The historian Susan Wise Bauer writes, “Sargon had, apparently, not been reticent in spreadi… The prism is a foundation record, intended to preserve King Sennacherib's achievements for posterity and the gods. They are hexagonal in shape, made of red baked clay, and stand 38.0 cm high by 14.0 cm wide.

So who was this guy? An 1813 poem by Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib, commemorates Sennacherib's campaign in Judea from the Hebrew point of view. The discovery of Sennacherib's own inscriptions in the 19th century, in which brutal and cruel acts such as ordering the throats of his Elamite enemies to be slit, and their hands and lips to be cut off, amplified his already ferocious reputation. According to inscriptions and letters from the time, Sargon II trusted his son to handle the daily affairs of state but did not seem to think highly of him as a man or future king. The "Taylor Prism", a prism of Sennacherib in the British Museum prisms, containing Sennacherib's Annals, narratives of his military campaigns.
Perhaps you may remember the name ''King Sennacherib'' from lessons related to ancient Israel. Written in anapestic tetrameter, the poem was popular in school recitations. On the prism Sennacherib boasts that he shut up "Hezekiah the Judahite" within Jerusalem his own royal city "like a caged bird." Ancient sources. References to this man are found in the Bible, and his name is sometimes mentioned in connection to the biblical account of the Hebrew people. The record of his account of his third campaign (701 BC) is particularly interesting to scholars. It involved the destruction of forty-six cities of the state of Judah and the deportation of 200,150 people. The Sennacherib Prism Sennacherib Prism : text of the Annals of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, famous for a reference to the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE also mentioned in the Bible. During the reign of Sargon II (722-705 BCE), Sennacherib had effectively maintained the administration of the empire while his father was away on military campaigns. Hexagonal clay prism, foundation record lists campaigns of Sennacherib until the start of his final war against Babylon, and includes a description of the tribute received from Hezekiah, King of Judah in 701 BC; 82 + 83 + 82 + 80 + 85 + 75 lines of inscription.

In the last quarter of the eighth century BCE, the Assyrian kings Šalmaneser V (r.726-722) and Sargon II (r.721-705) had expanded their empire to Israel . Some of you may have attended Sunday School as a child. They were created during the reign of Sennacherib in 689 BC (Chicago) or 691 BC (London, Jerusalem).
The prisms contain six paragraphs of cuneiform written in Akkadian. King Sennacherib was the This prism is among the three accounts discovered so far which have been left by the Assyrian monarch of his campaign against Israel and Judah.