In 701 BCE Sennacherib campaigned in the Levant against a coalition that included Hezekiah of Judah, storming the fortified town of Lachish and reducing the Judaean lowlands before blockading Jerusalem, which he did not take. His annals claim 46 conquered cities and 200,150 people driven out, together with the transfer of Judaean territory to neighbouring Philistine rulers and a heavy tribute from Hezekiah. The campaign is exceptionally well documented for an ancient event: the Assyrian prisms, the biblical narrative in 2 Kings 18–19, and the great relief cycle Sennacherib installed in his palace at Nineveh showing the siege of Lachish and the deportation of its inhabitants. Excavation at Lachish has confirmed the siege ramp, the destruction layer and mass burials. The 200,150 figure is the king's own and sits awkwardly with modern estimates of Judah's total population; the scale of the deportation is therefore disputed even though the fact of it is not.
Sennacherib of Assyria invaded Judah, stormed Lachish and other fortified towns, deported their populations and stripped Hezekiah of most of his territory
The figure comes from archaeological settlement survey rather than any text: Magen Broshi and Israel Finkelstein, working from excavated site areas and population-density coefficients, put Judah at roughly 110,000 in the late eighth century BCE, with the Shephelah — the region Sennacherib devastated — holding a large share of it. Sennacherib's own annals claim 200,150 people carried off from forty-six walled towns, a figure that exceeds most modern estimates of the entire kingdom's population and is generally read as royal propaganda.
No figure can be given. Excavation at Lachish has produced a destruction layer and a mass grave containing the remains of at least 1,500 people, but the burial cannot be securely dated to the 701 BCE assault alone, and no source records deaths across the campaign as a whole.
The siege and storming of Lachish and the destruction of Judaean towns are documented by Sennacherib's own palace reliefs at Nineveh and by the excavated destruction layer at Tel Lachish.
Israel, Iraq