union from 1941 onwards.