Lachish

Lachish stood in the Shephelah, the low hills between the Philistine coast and the Judean highlands. It was Judah's second city by size and fortification, and it guarded the main road an invading army would take from the coast up into the hill country toward Jerusalem. Holding Lachish meant controlling that road.

They are a series of carved stone panels from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh, showing his 701 BC siege of Lachish in detail: the siege ramp, battering rams, archers, defenders on the wall, and deportees leaving the city, with an inscription naming Sennacherib and Lachish by name. Austen Henry Layard excavated them in 1847, and they are now in the British Museum.

2 Kings 18 places Sennacherib at Lachish partway through his campaign, receiving Hezekiah's tribute there before sending his field commander on to Jerusalem with an army. Excavation has found the siege ramp Sennacherib's forces built against the city's southwest corner, the largest and best preserved Assyrian siege ramp yet found, which fits a king who took the time to reduce this fortress before turning toward the capital.

They are ostraca, pottery fragments with ink writing, exchanged between Judean military officers in Lachish's final weeks before Babylon's conquest. One is widely read as the writer watching for the signal fires of Lachish because Azekah's fires can no longer be seen, which lines up with Jeremiah's note that Lachish and Azekah were the last two fortified cities of Judah still standing, though that reading of the Azekah line depends on damaged ink. They were excavated from the city's burned gate-chamber in 1935 and 1938. The dig's director, James Leslie Starkey, was murdered on the road to Jerusalem in January 1938, and his team closed that season's excavation soon after; Olga Tufnell later published the full report.

Yes. Unlike Jerusalem, which the Assyrian record itself never claims to have captured, Lachish was taken. The excavated destruction layer at the site and the Assyrian reliefs of the siege agree with each other, and both agree with 2 Kings 18's account of Sennacherib capturing Judah's fortified cities before he reached Jerusalem.