Images Dated 2013

Tel el Saba - Palestine

Tel el Saba was a Turkish held artillery position on Oct 31st 1918 when British and Anzac units attacked Beersheba
The hillock on right horizon in the shot is Tel el Saba which was a Turkish artillery position taken on 31st Oct 1918 by the Anzac Light Horse with support from an HAC battery. This shot is taken from a ridge about 400m to the east which still has, to my eye at least, evidence of gunpits. The low ground to left of centre is the plain across which the Australian Light Horse made their famous charge to capture the town itself.
The site was a fortified city in 9th C. BC and was almost certainly referred to in the Bible in 2 Kings 18:13-19:37 when Sennacherib, King of Assyria captured King Hezekiah and destroyed 46 of his walled cities in 701 BC. Later it was the site of a fort built by Herod and a later Roman settlement and is best known to us as Beersheba.
This is described on the The Taylor Prism which is a six-sided baked clay document (or prism) discovered at the Assyrian capital Nineveh, in an area known today as Nebi Yunus. It was acquired by Colonel R. Taylor, British Consul General at Baghdad, in 1830, after whom it is named. The British Museum purchased it from Taylor's widow in 1855. As one of the first major Assyrian documents found, this document played an important part in the decipherment of the cuneiform script.
It describes the campaigns of King Sennacherib (704-681 BC0 thus
As for Hezekiah the Judahite, who did not submit to my yoke: forty-six of his strong, walled cities, as well as the small towns in their area, which were without number, by levelling with battering-rams and by bringing up seige-engines, and by attacking and storming on foot, by mines, tunnels, and breeches, I besieged and took them. 200, 150 people, great and small, male and female, horses, mules, asses, camels, cattle and sheep without number, I brought away from them and counted as spoil. (Hezekiah) himself, like a caged bird I shut up in Jerusalem, his royal city. I threw up earthworks against him

© Mike St. Maur Sheil / westernfrontphotography.com