Taylor Prism

The Taylor Prism is a six-sided clay prism, about 38 cm tall, inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform with the annals of the Assyrian king Sennacherib's first eight campaigns, written around −691. Colonel Robert Taylor, the British resident in Baghdad, acquired it at Nineveh in 1830, and it has been in the British Museum since 1855; near-identical copies are held by the Oriental Institute in Chicago and the Israel Museum. Its account of the campaign of −701 says that Hezekiah of Judah refused to submit, that Sennacherib besieged and took 46 of his walled cities and countless villages, carried off 200,150 people, and shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage." Hezekiah then sent 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver, along with his daughters and palace women, to Nineveh.

The prism closely matches 2 Kings 18–19, which likewise records Hezekiah's tribute (30 talents of gold and 300 of silver) and agrees that Jerusalem was not taken. Sennacherib, who boasts of every other conquest, never claims the city; instead his palace at Nineveh celebrated the fall of Lachish in great wall reliefs, now also in the British Museum. The Bible attributes Jerusalem's deliverance to an angel who struck the Assyrian camp.