The Annals of Sennacherib (Taylor Prism)

Assyrian kings had accounts of their wars and buildings written on clay cylinders and prisms and placed in the walls of the buildings they raised. This prism, 38 centimetres high, is dated to the year named after the official Bel-emuranni, which is 691 BC. There is no firm record of where and when it was found; the British Museum gives its findspot as Nebi Yunus, one of the mounds of Nineveh. It belonged to Colonel Taylor, the British consul at Baghdad, and the British Museum bought it from his widow in 1855. The same text stands on a prism in Chicago dated 689 BC, and a close parallel on one in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The earliest version of the Judah campaign is on the Rassam Cylinder of 700 BC, written within a year of the events.

The third campaign fills column ii, line 37, to column iii, line 49, and column iii, lines 18–49, is the passage on Hezekiah. These are the line numbers of the Chicago Prism, which the linked edition prints with its text and translation; they have become the standard way of citing the text, whichever prism is meant. Sennacherib says that he took forty-six walled towns of Judah, counted 200,150 people as spoil, shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem, gave parts of his land to Philistine kings and received a heavy tribute that Hezekiah sent after him to Nineveh. Like every Assyrian royal inscription it is written to praise the king and reports only success. It does not claim that Jerusalem was taken. See Hezekiah Withstands Sennacherib.