“Following the destruction of all the key sites in the north and the deportation of thousands, the Assyrians resettled the area with displaced peoples whom they had conquered and deported from other regions of the Near East, including Syria and the Transjordan. The practice shredded the social and cultural fabric of the region so that it could never recover, while providing some revenue from a foreign population now rendered homeless. “
Odd, sure sounds like the unfettered illegal immigration efforts by world governments.
Gotta wonder about that.
It really doesn't. Moving an entire population from its home area into some completely foreign and often distant area, in unfamiliar terrain, with unfamiliar and often hostile neighbors, is an old, old practice. Simmers them down and helps reconcile them to foreign rule, on which they are now reliant and beholden.
The Assyrians, Persians, Romans, and modern empires including the USSR have done it.
The movement of the ten tribes was into the area north of the Black Sea led to the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe (they're bickering about something in my chromosomes right now), which, based on archaeological evidence, was at least for some period of time under Assyrian rule.
The bulk of them went to Central Asia. Assyrian rule also caused a widespread use of Aramaic, and wound up being used in Central Asia to the point that at least three of Ashoka's Pillars (in what is now Afghanistan) are inscribed with it -- it was the local written language.
There's an Assyrian-era record, clay tablet, dug up in eastern Anatolia somewhere, with a transliteration of the name Hezekiah on it, apparently a merchant.
Stalin did a lot of population switching and eliminating.