Nineveh: Assyrian Capital of the World

Few cities in human history have loomed as large in the imagination of subsequent civilizations as Nineveh. For centuries it was the most powerful metropolis on earth, the seat of Assyrian kings whose armies swept from the borders of Egypt to the mountains of Iran, a city so vast and so dazzlingly embellished that ancient writers struggled to convey its scale. Yet within a generation of its destruction in 612 BCE, Nineveh had been so thoroughly erased that armies marching past its ruins centuries later had no idea that any great city had ever stood there. The story of Nineveh is therefore a double story: the story of a city that rose to become the uncontested capital of the ancient world, and the story of the long, painstaking effort by archaeologists and scholars to recover what that city was and what it meant. It is also, painfully, a story that belongs as much to the twenty-first century as to the ancient world, because in 2014 and 2015, the extremist organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria carried out a systematic campaign of destruction against what remained of ancient Nineveh, bulldozing palace walls, smashing irreplaceable sculptures, and filming the wreckage as propaganda. The story of Nineveh is therefore one of creation, destruction, rediscovery, and destruction once again, and it is a story that is still unfolding.

Location and Geography

Nineveh lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris River in what is today northern Iraq, at a point roughly opposite the modern city of Mosul, the capital of Nineveh Governorate. The site's approximate modern coordinates are 36 degrees 22 minutes north latitude and 43 degrees 9 minutes east longitude. This places it firmly within the ancient Assyrian heartland, the rolling plains and low hills of upper Mesopotamia that the Assyrians called the land of Ashur, bounded to the north and east by the Zagros mountain ranges and to the south and west by the flat alluvial plains that eventually give way to Babylonia. The Tigris at this point is a substantial river, wide and swift-flowing, and in antiquity it would have been even more impressive, because the landscape has been considerably altered by millennia of irrigation, agriculture, and urban development.

The ancient city occupied two principal mounds that still rise above the surrounding plain. The larger of the two is known as Kuyunjik, a name derived from Turkish and meaning roughly "little lamb," a prosaic label for what was once the grandest citadel in the world. Kuyunjik rises to a height of approximately thirty meters above the surrounding plain and covers an area of roughly forty hectares at its top, though the mound's full extent at its base is considerably larger. This was the site of the most important palaces and temples of ancient Nineveh, including the great royal palace built by Sennacherib, which he called the Palace Without Rival, and the temples to Ishtar and other deities that had stood on this mound since the earliest periods of the city's history.

The second and smaller mound lies approximately one kilometer to the south-southeast of Kuyunjik and is known as Nebi Yunus, a name that translates as "Prophet Jonah" in Arabic. This is because throughout the medieval period and into modern times, the mound was venerated by both Muslims and Christians as the traditional burial place of the biblical prophet Jonah, whose famous story is intimately connected with Nineveh. A mosque was built on the mound in the medieval period, and beneath that mosque archaeologists have long suspected that important Assyrian remains lay buried. In 2014, when the Islamic State captured Mosul, they entered the mosque, which they claimed to be engaged in purifying, and in doing so they accidentally exposed and then systematically looted ancient Assyrian remains beneath the building, including a remarkable inscription of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon and a passage from a previously unknown palace. The Nebi Yunus mound thus yielded its secrets under the most violent and tragic of circumstances.

Between and around these two mounds, the ancient city of Nineveh spread across a very large area. The great city wall built by Sennacherib enclosed an area of approximately 750 hectares, making Nineveh by far the largest city in the world at the height of its power in the seventh century BCE. To put that in perspective, ancient Babylon, that other great metropolis of Mesopotamia, covered roughly 1,000 hectares at its maximum extent but most estimates for the inner city are smaller, and Rome at the height of the empire covered an area not substantially larger. For its time, Nineveh was genuinely the greatest city on earth by nearly any measure one might apply.

Earliest History and Prehistoric Settlement

The human occupation of the Nineveh site stretches back so far into prehistory that it puts even the long span of Assyrian civilization into perspective. Archaeological investigations at Kuyunjik have revealed occupation layers dating to the seventh millennium BCE, making Nineveh one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the entire world. Neolithic pottery found at the site has been dated to approximately 6000 BCE, placing human settlement there in the period when agriculture was still a relatively new technology and when the great river civilizations of Mesopotamia were only beginning to coalesce.

The earliest material culture found at Nineveh belongs to a prehistoric period that archaeologists call the Hassuna and Halaf cultures, named after other sites in northern Iraq where similar pottery was first identified. These communities were early farming villages that cultivated grain and kept livestock, and they appear to have established themselves at Nineveh because of the strategic advantages the site offered: the proximity of the Tigris River for water and trade, the fertile plains of the upper Tigris valley for agriculture, and the natural defensibility of a position on a river bend. By the time of the Ubaid period, roughly 5500 to 4000 BCE, Nineveh appears to have grown into something approaching a proper town, with more substantial architecture and evidence of craft production.

Through the Uruk period, roughly 4000 to 3100 BCE, the period during which urban civilization was crystallizing in southern Mesopotamia with the growth of cities like Uruk itself and the invention of writing, Nineveh continued to develop as a significant settlement in the north. By the Early Dynastic period of the third millennium BCE, Nineveh was clearly an established urban center of considerable importance, and it appears in some of the earliest written records from Mesopotamia. A text from the Third Dynasty of Ur, which flourished around 2100 to 2000 BCE, mentions Nineveh as a city with an important temple dedicated to Ishtar, the goddess of love, desire, war, and fertility. This is among the first written references to the city, and it is significant that Nineveh's identity is from the very beginning associated with the cult of Ishtar.

The name Nineveh itself is ancient and its etymology remains somewhat uncertain. In the cuneiform script of ancient Mesopotamia it was written with signs that have been read as "Nina" or "Ninu," and some scholars have connected this name with the Sumerian word for fish, noting that the cuneiform sign used to write the city's name includes a fish within an enclosure. This possible connection to fish is intriguing given the city's position on the Tigris, one of the great fish-bearing rivers of the ancient world, and some ancient traditions did connect Nineveh with fish symbolism. Whatever its ultimate origin, the name Nineveh appears in texts from the third millennium BCE onward, giving the city one of the longest documented histories of any named settlement on earth.

Nineveh and the Patron Goddess Ishtar

No discussion of ancient Nineveh can proceed very far without confronting the figure of Ishtar, for this goddess was in a very real sense the divine owner and protector of the city, the being whose presence gave Nineveh its sacred character and whose temple was the spiritual center around which the city's religious life organized itself for thousands of years. Ishtar, known in the earlier Sumerian tradition as Inanna, was the most complex and powerful of the Mesopotamian goddesses, a deity who encompassed seemingly contradictory domains: she was the goddess of sexual love and physical desire, the goddess of war and battle fury, the goddess of the planet Venus in both its aspects as morning star and evening star, and a patron of kingship whose favor was essential to the legitimacy and success of Assyrian kings.

Nineveh was one of the holiest cities in Ishtar's honor throughout all of Mesopotamian history. The great Ishtar temple on the Kuyunjik mound, known in Sumerian as the Emashmas, meaning something like "house of the great wild cow," was one of the most celebrated sanctuaries in the ancient world, and kings from across Mesopotamia and beyond sent offerings to it. The temple's origins appear to go back to the earliest historical period, and by the time of the Akkadian Empire in the late third millennium BCE, the Ishtar of Nineveh had already become renowned far beyond the city itself.

The Akkadian king Manishtusu, who ruled around 2270 BCE, built or restored the Ishtar temple at Nineveh, and later the great Akkadian king Naram-Sin, whose empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, paid special attention to the Nineveh sanctuary. A remarkable stele of Naram-Sin was found at Nineveh, indicating the city's importance even in this early period. Later, during the period of Shamshi-Adad I, who created the first major Assyrian territorial state around 1800 BCE, Nineveh was already recognized as a city of special religious significance, and Shamshi-Adad I undertook restoration work on the Ishtar temple.

The reverence for the Ishtar of Nineveh extended far beyond Mesopotamia's borders. An extraordinary document from the fourteenth century BCE, found among the archives at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, reveals that the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III requested that the statue of the Ishtar of Nineveh be sent to Egypt so that its healing powers might cure him of illness. The statue was indeed sent by the Assyrian king, and the fact that a pharaoh at the height of Egyptian power would make such a request speaks volumes about the prestige and the believed power of this particular divine image. The Ishtar of Nineveh was understood to be not merely a local goddess but a cosmic power whose effects could reach across the entire known world.

The Assyrian kings of the Neo-Assyrian period, the kings who would make Nineveh their capital and transform it into the greatest city on earth, consistently positioned themselves as devotees of Ishtar of Nineveh. Their inscriptions describe her as the one who had granted them their victories, who had gone before their armies in battle, and who had chosen them above all other men to rule the world. This intimate relationship between the goddess and the institution of Assyrian kingship gave the city of Nineveh a double significance: it was not only the political capital of the greatest empire the ancient world had yet seen, but also the sacred city of the goddess who legitimized and empowered that empire.

Nineveh Through the Assyrian Periods

The historical development of Nineveh before its emergence as the imperial capital tracks closely with the broader development of Assyrian civilization, and understanding that development requires some appreciation of the long arc of Assyrian history. The Assyrians were a Semitic-speaking people who inhabited the upper Tigris valley and the surrounding regions of northern Mesopotamia, and their civilization had deep roots stretching back into the third millennium BCE. The city of Ashur, located on the Tigris River roughly one hundred kilometers south of Nineveh, was the original religious and political center of Assyria, and for most of the city-state's early history it was Ashur, not Nineveh, that held primacy.

During the Old Assyrian period, roughly 2000 to 1750 BCE, Nineveh was an important city but not the dominant one. It served principally as a religious center due to the great Ishtar temple, and as a significant trading city on the routes connecting the Tigris valley with the mountains to the north and east. The remarkable Old Assyrian trading colony at Kanesh in Anatolia, known from thousands of cuneiform tablets discovered there, testifies to the commercial vitality of Assyrian civilization in this period, and Nineveh was part of this trading network.

The Middle Assyrian period, roughly 1400 to 1050 BCE, saw Assyria emerge as a genuine territorial power, and Nineveh's importance grew accordingly. Several Middle Assyrian kings, including Tiglath-pileser I, who reigned around 1115 to 1076 BCE and who was one of the most energetic rulers in Assyrian history, are known to have carried out building work at Nineveh. Tiglath-pileser I expanded Assyrian territory dramatically, campaigning as far as the Mediterranean coast and receiving tribute from Phoenician cities. His inscriptions boast of his military achievements in language that would become characteristic of Assyrian royal rhetoric, combining religious piety with vivid descriptions of conquest. The great Ishtar temple at Nineveh was an object of his devotion and received attention during his reign.

It was during the Neo-Assyrian period, which began around 912 BCE and lasted until the fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE, that Assyria rose to become the dominant power of the ancient world and Nineveh rose with it to become the world's greatest city. The Neo-Assyrian Empire at its height controlled territory stretching from Iran in the east to Egypt in the west, from the mountains of Anatolia in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south. It was an empire built on military supremacy, systematic administration, and the deliberate projection of terror as a tool of political control, and its capital city was designed to express that power in architectural and artistic terms that could not be ignored.

The earlier Neo-Assyrian kings used several cities as their capitals or principal residences. Assur-nasir-pal II, who reigned from 883 to 859 BCE and who is famous for his detailed and often disturbing accounts of military campaigns and the treatment of defeated enemies, made Nimrud his principal city, building a magnificent palace there. Sargon II, who came to power in 722 BCE and who defeated the kingdom of Israel, sending its population into the captivity that became the legend of the Ten Lost Tribes, built an entirely new capital city called Dur-Sharrukin, modern Khorsabad, which he spent the last years of his life completing. Sargon II died in 705 BCE, apparently in a military disaster in Anatolia, and his body was not recovered, which was considered a terrible omen. His son Sennacherib would react to this catastrophe in a decisive way: he abandoned Dur-Sharrukin entirely, transferring the royal court and the apparatus of imperial administration to Nineveh, which from that point forward became the undisputed capital of the greatest empire on earth.

Sennacherib and the Making of a World Capital

The transformation of Nineveh from an important Assyrian city into the largest and most magnificent metropolis in the ancient world was primarily the achievement of one man: Sennacherib, who ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 705 to 681 BCE. Sennacherib is a figure of enormous historical complexity, at once a ruler of extraordinary energy and ambition, a builder on a scale that had never been seen before, a patron of the arts who surrounded himself with the finest craftsmen of his age, and a military commander whose campaigns left lasting scars on the peoples of the ancient Near East. He is best known in the Western tradition from the Hebrew Bible, where he appears as the Assyrian king who besieged Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah, a campaign that ended without the city being taken, an outcome attributed by the biblical text to divine intervention. But Sennacherib's fame in the ancient world rested above all on what he built at Nineveh.

When Sennacherib made Nineveh his capital, he found a city that was certainly important and already ancient but that did not yet possess the physical scale or grandeur appropriate to the seat of world empire. He proceeded to change that with a thoroughness and a speed that are genuinely remarkable. Over the course of his reign, he transformed Nineveh into what he himself described as the wonder of all peoples, a city without equal in the entire world. The epithet he chose for his greatest building project there, the Palace Without Rival, expressed his own understanding of what he had achieved: he had built something that nothing else in the world could match.

Sennacherib's approach to expanding Nineveh was comprehensive. He did not merely add to existing structures or renovate older buildings. He redesigned the urban fabric of the city on a massive scale, widening roads, constructing new residential districts, establishing parks and botanical gardens, reorganizing the water supply through a series of canals and aqueducts that represented some of the most advanced hydraulic engineering of the ancient world, and above all constructing the enormous wall system that would define the city's physical boundaries for the remainder of its existence.

The king's own inscriptions, which are preserved in considerable number, give a vivid if self-congratulatory picture of his building program. He describes how he replaced old clay-brick buildings with stone structures, how he created what he called a royal road wide enough for his chariot to pass without difficulty, how he planted trees from distant mountains and orchards of every kind around the city, and how he brought the waters of distant rivers through mountains and valleys to water the gardens and supply the city's growing population. These inscriptions must be read critically, as they are propaganda as much as history, but they are supported in their broad outlines by the archaeological evidence recovered from Nineveh over the past two centuries.

The Palace Without Rival

At the center of Sennacherib's new Nineveh stood his palace, which he called in Akkadian the "ekal la shanana," meaning the Palace Without Rival, a structure that was by any measure one of the most extraordinary buildings the ancient world ever produced. Located on the northern end of the Kuyunjik mound, where it would dominate the skyline and look out over the surrounding city, the palace was built on a raised terrace of mud brick that lifted it above the level of the surrounding structures. The palace complex covered an enormous area, with archaeologists having identified at least eighty rooms and corridors in the excavated portions alone, and the full extent of the building was certainly larger than what has been uncovered.

The most spectacular feature of the Palace Without Rival was not its size, impressive as that was, but its sculptural program: the seemingly endless miles of carved stone reliefs that lined the walls of its rooms and corridors. Sennacherib covered the interior walls of his palace with stone panels carved in low relief, depicting scenes of his military campaigns, scenes of religious ceremonies and hunting, scenes of the palace's own construction, and scenes of tribute processions from conquered peoples. The total length of these carved wall panels has been estimated at more than three kilometers, making the interior of the Palace Without Rival one of the largest continuous narrative art installations in the history of the ancient world.

The reliefs from the Palace Without Rival that have survived and made their way to museums around the world are among the finest examples of ancient Assyrian art. Among the most celebrated are the panels depicting Sennacherib's campaign against the Judean city of Lachish, which was one of the most important fortified cities in the kingdom of Judah and which Sennacherib captured in 701 BCE during the same campaign in which he besieged Jerusalem. These reliefs, now displayed in the British Museum in London, show in extraordinary detail the Assyrian siege of Lachish: the construction of a siege ramp, the deployment of siege engines, the assault on the city walls, the killing and deportation of the Judean defenders, and the presentation of captives before Sennacherib himself, who sits on his throne outside the city. The reliefs are so detailed and so precisely observed that archaeologists excavating at Lachish in the twentieth century were able to use them to locate the actual siege ramp, which they found exactly where the reliefs depicted it.

The throne room of the Palace Without Rival was itself a space of extraordinary magnificence. The king would have received ambassadors, conducted ceremonies, and dispensed justice in this room, surrounded by carved reliefs depicting his military triumphs and attended by officials and courtiers in elaborate ceremonial dress. The entrance to the palace was guarded by pairs of colossal stone creatures known in Akkadian as lamassu, human-headed winged bulls or lions of enormous size, typically about four to five meters in height and carved from single blocks of stone. These lamassu figures served both an apotropaic function, warding off evil influences, and a political one, demonstrating the power and resources of the king who could command their creation.

Among the most historically important features of the Palace Without Rival was the library, or more precisely the collection of cuneiform tablets that Ashurbanipal, Sennacherib's grandson, would later assemble there, creating what scholars now call the Library of Nineveh or the Library of Ashurbanipal. This collection will be discussed separately below, but it is worth noting here that the physical space in which the library was housed was part of the palace complex, demonstrating that for the Assyrian kings the accumulation of knowledge was understood as an expression of royal power comparable to the accumulation of military trophies or artistic treasures.

The Walls and Gates of Nineveh

If the Palace Without Rival was the heart of Sennacherib's new Nineveh, the city's great defensive wall was its skeleton, the structure that defined its physical extent and expressed in the most literal possible terms the ambition of its builder. Sennacherib rebuilt and massively expanded the walls of Nineveh, creating a defensive perimeter of approximately twelve kilometers that enclosed the entire urban area of the city within a circuit of formidable fortifications. This wall, portions of which can still be traced today, was one of the largest defensive structures of the ancient world and represented an extraordinary investment of human labor, materials, and organizational capacity.

The outer wall of Nineveh was built primarily of mud brick, as was standard for Mesopotamian defensive architecture, but it was of exceptional thickness and height, with towers projecting at regular intervals that would have allowed defenders to bring flanking fire to bear on attackers approaching any section of the wall. The total height of the wall, including its towers, has been estimated from ancient descriptions and from the surviving remains at somewhere between twenty and twenty-five meters, making it a genuinely imposing barrier. The walls were so massive that Sennacherib's inscriptions describe the process of construction in considerable detail, boasting of the enormous quantities of stone, brick, and timber that went into them.

The wall was pierced by fifteen gates, each named after a Mesopotamian deity or given some other honorific designation, and several of these gates were elaborately decorated. The most famous is the Nergal Gate, located on the north side of the city and named for Nergal, the god of death, disease, and the underworld. This gate was flanked by a pair of colossal lamassu figures, human-headed winged bulls of the type that also guarded the palace entrances. The Nergal Gate lamassu survived into modern times in a restored condition, making them among the most accessible surviving examples of Assyrian monumental sculpture within Iraq itself, before their deliberate destruction by the Islamic State in 2016.

Other named gates of Nineveh included the Gate of Shamash, the Gate of Sin, the Gate of Adad, and gates bearing names like the Desert Gate and the Gate of the Quay, the latter reflecting the city's relationship with the Tigris River. The naming of city gates after deities was common in Mesopotamian cities: the gates were understood as points of vulnerability in the defensive circuit, and the presence of divine names was meant to invoke the protection of those gods against any force that might try to break through.

The space between Nineveh's outer wall and the inner citadel of Kuyunjik was filled with the dense urban fabric of one of the ancient world's greatest cities: streets and alleyways, temples and shrines, workshops and storehouses, private homes of varying sizes and degrees of luxury, markets and administrative buildings. Unfortunately, relatively little of this urban fabric has been systematically excavated, because the scale of the site is so enormous and because for much of the nineteenth and twentieth century archaeological attention was focused on the more spectacular remains of the palaces and temples on the Kuyunjik mound. Future excavations, if political conditions in northern Iraq allow, will undoubtedly reveal much more about what daily life in the world's greatest ancient city was actually like.

The Gardens of Nineveh and the Hanging Gardens Debate

One of the most intriguing and consequential aspects of Sennacherib's embellishment of Nineveh is the creation of what the king himself described in his inscriptions as extensive gardens of remarkable beauty and diversity. These gardens, which Sennacherib created both within the palace complex and in parks around the city, were supplied with water through an elaborate system of canals and aqueducts and contained trees and plants gathered from across the Assyrian Empire. The king's inscriptions describe importing varieties of plants and trees from Anatolia, Syria, the Zagros mountains, and other parts of the empire, creating what was in effect a botanical garden of enormous extent and variety.

For most of the history of scholarship on the ancient world, the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in the traditional Greek list, have been assumed to be located at Babylon, the great city of southern Mesopotamia that served as the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and that looms so large in the biblical tradition. However, there is a significant problem with this attribution: no Babylonian texts mention gardens among the famous features of that city, and no archaeological evidence of spectacular gardens has been found at Babylon, despite extensive excavations of that site.

Stephanie Dalley, an Assyriologist at the University of Oxford who spent many years researching this question, published a detailed argument in 2013 proposing that the Hanging Gardens were not at Babylon at all but at Nineveh, and that they were created by Sennacherib. Dalley's argument rests on several interconnected lines of evidence. First, Sennacherib's own inscriptions describe his gardens in language that bears a striking resemblance to ancient descriptions of the Hanging Gardens, including references to the raising of water to great heights to supply upper terraces of plantings. Second, Sennacherib's inscriptions describe a technical device for raising water that Dalley identifies as a form of Archimedes' screw or a closely related mechanism, representing an application of this water-raising technology that predates Archimedes by several centuries. Third, Dalley argues that in the period after Nineveh's destruction, when the city had been so thoroughly obliterated that later writers no longer knew where it had been, the memory of Sennacherib's gardens became detached from their actual location and was later attributed to Babylon, which by the time of Greek and Roman writers was the more famous Mesopotamian city.

The argument is not universally accepted among scholars, and the debate about the true location of the Hanging Gardens continues. But the possibility that the most famous garden in antiquity was created not at Babylon but at Nineveh, by the same king who built the Palace Without Rival and the greatest city the ancient world had yet seen, adds another dimension to the already remarkable story of Sennacherib's capital. Even setting aside the question of whether Sennacherib's gardens were the Hanging Gardens of ancient tradition, the gardens themselves were clearly real, clearly extensive, and clearly represented a significant achievement of landscape design and horticultural management in the ancient world.

The Aqueduct of Jerwan

Among all of Sennacherib's engineering achievements at Nineveh, the one that modern engineers find most impressive is not the palace or the walls but the water supply system he constructed to bring fresh water to his expanding city and its gardens. Nineveh's existing water supply, drawing on the Khosr River (a tributary of the Tigris that flows through the site) and on local wells and cisterns, was insufficient for the rapidly growing population of the capital city and for the ambitious garden projects that Sennacherib envisioned. The king therefore undertook one of the most ambitious hydraulic engineering projects of the ancient world: the construction of a canal system that brought water from the mountains approximately fifty kilometers to the north.

The canal system began at the headwaters of the Khosr River in the mountains northeast of Nineveh and followed a roughly south-southwesterly course toward the city, passing through the landscape by means of a combination of open channels cut into the rock, earthen embankments, and at least one major aqueduct. The aqueduct that carried the canal over a valley at a site called Jerwan, approximately fifty kilometers north of Nineveh, is the most spectacular surviving component of Sennacherib's water system and one of the most extraordinary engineering structures of the ancient world.

The Jerwan aqueduct was built to carry the canal across a natural valley, and it was constructed using a technique that can be described as proto-arched or corbelled arch construction: the stones were laid in such a way that each course projected slightly beyond the one below, creating a spanning structure that could bridge the gap of the valley without the full understanding of the true arch that would later be developed by Roman engineers. The structure was built of dressed limestone blocks, and an inscription carved into the aqueduct's stones records Sennacherib's pride in the achievement, describing how he brought water from far mountains to his city. The aqueduct at Jerwan is considered by many historians of technology to be the oldest stone aqueduct in the world of which substantial remains survive, predating the more famous Roman aqueducts by more than six centuries.

The total canal system was remarkable not only for its length but for its sophistication. It included sluice gates to regulate water flow, settling pools to allow sediment to drop out of the water, and a distribution network within Nineveh itself that brought water to the palace gardens, to temples, and presumably to public facilities. The engineering knowledge required to plan and execute such a system was considerable, and the Jerwan aqueduct in particular demonstrates that Assyrian engineers of the seventh century BCE possessed a far more sophisticated understanding of hydraulics and construction than is sometimes assumed.

The existence of this water supply system has important implications for understanding the scale of ancient Nineveh. A city capable of sustaining the construction and maintenance of a fifty-kilometer canal system, including a major aqueduct, must have had both a large and well-organized workforce and a sophisticated administrative capacity to plan and execute such a project. It also supports the ancient descriptions of Nineveh as a city of remarkable beauty, since an abundant water supply made possible the extensive parks and gardens that ancient sources describe.

Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal: the City at Its Zenith

Sennacherib's reign ended in 681 BCE, when he was murdered by one or more of his own sons, an event recorded in the Hebrew Bible as well as in Assyrian sources. He was succeeded after a brief period of conflict by his son Esarhaddon, who ruled until 669 BCE and who proved to be one of the most remarkable rulers in Assyrian history despite the relatively brief duration of his reign. Esarhaddon is best known for his conquest of Egypt in 671 BCE, which brought the Nile Valley under Assyrian control for the first time and extended the empire to its greatest geographical extent. He was also notable for his rebuilding of Babylon, which his father Sennacherib had destroyed in 689 BCE in an act of deliberate cultural and political iconoclasm that shocked the ancient world.

At Nineveh, Esarhaddon continued the building program begun by his father, adding new structures and embellishments to the city. He also commissioned extensive repairs to the Ishtar temple, which had suffered damage, and added new features to the palace complex. Among the most historically significant discoveries from Esarhaddon's Nineveh is the cache of inscribed clay tablets found in the ruins of the Nebi Yunus mound, including a prism inscription in which Esarhaddon describes his building activities at Nineveh and his relationships with the other great powers of his day. The discovery of these tablets came about through the tragic circumstances of the Islamic State's looting of the Nebi Yunus mosque in 2014 and 2015.

Ashurbanipal, who succeeded Esarhaddon in 668 BCE and ruled until approximately 627 BCE, was in many ways the most intellectually remarkable of the Assyrian kings and the one whose name is most lastingly associated with Nineveh, because it was he who created the great library on the Kuyunjik mound that has given historians and scholars more information about the ancient world than any other single archaeological discovery. Ashurbanipal was a fierce and successful military commander in his own right, conducting campaigns against Egypt, Elam, and a coalition of his own relatives who rebelled against him, but his greatest legacy is cultural rather than military.

The king appears to have had an unusual personal interest in scholarship and literature for a ruler of the ancient world. He boasted in his inscriptions not only of his military achievements but of his ability to read cuneiform texts, which was a relatively rare skill even among the elite, and of his personal engagement with the written knowledge preserved in his library. Whether or not this self-presentation reflects historical reality or is itself a form of royal propaganda, the physical fact of the library he assembled is beyond dispute.

The Library of Nineveh

The Library of Ashurbanipal, sometimes called the Library of Nineveh, is without question the single most important repository of ancient Mesopotamian knowledge ever discovered, and its contents have transformed modern understanding of the ancient world in ways that are difficult to overstate. The library contained, according to estimates based on what has been found and on references in the tablets themselves, somewhere between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand individual cuneiform tablets and fragments, covering virtually every genre of knowledge that Mesopotamian civilization had developed over the preceding two millennia.

Ashurbanipal assembled his library through a systematic and deliberate program of collection that had no real parallel in the ancient world before the creation of the famous library at Alexandria. He sent scribes and scholars throughout the Assyrian Empire with instructions to locate, copy, and in many cases simply confiscate texts from temple libraries, private collections, and scribal schools across Mesopotamia. Letters survive in which the king orders his agents in various cities to collect specific types of texts and bring them or copies of them to Nineveh: texts on divination, on astronomy, on medicine, on ritual, on mythology, on history. The agents were instructed not to leave anything behind, and the language of some of these orders suggests that the collection program was conducted with the same thoroughness and the same willingness to override local resistance that characterized Assyrian military campaigns.

The result was a collection of texts that represented the accumulated knowledge of Mesopotamian civilization up to that point, organized within the library at Nineveh by subject matter and stored in clay-tablet form in rooms and corridors of the palace complex. Many tablets were labeled with their contents and with catalog information that allowed the scribes to locate specific texts, and the existence of such catalog tablets within the collection suggests a relatively sophisticated system of organization.

The specific texts found in the Library of Ashurbanipal read like a syllabus of everything the ancient Mesopotamian world considered worth knowing. Among the most famous and historically significant is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the great poem about the legendary king of Uruk whose friendship with the wild man Enkidu, whose quest for immortality after Enkidu's death, and whose encounter with the survivor of a great flood provided one of the first great works of world literature. The Nineveh library contained a particularly complete version of the Gilgamesh epic arranged in twelve tablets, and it was the discovery of the tablet describing the flood story that caused a sensation in Victorian England when it was recognized as a Mesopotamian antecedent to the biblical story of Noah's flood.

The Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth that describes the god Marduk's defeat of the primordial chaos monster Tiamat and the subsequent creation of the world from her body, was also found in the library in multiple copies, testifying to its importance in Mesopotamian religious thought. Alongside these literary and mythological masterpieces, the library contained enormous quantities of more utilitarian texts: thousands of tablets devoted to the practice of divination, the complex and highly developed Mesopotamian science of predicting the future from omens such as the movements of celestial bodies, the behavior of animals, the patterns of oil on water, and the appearance of the internal organs of sacrificed animals; hundreds of medical tablets describing symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments for various conditions; astronomical observations recording the movements of the sun, moon, and planets over many years; mathematical tables; ritual instructions for priests; hymns and prayers to various deities; historical chronicles recording the deeds of Assyrian and Babylonian kings; and lexical lists of Sumerian and Akkadian words that served as educational tools for scribal students.

The library also contained numerous texts in Sumerian, the ancient language of southern Mesopotamia that by the Neo-Assyrian period was no longer spoken as a living language but remained the classical language of scholarship and religion, comparable in some ways to the role of Latin in medieval Europe. Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual texts were common in the library, reflecting the scribal tradition of using the classical language while also providing translations or explanations in the contemporary language. This bilingual tradition has proved invaluable for modern scholars attempting to decode the Sumerian language, since the Akkadian translations often provide the key to understanding difficult or obscure Sumerian passages.

The discovery of the Library of Ashurbanipal is one of the great stories in the history of archaeology and scholarship. In 1845, Austen Henry Layard, a young English adventurer and diplomat, began excavating at Nimrud and subsequently at Nineveh under the auspices of the British Museum, with financial support from various private donors. Layard was a remarkable figure: largely self-taught as an archaeologist, enormously energetic and physically courageous, capable of working in extremely difficult conditions, and possessed of an instinct for finding significant remains that more systematic archaeologists would later sometimes lack. At Kuyunjik, Layard and his team began uncovering the remains of the Palace Without Rival and the rooms that contained the library, finding thousands of cuneiform tablets either intact or broken into fragments.

The work was continued after Layard's return to England by his colleague and protege Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian Christian from Mosul who had worked with Layard and who proved an equally energetic excavator. Rassam discovered additional rooms of the library in 1853 and recovered thousands more tablets. The excavations of Layard and Rassam together recovered what is estimated to be roughly twenty to thirty thousand tablets and fragments, which were shipped to the British Museum in London, where they remain today, forming the core of the museum's extraordinary collection of cuneiform tablets.

The process of deciphering the tablets was well underway by the time most of them arrived in London, thanks to the parallel work of scholars who had been working on the cuneiform script since the 1830s and 1840s. George Smith, a self-taught cuneiformist working at the British Museum in the 1870s, made one of the most dramatic discoveries in the history of scholarship when he recognized on a tablet from Nineveh the story of a great flood that closely paralleled the biblical account of Noah. Smith's announcement of this discovery caused a public sensation and led the Daily Telegraph to fund an expedition to Nineveh to look for the missing portions of the tablet, which Smith miraculously found within a matter of days of beginning to dig, a coincidence that some historians have found suspicious.

Today the tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal are studied by scholars around the world, and the digitization programs that have been undertaken by the British Museum and its academic partners mean that images and transliterations of many of the tablets are now freely available to researchers online. The library continues to yield discoveries: in 2015, scholars announced the identification of a previously unknown tablet of the Gilgamesh epic containing a version of the story of the Cedar Forest that differed in significant ways from the standard version, complete with a scene involving a divine tavern keeper that had not previously been known. The library that Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh more than twenty-six hundred years ago continues, in other words, to expand our understanding of the ancient world.

The Fall of Nineveh

The destruction of Nineveh in 612 BCE was one of the most dramatic and consequential events in the history of the ancient Near East. Within the span of a single human lifetime, the city that had been the most powerful metropolis on earth was reduced to a heap of rubble so thoroughly that within two centuries the location of the great Assyrian capital was essentially forgotten. The fall of Nineveh marked not only the end of a city but the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the political entity that had dominated the ancient world for more than a century and whose influence on the subsequent development of Near Eastern civilizations was profound.

The seeds of Nineveh's destruction were sown during the reign of Ashurbanipal himself, despite or perhaps in part because of the brilliance of his reign. The empire that Ashurbanipal governed had been expanded to a size that was very difficult to maintain, and the military campaigns required to hold it together, combined with the enormous cost of Ashurbanipal's building and cultural programs, placed tremendous strain on Assyrian resources. The king's later years appear to have been troubled by internal revolts and external pressures, and when he died around 627 BCE, he left a succession crisis that the empire's enemies were quick to exploit.

The coalition that eventually destroyed Nineveh was assembled by Nabopolassar, the ruler of Babylon, who had been fighting to free Babylonia from Assyrian control since the 620s BCE and who succeeded in establishing an independent Babylonian state that would become the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Nabopolassar formed an alliance with Cyaxares, king of the Medes, a powerful people who inhabited the territory of modern northwestern Iran and who had their own grievances against Assyria. There is also mention in some ancient sources of Scythian involvement in the anti-Assyrian coalition, although the exact role of the Scythians in the final campaign against Nineveh is debated by scholars.

The allied forces mounted a series of campaigns against Assyrian cities in the years leading up to the final siege, progressively weakening Assyrian power and capturing key strategic positions. Nineveh itself was besieged in 612 BCE in what appears to have been a sustained siege lasting approximately three months, according to the Babylonian Chronicle, a near-contemporary historical document that provides the most detailed account of the events. The city's formidable walls, which had been designed to withstand exactly this kind of assault, initially held against the attackers.

An ancient tradition preserved in Greek and later sources and supported by some readings of the Babylonian Chronicle describes the Tigris River flooding during the siege and washing away a section of the city's walls, creating a breach through which the attackers were able to enter. Whether this reflects literal historical fact, a garbled memory of the use of river water as part of a siege operation, or a later legendary elaboration of the siege story is difficult to determine with certainty. What is clear from the archaeological evidence is that when the city finally fell, it was destroyed with extreme thoroughness.

The Babylonian Chronicle records matter-of-factly that the city was sacked and its population killed or scattered. The Assyrian king who was defending Nineveh, Sin-shar-ishkun, appears to have died in the fall of the city, though the details are uncertain. The palace and temples were burned, the buildings were razed, and the city that had been the greatest metropolis in the world was reduced to a smoldering ruin. The Babylonian and Median forces divided the spoils of Nineveh between them, carrying off the treasures that had accumulated over generations of Assyrian imperial conquest.

The completeness of Nineveh's destruction is attested by a remarkable piece of historical evidence: when Alexander the Great marched through the region in 331 BCE, on his way to his decisive victory over the Persian king Darius III at the battle of Gaugamela, he passed close to the site of Nineveh. Neither Alexander nor any of the historians who recorded his campaign appears to have known that one of the greatest cities in the history of the world had stood on the mounds near the Tigris. Nineveh had been so thoroughly destroyed and its memory so completely effaced from the living tradition that even one of history's most historically conscious conquerors passed by in ignorance. The city that had been the capital of the world had become, within two and a half centuries of its destruction, a literally forgotten place.

Nineveh in the Hebrew Bible

Among all the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, Nineveh holds a unique place in the religious imagination of Western civilization because of its prominent role in the Hebrew Bible. Two entire biblical books are substantially or entirely devoted to Nineveh: the Book of Jonah and the Book of Nahum. These two works could hardly be more different in their tone and perspective, and together they illustrate the complex and ambivalent relationship that ancient Israel maintained with the Assyrian Empire that dominated and threatened it for so much of the biblical period.

The Book of Jonah is one of the strangest and most beloved narratives in the Hebrew Bible, a story whose combination of miraculous events, sharp irony, and ultimately redemptive message has fascinated readers for millennia. The story begins with God commanding the prophet Jonah son of Amittai to go to Nineveh and preach repentance to its inhabitants, who have become wicked in God's sight. Jonah, rather than obeying, attempts to flee in exactly the opposite direction, boarding a ship at the port of Joppa (modern Jaffa on the Israeli coast) and heading west. God sends a great storm that threatens to destroy the ship; Jonah acknowledges to the terrified sailors that he is the cause of the storm because he has been fleeing from God, and he asks to be thrown overboard. The sailors reluctantly comply, the storm ceases, and Jonah is swallowed by a great fish in which he spends three days and three nights before being vomited onto dry land.

God then commands Jonah a second time to go to Nineveh, and this time the prophet complies. He preaches a message of imminent divine judgment against the city, and the response of the Ninevites is extraordinary: the entire population, from the king on his throne to the animals in the fields, puts on sackcloth and fasts in repentance. God, moved by this repentance, relents from the threatened destruction, which infuriates Jonah, who had apparently been hoping to see the city destroyed. The story ends with God gently rebuking the prophet for caring more about a plant that shaded him than about the one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants of Nineveh.

The Book of Jonah is remarkable in several respects. It presents the Assyrian population of Nineveh as capable of genuine repentance and worthy of divine mercy, a strikingly generous portrayal given that the Assyrians were the great imperial oppressors of Israel and Judah. It also presents its Israelite prophet as petty and self-absorbed in comparison to the repentant Ninevites, a piece of self-criticism that is unusual in ancient national literatures. Modern scholars debate the date and purpose of the book, but many see it as a work of the post-exilic period intended to challenge narrow nationalism and argue for a universal divine concern that extends even to Israel's enemies.

The description of Nineveh in the Book of Jonah has attracted the attention of historians and archaeologists because the text describes the city as "an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth," a description that, if taken literally, would imply a city of extraordinary size. Various interpretations have been offered: some scholars suggest the text is referring to the entire administrative district of Nineveh rather than the city proper, while others take it as evidence that the city's reputation had grown in the telling. The description of one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants "who do not know their right hand from their left" has sometimes been taken as a reference to children, implying a total population considerably larger.

The Book of Nahum presents a completely different emotional register. Where Jonah is ironic, searching, and ultimately merciful in its depiction of Nineveh, Nahum is one of the most violently exultant texts in the entire Hebrew Bible, a sustained prophecy of rejoicing over the destruction of Nineveh that is written with extraordinary poetic power. Nahum prophesied during the period when Assyrian power was at its height and when the threat of Assyrian destruction hung over every city and kingdom in the ancient Near East. His prophecy begins with a description of God as a divine warrior of terrifying power who will pursue his enemies into darkness and who shakes the earth with his passage, before turning to the specific doom awaiting Nineveh.

The prophecy is vivid and specific in ways that have sometimes seemed to later readers almost supernaturally accurate in their description of Nineveh's eventual fate. Nahum describes the noise of chariots, the flash of spears, the heaping of corpses, the plundering of the city's silver and gold, the breaching of the river gates, the desolation and emptiness left behind. The book asks rhetorically who will mourn for Nineveh, answering that no one will, for all who heard of its cruelty and its oppression will clap their hands in relief at its passing. The tone is one of fierce, barely contained triumph, the vindication of a people long oppressed by a power that had seemed invincible.

The historical connection between the biblical accounts of Nineveh and the archaeological record is a subject of continuing scholarly interest. The Assyrian records contain several points of contact with biblical narratives, including references to the campaigns of Sennacherib against Judah and his siege of the city of Lachish, the tribute paid by Hezekiah of Judah to Sennacherib, the campaigns of Tiglath-pileser III against Israel and Judah that led to the deportation of populations from the northern kingdom, and various other events mentioned in both Assyrian royal inscriptions and the books of Kings and Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible. The intersection of Assyrian and biblical history at Nineveh gives the city a significance in the history of religion and literature that extends far beyond its purely political and archaeological importance.

Nineveh in Modern Times: Mosul and the Nineveh Plains

The ancient city of Nineveh lies within the modern governorate of Nineveh, one of the administrative provinces of the Republic of Iraq. The provincial capital is the city of Mosul, which lies immediately to the west of the ancient Nineveh site on the opposite bank of the Tigris, making modern Mosul the direct successor of ancient Nineveh not only geographically but in a broader cultural and historical sense. Mosul is one of the major cities of northern Iraq, historically a significant center of trade, scholarship, and Christian minority communities, and the administrative hub of a region with one of the most diverse ethnic and religious populations in the entire Middle East.

The Nineveh plains, the agricultural heartland surrounding Mosul and the ancient Nineveh site, have been inhabited continuously since antiquity and are home to communities whose roots in the region extend back thousands of years. Among these communities are Assyrian Christians, who trace their ancestry to the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia and who have maintained their presence in the Nineveh plains despite centuries of demographic and political change. These Christian communities, speaking varieties of Eastern Aramaic that descend from the language spoken in the region in late antiquity, represent one of the most remarkable examples of cultural continuity in the world, maintaining a connection to the Mesopotamian past that stretches from the ancient world to the present day.

The region also contains Kurdish communities in the northern and eastern parts of the governorate, Arab communities in the central and western parts, Yazidi communities particularly in the Sinjar region to the west, and Shabak and Turkmen communities in various locations. This extraordinary diversity, which reflects the complex history of a region that has been a crossroads of civilizations for thousands of years, has also made the area a zone of profound political tension and conflict in the modern period.

The ancient mounds of Nineveh themselves have been managed as an archaeological site by the Iraqi government, with varying degrees of investment and attention over the decades since Iraqi independence. A small site museum was established at the Nergal Gate area, and some restoration work was done on the gates themselves, including the restoration of the lamassu figures at the Nergal Gate. However, the scale of the ancient site, the complexity of what lies beneath the ground, and the difficult political and security conditions that have characterized Iraq for much of its modern history have meant that the full archaeological potential of Nineveh has never come close to being realized.

The Islamic State and the Destruction of Nineveh's Heritage

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known variously as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh, captured the city of Mosul in June 2014 in one of the most dramatic military advances of the early twenty-first century. Within hours of entering the city, the extremist group had overrun Iraqi army positions, seized enormous quantities of weapons and equipment, and established control over a city of more than one million people. The capture of Mosul was a catastrophe of the first order for Iraq, but it was also a catastrophe for the heritage of all humanity, because the territories under Islamic State control contained some of the most significant archaeological sites in the world, including the ancient Assyrian cities of Nineveh, Nimrud, and Khorsabad.

The Islamic State's approach to the pre-Islamic heritage of the region was one of deliberate and systematic destruction, motivated by a theological position that such remains constituted idolatry and must therefore be obliterated. In practice, however, the group's treatment of antiquities was more complex and more cynical than this ideological justification implied, because while it publicly destroyed many objects of low market value for propaganda purposes, it simultaneously organized the looting and black-market sale of more commercially valuable antiquities, profiting financially from the very heritage it claimed to be destroying on religious grounds.

In February 2015, Islamic State members entered the Mosul Museum and filmed themselves using sledgehammers and power drills to smash statues and stone reliefs, including several pieces of ancient Assyrian art and replicas of objects from the region's long history. The video of this destruction, which was deliberately disseminated as propaganda, was watched by millions of people around the world and provoked international outrage. Many of the objects destroyed were described in initial reports as priceless originals, though subsequent analysis by archaeologists who reviewed the footage determined that some of the destroyed items were in fact replicas, the originals having been moved for safekeeping before the city fell. Nonetheless, genuine ancient objects were destroyed, and the deliberateness and theatricality of the destruction made it a profound act of cultural violence.

The destruction at the Nineveh site itself was even more extensive. Islamic State forces demolished the Nergal Gate, one of the original gates of ancient Nineveh, and destroyed the reconstructed lamassu figures that had flanked it. These lamassu, colossal human-headed winged bulls that had guarded the gate of the ancient Assyrian capital for more than two and a half thousand years in various forms, were filmed being smashed with sledgehammers and jackhammers and then blown apart with explosives. The footage of their destruction, released by the Islamic State in 2016, was watched with horror by archaeologists and historians around the world.

At Nimrud, the ancient Assyrian city south of Mosul that had served as a royal capital before Nineveh, the destruction was comprehensive: the palace of Assur-nasir-pal II was dynamited, and the extraordinary stone reliefs and sculptures that decorated it were systematically smashed. At Khorsabad, the brief capital of Sargon II, similar destruction was carried out. In total, the Islamic State is estimated to have damaged or destroyed more than ninety percent of the above-ground ancient monuments of the Nineveh Governorate during its occupation of the region.

The looting of archaeological sites in the broader region was also extensive. Satellite imagery analyzed by researchers at the American Schools of Oriental Research and other institutions revealed thousands of illegal excavation pits at archaeological sites throughout the territory controlled by the Islamic State. The Nineveh plains, with their extraordinarily rich archaeological deposits stretching back thousands of years, were particularly heavily targeted. Objects looted from these sites entered the international antiquities market through complex smuggling routes, and their ultimate destinations included dealers and collectors in Europe, North America, and the Gulf region.

Beneath the Nebi Yunus mosque, the Islamic State's looting activities inadvertently led to the discovery of previously unknown Assyrian remains. While creating tunnels beneath the mosque to look for antiquities to sell, the group's members penetrated to archaeological levels that had never previously been excavated, uncovering inscriptions of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, the remains of a palace that scholars have tentatively identified as one mentioned in ancient texts, and carved ivories and other luxury objects of extraordinary quality. Some of these objects were removed and sold; others were documented by archaeologists after the liberation of Mosul.