The Taylor Prism

The Taylor Prism is a six-sided baked-clay prism from the palace at Nineveh, fifteen inches tall, covered in Akkadian cuneiform recording the military campaigns of Sennacherib of Assyria. Colonel Robert Taylor acquired it in 1830 from the ruins of Sennacherib's palace at modern Kuyunjik; the British Museum has held it since. Two near-identical copies survive — the Oriental Institute Prism in Chicago and the Jerusalem Prism in the Israel Museum — written in 691, 690, and 689 BC respectively, all from official Assyrian scriptoria. Column three records Sennacherib's third campaign, in 701 BC, against the western provinces. After taking forty-six fortified cities of Judah, he reports the siege of Jerusalem in his own voice: "As for Hezekiah the Judean, who did not submit to my yoke — forty-six of his strong walled cities I besieged and conquered. He himself I shut up in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage." The Hebrew Bible records the same campaign from the inside (2 Kings 18–19, Isaiah 36–37), reporting the angel of the Lord struck the Assyrian camp and Sennacherib withdrew. The two accounts agree on the campaign, the date, the cities, and Hezekiah's tribute — and the Assyrian record never claims to have actually taken Jerusalem. The historical fact is the rare unguarded confession of an imperial scribe. The Taylor Prism is on permanent display in the British Museum's Mesopotamia gallery. Sources: Daniel Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (University of Chicago Press, 1924); Mordechai Cogan, The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating to Ancient Israel (Carta, 2008); William Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, The Context of Scripture vol. 2 (Brill, 2003); 2 Kings 18:13–19:37.