YOAV VAKNIN: We're standing here at the gate house at Lachish.
In 701, Sennacherib, King of Assyria,
was here, put a siege on the city,
and eventually conquered the city and destroyed it.
This is described also in the Bible,
and also in Assyrian sources and in the famous Lachish relief
describing this event.
And we managed to reconstruct the magnetic field
of the earth, which is recorded in burnt mud bricks
like the one I'm holding here, as you can see over there
the burnt mud brick wall.
When these mud bricks were burnt,
they recorded the magnetic field of the earth at the time.
This helped us-- this was used as an anchor
for dating other sites.
We reconstructed the magnetic field also in other sites,
and we could use the magnetic signal to date sites that
aren't well-dated with this--
according to the data from this site,
which is very well-dated to 701 BCE.