Editing Sennacherib (section)

=== Archaeological discoveries ===
[[File:Ancient Assyria Bas-Relief of Armed Soldiers, Palace of King Sennacherib (704-689 BC) (a).jpg|alt=Relief depicting two Assyrian soldiers|thumb|Relief depicting two Assyrian soldiers, from Sennacherib's palace]]
The discovery of Sennacherib's own inscriptions in the 19th&nbsp;century, in which brutal and cruel acts such as ordering the throats of his Elamite enemies to be slit, and their hands and lips cut off, amplified his already ferocious reputation. Today, many such inscriptions are known, most of them housed in the collections of the [[Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin|Vorderasiatisches Museum]] in [[Berlin]] and the [[British Museum]] in [[London]], though many are located throughout the world in other institutions and private collections. Some large objects with Sennacherib's inscriptions remain at Nineveh, where some have even been reburied.{{Sfn|Elayi|2018|p=2}} Sennacherib's own accounts of his building projects and military campaigns, typically referred to as his "annals", were often copied several times and spread throughout the Neo-Assyrian Empire during his reign. For the first six years of his reign, they were written on clay cylinders, but he later began using clay prisms, probably because they provided a greater surface area.{{Sfn|Elayi|2018|p=3}}

Letters associated with Sennacherib are fewer in number than those known from his father and the time of his son Esarhaddon; most of them are from Sennacherib's tenure as crown prince. Other types of non-royal inscriptions from Sennacherib's reign, such as administrative documents, economic documents and chronicles, are more numerous.{{Sfn|Elayi|2018|p=4}} In addition to written sources, many pieces of artwork have also survived from Sennacherib's time, notably the king's reliefs from his palace at Nineveh. They typically depict his conquests, sometimes with short pieces of text explaining the scene shown. First discovered and excavated from 1847 to 1851 by the British archaeologist [[Austen Henry Layard]], the discovery of reliefs depicting Sennacherib's siege of Lachish in the Southwest Palace was the first archaeological confirmation of an event described in the Bible.{{Sfn|Elayi|2018|p=5}}

The Assyriologists [[Hormuzd Rassam]] and [[Henry Creswicke Rawlinson]] from 1852 to 1854, [[William Kennett Loftus]] from 1854 to 1855 and [[George Smith (Assyriologist)|George Smith]] from 1873 to 1874 led further excavations of the Southwest Palace.{{Sfn|Elayi|2018|p=5}} Among the many inscriptions found at the site, Smith discovered a fragmentary account of a [[Flood myth|flood]], which generated much excitement both among scholars and the public. Since Smith, the site has experienced several periods of intense excavation and study; Rassam returned from 1878 to 1882, the [[Egyptologist]] [[E. A. Wallis Budge]] oversaw excavations from 1889 to 1891, the Assyriologist [[Leonard William King]] from 1903 to 1904 and the Assyriologist [[Reginald Campbell Thompson]] in 1905 and from 1931 to 1932. The [[Iraqi Department of Antiquities]] under the Assyriologist Tariq Madhloom conducted the most recent expeditions from 1965 to 1968. Many of Sennacherib's reliefs are exhibited today at the Vorderasiatisches Museum, the British Museum, the [[Iraq Museum]] in [[Baghdad]], the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]] in [[New York City|New York]] and the [[Louvre]] in [[Paris]].{{Sfn|Elayi|2018|p=6}}

The traditional negative assessment of Sennacherib as a ruthless conqueror has faded away in modern scholarship. Writing in 1978, Reade assessed Sennacherib as a king who stands out among Assyrian rulers as open-minded and far-sighted and that he was a man "who not only coped effectively with ordinary crises but even turned them to advantage as he created, or attempted to create, a stable imperial structure immune from traditional problems". Reade believes that the collapse of the Assyrian Empire within seventy years of Sennacherib's death can be partly attributed to later kings ignoring Sennacherib's policies and reforms.{{Sfn|Reade|1978|p=47}} Elayi, writing in 2018, concluded that Sennacherib was different both from the traditional negative image of him and from the perfect image the king wanted to convey himself through his inscriptions, but that elements of both were true. According to Elayi, Sennacherib was "certainly intelligent, skillful, with an ability of adaptation", but "his sense of piety was contradictory, as, on the one hand, he impiously destroyed the statues of gods and temples of Babylon while, on the other hand, he used to consult the gods before acting and prayed to them". Elayi believes Sennacherib's greatest flaw was "his irascible, vindictive and impatient character" and that he, when emotional, could be pushed to make irrational decisions.{{Sfn|Elayi|2018|p=203}}

In 2011, a huge slope was discovered in [[Qasr Shemamok]] (Kilizu) in [[Erbil governorate]], with a multi-step staircase of very low height, the steps are built of proud bricks, and a [[cuneiform]] text was found on one of the proud bricks with which the stairs were built bearing the name of the Assyrian king Sennacherib. During the French excavations, many [[cuneiform]]  inscriptions were found, most of which bear a text mentioning one of the king's titles, mentioning the construction of wall and a palace in the city.<ref>https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/14022526/Archaeological%20Projects%20in%20the%20Kurdistan%20Region%202015_0.pdf?sequence=1 . p54</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Furlani |first=Giuseppe |date=1934 |title=Kakzu-Qaṣr Šemāmok |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41864549 |journal=Rivista degli studi orientali |volume=15 |issue=2/3 |pages=119–142 |jstor=41864549 |issn=0392-4866}}</ref><ref>Masetti-Rouault M. G. «Late Bronze and Iron Age Levels from Qasr Shemamok. A First Evaluation of the Impact of the Assyrian Presence in the Region East of Calah», Proceedings of the 11th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, p.253–264.</ref>