INV. 009 · Artwork
Assyrian relief of the siege of Lachish
A palace program narrating Assyria's victory at Lachish. Alongside excavation and annals, it provides a material counterpoint to the biblical account.
Editorial note: Image metadata was checked against the Wikimedia Commons record; the object's historical identification should also be verified in the institution's catalogue.
- Type
- Artwork
- Nature
- Ancient objectThe object itself dates from the period indicated.
- Date of the object
- c. 700 BCEThe relief celebrates Sennacherib's campaign of 701 BCE.
- Depicts
- The Assyrian attack on Lachish, Judahite deportees and the victorious king.
- Institution
- British Museum, Londres
- Provenance
- Sennacherib's Southwest Palace at Nineveh.
- Image
- Gary Todd
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗
- Retrieved
- Commons API, 2026-10-15
Sourced historical context
Assyrian records corroborate the 701 BCE conquest of most Judah described in 2 Kings 18 and 19. Particularly detailed palace reliefs commissioned by Sennacherib portray the siege of the Judahite city Lachish. Sennacherib's own annals say, in compatible terms, that Hezekiah did not submit, that he besieged 46 fortified cities and countless villages, deported 200,150 people along with their animals and treated the rest as booty, and that he shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem 'like a bird in a cage'.