Historian Israel Eph'al questions the plausibility of Sargon's account, as the briefness of Sargon's account seems to be at odds with the fact that such a campaign deep into Arabia would have been one of the longest wars in Assyrian history, and because no mention of plunder is provided. Eph'al instead speculates that the Thamud and other Arab tribes may have made arrangements with Sargon to trade in Samaria, which Assyrian historians embellished as submission.

A surviving letter from Nabonidus, a sixth-century