Decapitation at Lachish

One of the most haunting panels of the Lachish Relief shows an Assyrian soldier in the act of decapitating a warrior of Judah. The scene is brutal, but it is also precise—every detail carefully carved by Assyrian artisans. Look closely at the head of the Judean being slain: his short woolly hair is captured in astonishing detail, with the sculptor chiseling nearly a hundred tiny raised bumps across the scalp to represent the coarse, tightly coiled texture.

This was no stylized flourish. The Assyrians recorded what they saw. The hair is not flowing or straight, but dense, cropped, and woolly, a texture long recognized in African depictions across Egyptian, Nubian, and Nok art. In this chilling moment of conquest, the Assyrians unwittingly left behind something more than a record of war—they carved into stone the true appearance of the people of Judah.