A Researcher’s Guide to the Lachish Collection in the British Museum

Abstract

• This publication is the culmination of a ten-year project carried out by the author to organise, research and catalogue a collection of over 17,000 objects from the 1930s British excavations at Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir), which was acquired in 1980 by the Department of the Ancient Near East, British Museum. Lachish is a large multi-period tell site in Israel, situated some 40 kilometres south-west of Jerusalem, with remains dating from the Neolithic period onwards. Its major periods of occupation cover the Bronze and Iron Ages (4th to mid-1st millennium BC). In the Late Bronze Age, Lachish was a large and important Canaanite city, known from the Amarna Letters, while in the Iron Age it was the second city of the Kingdom of Judah, the site of the Assyrian siege in 701 BC, which is depicted on the famous reliefs from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh. This book is intended to make this important collection more readily accessible to researchers, and takes the form of a detailed, annotated handlist.