Sennacherib's reign, such as administrative documents, economic documents and chronicles, are more numerous. 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. The Assyriologists Hormuzd Rassam and Henry Creswicke Rawlinson from 1852 to 1854, William Kennett Loftus from 1854 to 1855 and George Smith from 1873 to 1874 led further excavations of the Southwest Palace. Among the many inscriptions found at the site, Smith discovered a fragmentary account of a 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 and the Louvre in Paris. 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. 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