Self-Assessment

Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, would like you to remember how he fared against the Elamites in 691:

At the command of the god Ashur, the great Lord, I rushed upon the enemy like the approach of a hurricane. … I transfixed the troops of the enemy with javelins and arrows. … I cut their throats like sheep. … My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariot were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like herbage. … As to the sheikhs of the Chaldaeans, panic from my onslaught overwhelmed them like a demon. They abandoned their tents and fled for their lives, crushing the corpses of their troops as they went. … They passed scalding urine and voided their excrement into their chariots.

He claimed that the Elamites lost 150,000 men. This is likely an exaggeration, but in The Might That Was Assyria (1984), H.W.F. Saggs observes that, “even if arbitrarily scaled down by a factor of as much as ten … this would still leave enormous casualties for an engagement of a few hours.”