The prisms contain six paragraphs of
Akkadian, written in cuneiform. They are hexagonal, made of red baked clay, and stand 38.0 cm high by 14.0 cm wide. They were created during the reign of Sennacherib in 689 BC (Chicago) or 691 BC (London, Jerusalem). The Taylor prism is thought to have been found by Colonel Robert Taylor (1790–1852) in 1830 at
Nineveh, which was the ancient capital of the
Neo-Assyrian Empire under Sennacherib, before its initial excavation by
Botta and
Layard more than a decade later. Although the prism remained in
Ottoman Iraq until 1846, in 1835 a
paper squeeze was made by the 25-year-old
Henry Rawlinson, and a plaster cast was taken by
Pierre-Victorien Lottin in c.1845. The original was later thought to have been lost, until it was purchased from Colonel Taylor's widow in 1855 by the British Museum. (Colonel Taylor may have been the father of
John George Taylor, who, himself, became a noted Assyrian explorer and archaeologist.) . Another version of this text is found on what is known as the Sennacherib Prism, which is now in the ISAC. It was purchased by
James Henry Breasted from a Baghdad antiques dealer in 1919 for the Institute. The Jerusalem prism was acquired by the Israel Museum at a Sotheby's auction in 1970. It was only published in 1990. The three known complete examples of this inscription are nearly identical, with only minor variants, although the dates on the prisms show that they were written sixteen months apart (the Taylor and Jerusalem Prisms in 691 BC and the ISAC prism in 689 BC). At least eight other fragmentary prisms, all in the British Museum, preserve parts of this text, most of them containing just a few lines. The Chicago text was translated by
Daniel David Luckenbill and the Akkadian text, along with a translation into English, is available in his book
The Annals of Sennacherib (University of Chicago Press, 1924). ==Significance==