Sargon II

The Assyrian king (722-705 BCE) who completed the conquest of Samaria begun by his predecessor Shalmaneser V, deporting the ten northern tribes of Israel and resettling the land with foreign colonists from Babylon, Cuth, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim (2 Kings 17:6, 17:24-41). The biblical text names him directly only once — in Isaiah 20:1, where his Tartan (commander) captures Ashdod — but his policies of mass deportation and forced population transfer reshape the entire religious and ethnic landscape of the northern kingdom, producing the mixed people later known as the Samaritans. The Khorsabad annals and reliefs preserve Sargons own boast that he deported 27,290 inhabitants from Samaria; his name appears throughout the Assyrian record as one of the most aggressive expansionists of the neo-Assyrian era.