纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 021拉吉浮雕（4）

（单词翻译）

"I saw refugee camps right across the Balkans and, frankly, I could never stop the tears coming to my eyes, because what I saw was my sister and my mother and my wife and my children. But I saw Serbs driven out by Bosniacs, Bosniacs driven out by Croats, Croats driven out by Serbs, and so on. I even saw the most shameful refugees of all ... the Roma people, a huge camp of Roma people, maybe 40 - 50,000, and they were driven out when my army, the NATO army, was in charge. And we stood aside as their houses were burnt and they were driven from their homes. And that made me feel not just desperately sad, but also desperately ashamed. What is true, and what the reliefs show, is in a sense the immutable and unchangeable character of war. There's always wars, there's always deaths, there's always refugees. Refugees are normally the sort of flotsam and jetsam of war. They are left where they were washed up when the war finished."

The heartland of the Assyrian empire lay on the fertile river Tigris, over 500 miles (800 km) north-east of the devastated Lachish. It was an ideal location for agriculture and trade, but it had no natural boundaries or defences, and so the Assyrians spent huge resources on a large army, to police their frontiers, expand their territory and to keep potential enemies at bay.

Lachish was just one victim in a long series of wars but, and this is what I think makes Lachish so fascinating, we know about this particular war from the other side as well, from the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Kings tells us that Hezekiah, King of Judah, refused to pay the tribute that Sennacherib demanded: