The Taylor Prism: Sennacherib's Own Account

In 1830, Colonel Robert Taylor is thought to have found a six-sided clay object among the ruins of Nineveh. It would turn out to carry an Assyrian king's own account of his campaign against Judah.

Scripture: Now in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah, and took them.

The Bible sets the scene just before this verse. Assyria's king Shalmaneser besieged Samaria, and the people of Israel were carried away to Assyria. Next, the passage turns to Judah's fortified cities.

Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire under Sennacherib. Taylor's find came more than a decade before the first excavations there by Botta and Layard.

The prism stayed in Ottoman Iraq until 1846. In 1835, a young Henry Rawlinson pressed paper into the writing to make a squeeze, a mould of the inscription. The original was later thought lost, until the museum bought it from Taylor's widow in 1855.

The text is in Akkadian, written in cuneiform, which means wedge-shaped marks pressed into wet clay. Two near-identical prisms survive: one in Chicago, one in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Sennacherib says he captured forty-six of Hezekiah's fortified cities, plus many smaller towns, and carried off 200,150 people. That fits the verse's claim that the fortified cities fell, though the Bible gives no such numbers.

Scripture: About Hezekiah himself, the king boasts of this.

Kings records tribute of three hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold. The prism lists more, and says Hezekiah became a tributary ruler. It does not claim Jerusalem was captured.

So what does it show? A royal Assyrian record that names Hezekiah and describes a campaign against Judah. It is the king's own account, so historians weigh its claims carefully, and the two texts differ in emphasis and detail.

Clay can keep a voice for nearly three thousand years, and it asks us to listen with care. May the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today. Follow Bible Evidence for more from the ground beneath the Bible.