Welcome to the History of the World Podcast. My name is Chris Hasler.

And you're listening to volume 2, The Ancient World. This is episode. The Siege of Lakeish.

This is episode 8, The Siege of Lakeish. The Oh, Oh, you know. location.

Tell Lakeish is an archaeological site in the Shefella region of the modern country of Israel.

It is a mound which is evident by the word tell in its name.

The historical city at this site was called Lakeish and it was the site of a famous siege which took place in 701

b.C. The siege was conducted by the Assyrian Empire and it was imposed on the city which

belonged to the Kingdom of Judah. The location itself was very important, second only to Jerusalem

in the kingdom of Judah. Settlement of this

settlement of this place is believed to have started during the pottery

Neolithic which is after the pre-Pottery Neolithic so we're going back into pre-Poterie Neolithic. So we're going back into pre-history and certainly more

than 7,000 years ago. Now the Siege of Lakeish was less than 3,000 years ago, so let's explore how it developed.

By around 5,000 B.C.E, the area would have certainly been exposed and introduced to ceramic pottery, metallurgy, particularly

of the calcalithic age, and megalithic construction probably as a means to worship deities.

The Proto-Syrian period of the Levant corresponds to the early Bronze Age and it is during this

period that we can see the development of a Bronze Age settlement at Tell Lakeish. This appears to have developed in the typical fashion

for most settlements in the fertile crescent as the settlement steadily grew throughout the Proto-Syrian period from around 3,100

B.C. We often see people of the Levant referred to as Canaanites, which is a biblical term for the area of the Levant.

Canaanite peoples are... area of the Levant.

Canaanite peoples are perhaps unsurprisingly a Semitic peoples and many of the cultures of the region

at this time and now typically referred to as Canaanite.

The Neo-Sumirians of the Third Dynasty of Ore, which was mentioned in episode 3, were the first major empire

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