Lachish battle reliefs in King Sennacherib's palace without rival at Nineveh, ancient Assyria.)

On numerous inscriptions on clay cylinders, bricks, and wall sculptures, King Sennacherib says, Thereon I built a palace of ivory, ebony, boxwood, cedar, cypress, and spruce, the palace without a rival for my abode. King Sennacherib, 702 BCE Between 1847 and 1851, Austin Henry Laird, a British adventurer and part-time lawyer, excavated the Citadel Mound of ancient Nineveh. He dug deep pits and underground tunnels to follow the wall reliefs and sculptures. In 1853, Laird published his findings, including the cuneiform inscriptions he discovered on the bulls guarding the entry to King Sennacherib's palace without rival. The inscriptions describe the king's third military campaign along the Levantine coast, including detailed descriptions of his siege of Jerusalem, which stunned the world by duplicating biblical accounts of the very same events in Isaiah and 2 Kings, instantly transforming biblical writings from mere stories into historical realities. By 1929, as seen in this RAF photo, the ancient walls of Nineveh are still clearly visible and much of the old city remained intact. Even the Citadel Mound shows only the disturbances of the mid-19th century work. By the dawn of the 21st century, the modern northern Iraqi city of Masul had expanded across the ancient Assyrian capital. The outline of the ancient city remains visible and the citadel sits isolated in a park. Between 703 and 690 BCE, Sennacherib enlarged and enclosed the previous settlement at the site in an immense double wall, nearly 25 meters thick and 12 kilometers long, with as many as 18 gateways into the city. He added an elaborate system of canals to feed the nearly 100,000 inhabitants of his new administrative capital of the empire. He also built palaces and temples on the Citadel Mound near the northwest corner of the city and added an elaborate road system, bridges, and a series of parks and gardens. During King Sennacherib's third campaign, he captured towns of the northern kingdoms along the Phoenician coast and Philistia, defeated the Egyptian army, and subjugated the southern kingdoms of Judea, including Lachish and Jerusalem. Upon his return, his palace without rival had been expanded to the superstructure and inner administrative quarters. His destruction of Lachish was deemed so important, he depicted the entire battle in detail across all the walls of this single inner room of his palace.