A small clay tablet — three and a half by two and a half inches — covered front and back in dense Babylonian cuneiform. Acquired by the British Museum in 1896 but unpublished until Donald Wiseman's 1956 edition of the Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings, which finally placed it in the late Neo-Babylonian period. BM 21946 is one entry in a series of court chronicles covering the reigns of Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar II, Neriglissar, and Nabonidus — written in dispassionate scribal Akkadian, reign by reign, year by year. The tablet's reverse covers Nebuchadnezzar's regnal years one through eleven (604–594 BC). The entry for year seven, Kislev (December 598 BC), reads: "In the seventh year, the month of Kislev, the king of Akkad mustered his troops, marched to the Hatti-land, and encamped against the city of Judah. On the second day of the month of Adar he captured the city and seized its king. He appointed there a king of his own choice, received its heavy tribute, and dispatched them to Babylon." The capture date — 16 March 597 BC — is fixed precisely. The Bible records the same event from inside Jerusalem (2 Kings 24:8–17), naming the captured king as Jehoiachin and the replacement as Zedekiah. The chronicle confirms the date, the campaign, the substitution of king, and the tribute. The Bible adds the names. The two records are independently produced and exactly compatible. BM 21946 is held in the British Museum's Department of the Middle East and is digitally available through the museum's online catalog. Sources: Donald J. Wiseman, Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626–556 B.C.) in the British Museum (British Museum, 1956); A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (Augustin, 1975); Mordechai Cogan, The Raging Torrent (Carta, 2008); 2 Kings 24:8–17.
BM 21946 provides the only surviving extrabiblical administrative record that independently corroborates the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem in 597 BC, fixing the event to 16 March with cuneiform precision and confirming the royal substitution described in 2 Kings 24, thereby grounding a pivotal moment of Judean history in datable Mesopotamian documentation.