 Dyna gweinwch. Rhywbeth i mi. Rhywbeth i mi. Dyna'r bennid Elinda Bennid. E'n 在unig residence iddyn nhw risesaeth, fel dyna gwych ar y dyfodol yw'r disgleimau. Rhywbeth eithaf ar y carwi angen i'w rhesymau. Rhywbeth i'r periol sydd rhesymau i'r newydd yng nghymru. Rwy'n galw ni'n edrych i'ch tyfu dyma i'r ddechrau'r arddangos cyflogau yn y cyflog am y lleoedd yn y ffordd. Yr eich pethau ar y ddechrau yn y lleidol amsgol, yn y gwaith yng Nghymru yn y bwrdd cymryd, y pryd yn ymgyrch o'n gweithio ni o'r rhai ysgol. Rwy'n amdangos i'w cymryd y bwysigiaeth ymgyrch, o'n cymryd yng Nghymru yn y bwysigai. Rwy'n amdangos i'w cymryd ymgyrch, a'r rhai ymgyrch o'r cymryd ymgyrch ymgyrch, o'n cymryd ymgyrch yn y bwysigiaeth. Yn mynd i'w cymryd ymgyrch, I'm going to give you the traditional method of what I'm used to when we're discussing these battles, and then I'm going to investigate a future multidisciplinary approach towards these with a case study for my own research. So, the brief background. The new Assyrian Empire was based in northern Iraq, and it was from 934 to 612 BC. That's all the dates I'm going to be mentioning are going to be in BC. The fullest extent of this empire is in green. So that's all here. But the period that I'm going to be discussing today is, it started off, is this purple area. The main characteristics was it was very militaristic. The king was expected to go on campaign every year, and there was a very sophisticated propaganda machine. So there were personal exploits were written in royal inscriptions that describe military, scientific and building expeditions or exploits. And these are also presented in the reliefs of the royal palaces. We don't really have much actual direct evidence of battles at these sites. The most that I know of, to my knowledge, is at a site in Israel called Lechish. Please tell me if I'm pronouncing that wrong. Here we've seen arrowheads, slingshots, potentially a helmet crest, and the remains of a siege ramp built by Snackrub's forces when they besieged the city. But other than that, most other sites, we have to rely on the texts and palace reliefs because we're still very far behind in terms of actually locating them, let alone excavating them. But something I need to say is that there is a growing movement within my own field to use reliefs. Sorry, I'm way ahead of myself. So going with the text with my case study for today, it comes under the reign of Tiglath Palaces III. So he reigned from 744 till 727, and under him there was a massive expansion of the new Assyrian Empire after a period of contraction. But his annals were incredibly fragmentary that we have very limited information about what actually happened. But within those annals we do have mention of a battle with a woman, picking up on the earlier theme of, you know, women in battle, Samsi, Queen of the Arabs, and these women are my PhD thesis, basically. We have more information about this particular battle than any other battle with these Queens of the Arabs. So I thought he was a good candidate for a bit of further analysis to see what else I could find out about the battle. So the traditional approach, the first thing we do is turn to the texts. The annals are incredibly fragmentary. That's because of poor storage from antiquity. And we don't know the intended audience as well. So we do know there's a particular image and message portrayed. For example, there's not a single Assyrian defeat mentioned. But we don't know who that message is towards. The annals tend to say that battles happened, but we don't have any detail. So we don't have any information about the tactics, strategies, or even the weapons that are employed. So this is the most intact version of the events of the battle I'm talking about today. It's a wall of text, so I'll walk you through, don't worry. First of all, we know that the battle was fought in Mount Sikori, which is an interesting grammatical point. Then we know that 9,400 Arabs were killed. We know that 1,000 captives, 30,000 camels, 20,000 oxen, and 5,000 bags of aromatics, as well as religious items were then taken from the Arabs. And then Samsy fled into the desert. Her camp was burned, and her remaining soldiers were taken to the centre of the camp and then slaughtered. And then Samsy surrendered to Tiglath Plays III, sending camels to Assy as tribute. Assy was the capital city at the time, I believe. They moved their capitals around a lot. Then an Assyrian official was placed over her alongside 10,000 troops to make sure that she stayed under control, basically. After hearing news of her surrender, other leaders who we think are Arab as well then sent tribute to Assyria. So this is like other battles in the annals. We know the battle happened, but there are no details. So the next step in the traditional approach is to turn to reliefs to supplement with some more data from the text. The reliefs at Tiglath Plays III are also fragmentary because of the same reason poor storage and antiquity. But they do inform us about the armour, weapons and transportation, but we don't have much information about tactics and strategy. So with limited information, where do we go from here? Well, we have to move beyond text and reliefs. That's kind of the whole point here. So I decided to go back to basics, and I questioned that the suggested location that's always put forward about Mansakori, which is Jebel-Adruz. Again, apologies for mispronunciations. So this mountain has been suggested because, quite frankly, it's a mountain in the area controlled by the Arabs currently in Bonn, the southern Syria. That's pretty much the only reasoning so far people have given for it. But my question is, could the battle have actually physically happened there? And the best way to answer this is to turn to the landscape. So when you look at imagery from, again, historians don't have very fancy, you know, satellite imagery, so I turn to Google Maps. And when you look at it from above, the most obvious way to approach the mountain is from either the north or from the south. Also, interestingly, it's a plateau, not a mountain, which is nice to find out. Then I turned to the Helsinki Atlas of the Neo-Syrian Empire, and from there there are two plausible routes with the assumption that you need to keep your army supplied whilst you're going along the King's Highway, which is the red lines on the map. The first route is from the north, sorry. This is, again, similar to what the satellite imagery suggests. So here you go along the King's Highway to Damascus, here it's called Dimashkar, and then you head south, stopping at a river and two settlements along the way. The other option is if you come to the mountain from the west. So this is not what the satellite suggests. So here you go past Damascus, you follow the rivers until you... follow the rivers going south, and then you approach the plateau from the west along one of these rivers. My question is, are these suggestions actually plausible, or even possible? So I turned to GIS, and I hope that it answers this. I have to say that these are all preliminary results, and I have Chris King to thank for all of these because I'm mostly technologically illiterate. So thank you so much. This image, it's come up relatively okay, I was worried about that. It shows the least cost paths from eight points around the plateau to the centre, and there's only small deviations. I was expecting them all to converge either at one end or the other, but there wasn't any real massive deviation, and there's no indication that the terrain would create a massive preference of the Assyrian route. So as a brief conclusion, I'd say that the northwest and southern approaches were all possible, but I would tend to... go towards the Assyrians coming from the north or the west due to their ability to resupply along the routes there. So my second question was, could the Arabs see the Assyrians approach? So we took observation points at the average height of a human of 1.73 metres, and we placed them in eight compass points at the edge of the plateau, so they're on the ridge. Again, assuming ideal conditions of clear weather, trees, and you can see for infinite distances, each of these dots represents an Arab scout looking outwards for an Assyrian to come in. And I'm also only showing you the points where the Arabs can actually see something, and working on the previous assumption that the Assyrians are coming in from the north or the west, then I've also focused on those. And we can see, as you can see a lot, from the north, northeast, west, and southwest. So I'm perfectly happy to say that the Arabs could definitely see the Assyrians if they came from the suggested approach to the north or the west, and the Arabs would definitely have had time to both mobilise their troops and move their camp and any civilian elements to safety. So this particular question was what started my investigation in this battle, which was, would the armies have fit in this area that we're talking about? Because 9,400 people sounds like a lot of people, and I needed to see if the landscape could actually accommodate these numbers, or if these numbers were inflated in the annals, which is a really common problem in Assyrian inscriptions. So with 9,400 soldiers, there also needs to be a base for an Arab camp, camels, the oxen, and the Assyrian army. So again, could all of them fit in the plateau, or would they then have to go on the side of the plateau or in a nearby plain? Well, these are representations of both armies with the numbers they've been given in the text, and the Assyrian army is based on numbers given by Fuchs for the ideal late 8th century Assyrian army. And what we can see is there's plenty of space in relation to each other, but there's plenty of space on the plateau to have a huge skirmish. There's plenty of space, I had no need to worry. But this aspect doesn't come across in the text, and that's something I really want to stress. This isn't mentioned in the text, or really the sheer scale of the area they're discussing. So my conclusion is, as I said, landscape can accommodate these numbers, and it does also explain the use of the word in to describe where the battle took place as well. So at this preliminary stage, the landscape doesn't really give us much information about the actual battle. I hope to try and explore that with Chris, because again, technologically illiterate. But we do have a little bit of information, a little bit of an insight into the immediate aftermath, which is where Samsy flees into the desert. My questions are, where did Samsy flee to, and would she have been able to only see a column of smoke from her burning camp, or would she have been able to see the Assyrians killing her people? I find this is really important, because this would have influenced both her decision to surrender and her later politics. In later inscriptions, we know that she sends tribute to a later Assyrian king called Sargon II, and that's an indication of friendly relations that have been based on intimidation tactics. So I have two options of where Samsy could have fled to, again based on her ability to resupply. The first is heading west along the river, which is potentially the same route as the advance of the Assyrians. So plugging this into GIS, and Chris being really useful here. These are again observation points, taken at the same height as before, but this time at the bottom of the plateau at eight compass points, looking, well I think these are 360 degrees. Each one of these dots this time represents Samsy having partially fled on her way to the point that is her ultimate goal and then looking back at the plateau. So I've taken a bit of an assumption that the Arab camp would have been at the highest point in the north. That again is for further investigation and I hope to have some sort of answer. But I haven't included the southern points because again you can't see anything. So in these images you can see that the northern central part of the plateau is visible from the western points. The second one is she flees into the desert to the east. To these two small oasis is my other plausible thing. I think it's more likely because that's more in line with what the flavour of the Arabs would get in the texts. Again plugging into GIS we can see that the northern central part of the plateau is again visible from the east. So I'm happy to say that Samsy could have fled up east or west but there's no proof which one is more likely and she could see a location that may have been where her camps have been. I'm very cautious with that specific conclusion but I'm happy to say that she could have seen anything from either way. So to sum up I can actually give someone a brief reconstruction of Assyrians approaching a battle. First of all approaching the plateau of Jebel El Drws from either the north or the west and then Arab Scouts relaying this information with enough time to relocate their camp to safety and then being able to prepare for battle. The battle was then fought on top of the plateau and then after the defeat Samsy fled either east or west and then surrendered after she saw her people being killed or seeing the smoke from her camp. I'd like to conclude with the rather grand statements of landscape archaeology as well as spatial and digital archaeological techniques are the future of conflict archaeology in Ancient Near East Battles especially for people like myself as a urologist. So I know I'm on time now. You are well on time. There you go. Alright, thank you very much.