Sennacherib Prism
In 701 BCE, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, marched on Judah to conquer King Hezekiah. According to 2 Kings 18-19, Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, but after an angel of Yahweh killed 185,000 of his troops, he returned to Nineveh. In 1830, Colonel Taylor also went to Nineveh and there he discovered a six-sided clay prism that recorded Sennacherib's version of the story. Sennacherib claims that the siege left Hezekiah "like a bird in a cage," and that Hezekiah paid him a handsome tribute to end the standoff. This prism provided historians the rare opportunity to have both sides' versions of the story. In 1919 James Breasted purchased the prism from a Baghdad antiquities dealer, and it currently resides at the Oriental Institute in Chicago.
Dude! Wanna read a translation of the Sennacherib Prism?