What was found. Assyrian kings recorded their campaigns on six-sided baked-clay prisms. One, found in the ruins of Sennacherib's Nineveh and acquired by Colonel R. Taylor in 1830, is the Taylor Prism (now in the British Museum); a near-duplicate, the Oriental Institute Prism, was bought in Baghdad in 1919 by the Egyptologist J. H. Breasted. Both carry Sennacherib's own annals, including his account of the campaign of 701 BC against Hezekiah's Judah.
What it says. Sennacherib claims to have taken "46 strongholds" of Hezekiah's territory and to have received heavy tribute, and of Jerusalem he says, in the famous phrase, that he shut Hezekiah up "like a bird in a cage in Jerusalem, his royal city."
The biblical connection, and the striking silence. This is the invasion of 2 Kings 18–19 / Isaiah 36–37. The Assyrian and biblical accounts agree on a great deal, the ISBE notes that the amount of gold Hezekiah paid, thirty talents, is the exact figure given in 2 Kings 18:14 (the silver totals differ: Assyria claims 800 talents, the Bible 300). But Sennacherib's annals, which never miss a chance to boast, stop at the siege, he "penned him like a bird" but does not claim to have captured Jerusalem. The Bible says the city was delivered and Sennacherib withdrew (2 Kings 19:35–36). The two records meet at exactly the point the Bible says the siege broke off, a silence historians have long found telling, though what caused the withdrawal is told only from the biblical side.
Sources (read live 2026-06-29 + ISBE 1915, public domain). "Bird in a cage," the 46 strongholds, and the tribute figures quoted from the ISBE entry "Sennacherib" (A. T. Clay); prism object data (Taylor 1830; the Oriental Institute prism, Breasted 1919) from open museum overviews. Objects: the British Museum (Taylor Prism); the ISAC/Oriental Institute, Chicago.
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