The ‘Taylor Prism’ has stood on display in the British Museum for 170 years. Named after Colonel J. Taylor, the British diplomat who purchased it in the 1830s, it is a masterful example of ancient Assyrian cuneiform and craftsmanship, with its six tightly-inscribed columns standing almost 40 cm tall. Remarkable to look at, it is even more remarkable to read.
The clay prism, inscribed in 691 BC, recounts the first eight annual military campaigns of the infamous Assyrian king Sennacherib (reigned 704–681 BC), as well as the building of a new armoury in Nineveh, in which the prism would originally have been placed. It is part of Sennacherib’s description of his third campaign, in particular, that has given the Taylor Prism its fame:
Hezekiah of Judah, who did not submit to my yoke – I besieged and conquered forty-six of his fortified cities and fortresses, along with countless smaller towns within their orbit . . . I brought out from inside them 200,150 people, young, old, male, and female . . . and I counted them as booty.
The Assyrian invasion of Judah that is so vividly described in three books of the Bible – 2 Kings, Isaiah, and 2 Chronicles – shows up in the inscriptions of the very king who invaded her. Sennacherib’s account of his third campaign tells us that he faced a coalition of rebellious kings on the western flank of his empire. He brought his armies down the coast of the Mediterranean in a wave of destruction, before setting his sights on the kingdom of Judah and her king, Hezekiah. As recorded in the Bible, Sennacherib’s subjugation of Judah was not total, but stopped short when it got to Jerusalem. Sennacherib says of Hezekiah:
Like a bird in a cage, I confined him in Jerusalem, the city of his kingship. I constructed fortifications against him, and I made leaving the gate of his city into something he dreaded. I cut off from his land his cities that I had plundered. . . . On top of their former annual tribute, I added the payment of my ‘lordship gift’.
The other rebel rulers were killed or taken captive to Assyria. Hezekiah, however, despite possibly having masterminded the rebellion, and despite being besieged within Jerusalem, got away with simply paying more money to Sennacherib than he had previously done. Reading the Assyrian account alone, this comes across as an uncharacteristic show of mercy on Sennacherib’s part. Even without the biblical accounts, we might suspect that this passage hides the failure of Sennacherib to conquer Jerusalem and remove Hezekiah as intended. 2 Kings 19:35 and Isaiah 37:36, however, provide us with the detail that ‘the angel of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians’, after which Sennacherib returned home.
Though the exact order of events is difficult to reconstruct, several details found in the biblical accounts are corroborated by this inscription. For example, the Assyrian account agrees with the biblical record that Hezekiah was part of an alliance with Egypt against the Assyrians (e.g. 2 Kings 18:21), that Sennacherib conquered Judah’s fortified cities (2 Kings 18:13), that Jerusalem itself did not fall to Assyria (e.g. 2 Kings 19:32), and that Hezekiah paid thirty talents of gold and large sums of silver to Sennacherib (e.g. 2 Kings 18:14-16). No, Sennacherib’s account does not mention why his army left Jerusalem, but Assyrian kings were not ones to admit their failures.
That we have an Assyrian account to compare with the Bible is astounding. It is exceedingly rare that we should have multiple sources attesting to the same event from this period of history. Indeed, you might be forgiven for thinking it fortunate that the Taylor Prism was discovered, on the basis that we would otherwise lack any account of this particular event outside the Bible. But in fact, this description of Sennacherib’s dealings with Hezekiah is found in forty-six inscriptions (in varying levels of preservation), with a further nine preserving a short summary of the events. As the Taylor Prism contains more of Sennacherib’s campaigns than most of these other inscriptions, though, it gives us a better sense of the threat that Sennacherib posed, and the courage that Hezekiah exhibited.
Sennacherib said of one group of towns he had put to the torch, ‘I caused the smoke from their burning to cover the broad heavens like a thick cloud.’ Another town saw every inhabitant slaughtered, after which Sennacherib ‘hung their corpses on stakes’ around the settlement. Referring to other defeated enemies a few years after his foray in Judah, Sennacherib writes, ‘Like the swelling flood of the seasonal rain I made their blood flow upon the expansive land . . . I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors as if they were grass . . . and cut off their hands as if they were the stems of ripe cucumbers.’ When this is how Sennacherib dealt with those who defied him, we can perhaps imagine how the citizens of Jerusalem felt as, one by one, the towns of Judah fell.
Indeed, the Taylor Prism chronicles the fear that Sennacherib struck in the hearts of his enemies. He claims in its introduction that, ‘obstinate rulers feared battle with me – they fled their settlements and, like bats in crevices, they flew off alone into places that cannot be approached.’ The Taylor Prism names twelve rulers or officials who defied Sennacherib. One of them was killed in battle, two were captured and taken to Assyria, but eight of them are said to have fled their cities in fear of Sennacherib and gone into hiding.
Against such a background of terror, Hezekiah’s actions stand out. He is the only rebel named in the Taylor Prism’s inscription to have stayed put within his city before the enveloping fog of the Assyrian army and not to have ended up dead or in chains. Sennacherib may tell us that, ‘fear of the awesome radiance of my lordship overwhelmed’ Hezekiah, convincing him to resume paying tribute. But the king of Judah’s decision not to abandon his people tells a different story, one more in line with his words to his citizens recorded in 2 Chronicles 32:7-8:
Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or dismayed before the king of Assyria and all of the horde that is with him. With him is an arm of flesh, but with us is the LORD our God, to help us and to fight our battles.
July 1, 2026
George Heath-Whyte
Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford