Assyria: Room 10b — Scroll & Stone

Room 10b of the British Museum is not a large room. It's a long, slightly low-ceilinged gallery off the main Assyrian circuit, and if you walk through it quickly - as most visitors do - you'll register large stone panels on the walls showing a city under siege, soldiers climbing ladders, people being led away in chains, a king on a throne watching it all. You might read the caption. You might not. Then you'll walk on to the lion hunt reliefs in Room 10a, which are more dramatic, and the moment will pass.

If you stop, though - if you actually stop and read what the panels say - something shifts. The city being attacked is Lachish. The year is 701 BCE. The king watching from the throne, carved in the act of receiving the submission of the conquered, is Sennacherib, King of Assyria, the most powerful man on earth at that moment. And the people being led away in chains are from the kingdom of Judah.

The Lachish Reliefs at the British Museum, showing the Assyrian siege of Lachish — The Lachish Reliefs (c.700 BCE) at the British Museum — carved wall panels from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh depicting the Assyrian siege and capture of the Judaean city of Lachish in 701 BCE. Public domain · British Museum, via Wikimedia Commons

Stone The Lachish reliefs were excavated by Austen Henry Layard at Nineveh between 1845 and 1847, from Sennacherib's South-West Palace. They were carved between 700 and 681 BCE as a permanent record of the campaign. They have been in the British Museum since 1856. Room 10b, British Museum, London.

The reliefs are carved in gypsum alabaster and would have run almost continuously around the walls of a dedicated room in the palace, approximately 2.5 metres high. The room was evidently designed as a single viewing experience: you entered and were surrounded by Lachish falling. Scholars note that Sennacherib gave Lachish this treatment rather than Jerusalem - the city he was unable to claim as a straightforward military conquest.

What he built, and why

Sennacherib didn't just fight his wars. He curated them. His palace at Nineveh - the South-West Palace, which he called the "Palace Without Rival" - was a monument to the proposition that Assyria had conquered everything worth conquering, and that this fact should be legible to anyone who walked through its halls. The walls were carved floor to ceiling with victories: cities falling, armies routing, populations bowing. The Lachish reliefs occupied an entire room, the panels running almost continuously from floor to ceiling, showing every stage of the operation in a kind of sequential documentary. The assault ramps. The battering rams. The impaled prisoners outside the city walls - apparently Sennacherib's preferred method of discouraging resistance. Sennacherib himself, larger than everyone else, enthroned and watching.

Lachish was the second city of Judah, a fortified garrison town in the Shephelah, the lowland foothills south-west of Jerusalem. Taking it was the necessary military prelude to any assault on Jerusalem itself. Sennacherib took it. He took it so definitively, and was so pleased about having taken it, that he gave it its own room.

Jerusalem, interestingly, did not get a room.

c. 700-681 BCEThe record

The Lachish Reliefs - Sennacherib's South-West Palace, Nineveh

Carved gypsum wall panels depicting the Assyrian siege and capture of Lachish in 701 BCE. The reliefs show the assault in sequence: approach, battering rams, scaling ladders, the fall of the city, the population led into exile, prisoners impaled, and Sennacherib on his throne receiving the submission of the survivors. An inscription identifies the scene: "Sennacherib, king of the world, king of Assyria, sat upon a throne and passed in review the booty from Lachish." Excavated at Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard, 1845-1847. The panels were carved to be the permanent, public record of an Assyrian victory. They are now in Room 10b of the British Museum, London, where they have been since 1856.

British Museum, London - Room 10b

The prism that doesn't quite finish the sentence

In Room 55 of the same building, a few minutes' walk away, is a hexagonal clay prism about 38 centimetres tall. It is covered in cuneiform script - the annals of Sennacherib's third campaign, written in his own voice. It reaches his invasion of Judah and records what happened to Hezekiah, king of Jerusalem: "As for Hezekiah the Judahite, I shut him up like a caged bird in his royal city of Jerusalem."

A caged bird. Shut in. The language is contemptuous - the king reduced to a prisoner in his own palace - and you can feel the scribe reaching for the right formulation, something that will convey total dominance without actually having to claim a military victory that, apparently, he couldn't claim. Because the sentence doesn't end with a fall. It ends with tribute. Hezekiah paid. Sennacherib took the gold and the silver and the daughters and went home. "Jerusalem" and "captured" do not appear in the same sentence anywhere on the prism.

The Taylor Prism is one of three identical clay prisms recording the same annals. It was found at Nineveh in 1830, purchased by the British Museum in 1855, and it has been sitting there ever since: Sennacherib's own account of the campaign that didn't quite end the way the reliefs in Room 10b imply.

c. 691 BCEThe record

The Taylor Prism - Sennacherib's Annals, Third Campaign

A hexagonal baked-clay prism, 38 cm high, inscribed in cuneiform with Sennacherib's account of his eight military campaigns. Column III records the invasion of Judah in 701 BCE. The relevant passage states that Hezekiah was "shut up like a caged bird in his royal city of Jerusalem" and that tribute was subsequently delivered - gold, silver, precious stones, ivory, and members of the royal household. The prism does not state that Jerusalem was taken. Found at Nineveh in 1830 by Colonel Robert Taylor; acquired by the British Museum in 1855 from Taylor's estate. Two further copies of the same text survive: the Chicago Prism (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Chicago) and the Jerusalem Prism (Israel Museum, Jerusalem).

British Museum, London - Room 55

Nineveh fell in 612 BCE

Sixty years after the Taylor Prism was inscribed, and eighty-nine years after Sennacherib stood in front of a stone panel of himself watching Lachish burn, Nineveh was destroyed by a coalition of Babylonians and Medes. The city was sacked so thoroughly that it disappeared from history for over two thousand years. When Xenophon's army marched past the ruins in 401 BCE, they didn't know what the great mounds were. When Alexander crossed the region, the city had been rubble for two centuries. It was not rediscovered until the nineteenth century.

Jerusalem was still there. Under Babylonian rule after 586 BCE, yes - and that is a story this site knows well, and Psalm 137 knows better. Under Persian rule, then Hellenistic, then Roman. Destroyed by Rome in 70 CE and again in 135 CE. But never entirely gone, never forgotten, never reduced to a mound that travellers passed without recognising. The city Sennacherib couldn't finish the sentence about is still there. The city of the king who gave Lachish its own room is not.

The descendants of the people on the panels in Room 10b visit them on school trips.

701 BCE

Sennacherib captures Lachish and besieges Jerusalem. Hezekiah pays tribute. Jerusalem does not fall.

c. 700-681 BCE

Sennacherib builds his Palace Without Rival at Nineveh and commissions the Lachish reliefs to fill an entire room.

612 BCE

Nineveh is destroyed by the Babylonian-Median coalition. The city disappears from history for two millennia.

1845-1847

Austen Henry Layard excavates Nineveh and recovers the Lachish reliefs. The Taylor Prism reached the British Museum in 1855.

Today

Room 10b, British Museum. The panels are where Sennacherib always intended: on permanent display, visited by the world. He didn't specify who.