纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 021拉吉浮雕（7）

"And the peoples who were most famously affected were of course the Crimean Tartars, the Ingushes, the Chechens, the Kalmuks - one is certainly talking of three to three and a half million. In many cases they reckon that 40 per cent of those died during the transport, and of course during the forced labour when they arrived. And when I say 'arrived' ... usually what happened was, a lot of them were just literally dropped by the railhead, with no tools, no seeds, and were literally left there in the desert, so it's not surprising how many died. It was interesting to see that in Lachish, in the early deportations of the pre-Christian times, that they took their sheep with them, but in these cases they had to leave everything there."

So Sennacherib may not have been quite as bad as Stalin - cold comfort for the victims. The Lachish Reliefs show the misery that defeat in war always entails, but of course their main focus is not the Judeans, but Sennacherib in his moment of triumph. They do not record Sennacherib's less than glorious end ... assassinated by two of his sons while he was at prayer to the gods who'd appointed him ruler. He was succeeded by another son, whose son, in his turn, conquered Egypt and defeated the pharaoh Taharqo, who is the subject of our next programme.

And so the cycle of war that these reliefs show - brutal, pitiless, and devastating for the civilian population - was about to begin all over again.