Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, one of the great enemies of the Nation of Israel in the Bible.

The ancient site of Nineveh is part of Mosul, the second largest city in modern Iraq.

Nineveh lies on the east bank of the Tigris a few kilometers downhill from the beginning of the Kurdish mountains.

Nineveh was founded by Nimrod - "the mighty hunter" - and was the last capital of the Assyrian Empire.

The prophet Jonah had gone to Nineveh and preached, saying, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (Jonah 3:4). The record tells us "the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them" (Jonah 3:5). In response to one of the greatest stories of repentance in history, "God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it" (Jonah 3:10).

The prophet Nahum predicted the destruction of Nineveh in the book that bears his name. The following items were to be a part of the destruction of that great city:

1. An "overflowing flood" would "make an utter end of its place" (Nah. 1:8)

2. It would be destroyed while the inhabitants were "drunken like drunkards" (Nah. 1:10)

3. The city would be unprotected because "fire shall devour the bars of your gates" (Nah. 3:13)

4. The city would never recover, for their "injury has no healing" (Nah. 3:19)

5. The downfall of the city would come with remarkable ease, like figs falling when the tree is shaken (Nah. 3:12)

In 612 B.C. Nabopolassar united the Babylonian army with an army of Medes and Scythians and led a campaign which captured the Assyrian citadels in the North. The Babylonian army laid siege to Nineveh, but the walls of the city were too strong for battering rams, so they decided to try and starve the people out.

A famous oracle had been given that "Nineveh should never be taken until the river became its enemy." After a three month siege, "rain fell in such abundance that the waters of the Tigris inundated part of the city and overturned one of its walls for a distance of twenty stades.

Then the King, convinced that the oracle was accomplished and despairing of any means of escape, to avoid falling alive into the enemy's hands constructed in his palace an immense funeral pyre, placed on it his gold and silver and his royal robes, and then, shutting himself up with his wives and eunuchs in a chamber formed in the midst of the pile, disappeared in the flames. Nineveh opened its gates to the besiegers, but this tardy submission did not save the proud city.

In Sennacherib's day the wall around Nineveh was 40 to 50 feet high. It extended for 4 kilometers along the Tigris River and for 13 kilometers around the inner city. The city wall had 15 main gates, 5 of which have been excavated. Each of the gates was guarded by stone bull statues. Both inside and outside the walls, Sennacherib created parks, a botanical garden, and a zoo. He built a water-system containing the oldest aqueduct in history at Jerwan, across the Gomel River.

Nineveh was pillaged and burned, and then razed to the ground so completely as to evidence the implacable hatred enkindled in the minds of subject nations by the fierce and cruel Assyrian government.

Nineveh was laid waste as ruthlessly and completely as her kings had once ravaged Susa and Babylon; the city was put to the torch, the population was slaughtered or enslaved, and the palace so recently built by Ashurbanipal was sacked and destroyed. At one blow Assyria disappeared from history. Nothing remained of her except certain tactics and weapons of war.

The Near East remembered her for a while as a merciless unifier of a dozen lesser states; and the Jews recalled Nineveh vengefully as 'the bloody city, full of lies and robbery.' In a little while all but the mightiest of the Great Kings were forgotten, and all their royal palaces were in ruins under the drifting sands.

Two hundred years after its capture, Xenophon's Ten Thousand marched over the mounds that had been Nineveh, and never suspected that these were the site of the ancient metropolis that had ruled half the world. Not a stone remained visible of all the temples with which Assyria's pious warriors had sought to beautify their greatest capital. Even Ashur, the everlasting god, was dead.


Prehistoric occupation of the site dates back to at least the 6th millennium BC.

Holding an important position on Nineveh,the main river crossing in the fertile northern Mesopotamian plain but only intermittently governed by local rulers, Nineveh was dominated in the 3d millennium BC by the Agade and Ur empires and in the 2d millennium by the Mitanni and Kassite empires.

With the rise of Assyrian power in the late 2d millennium, the city became a royal residence and was finally established as the capital by King Sennacherib (r. 704-681 BC), who replanned the city and built for himself a magnificent palace.

Sacked (612 BC) by the Medes, Nineveh declined, although occupation of the site continued through the Seleucid and Parthian periods until medieval times.

Sennacherib's city wall, more than 12 km (7.5 mi) long, enclosed an area of about 700 ha (1730 acres); it was pierced by 15 great gates, five of which have been excavated.

The northern Nergal Gate, with its original flanking bull colossuses, has been restored. Canals provided water to the city and to municipal gardens that were stocked with unusual plants and animals.

Sections of an aqueduct built by Sennacherib still stand at Jerwan, 40 km (25 mi) away.

The palaces of Sennacherib and his grandson Assurbanipal stand at Kuyunjik, the citadel of the site.

Their walls and doorways were lined with sculptured reliefs, many of which are now in the Louvre, Paris, and the British Museum, London (including Ashurbanipal's famous Lion Hunt reliefs, now in the British Museum).

Sennacherib's palace comprised at least 80 rooms; the throne room suite, now partially restored, still contains some of its bas-reliefs depicting scenes of conquest.

Archives of cuneiform tablets were found in both palaces, but the library of Ashurbanipal forms an unrivaled epigraphic source for current knowledge of Mesopotamian history.

One of the greatest treasures of ancient Mesopotamia, it contains more than 20,000 tablets and fragments, many of which are copies of ancient Mesopotamian texts such as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian Flood story; its subjects range from literature to religion, the sciences, and lexicography.

The E-mashmash temple, dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, also stood on Kuyunjik; its series of superimposed structures, dating back to the 3d millennium BC, were maintained by successive rulers of Assyria and survived until at least AD 200.

The imperial arsenal, built by Sennacherib's successor Esarhaddon (r. 680-669 BC), stands largely unexcavated at Nebi Yunus, a mound on the city wall 1.6 km (1 mi) south of Kuyunjik. It is still covered by modern buildings, among them a mosque reputed to contain the tomb of Jonah.

Nineveh was first surveyed in 1820; intermittent excavation by various expeditions took place from 1842 to 1931; more recent work, including some restoration, has been undertaken by the Iraq Department of Antiquities


From 1845-1854 young British adventurer Austen Henry Layard explored the ruins of Nineveh

For years skeptics questioned the existence of the city since it could not be found.

Layard rediscovered the lost palace of Sennacherib across the Tigris River from modern Mosul in northern Iraq.

Inscribed in cuneiform on the colossal sculptures in the doorway of its throne room was Sennacherib's own account of his siege of Jerusalem. It differed in detail from the biblical one but confirmed that Sennacherib did not capture the city.

This created a great deal of public interest, because previously the only account of any seige of Jerusalem by Sennacherib was the one found in the Bible (2 Kings 18-19) Sennacherib's account does differ from the Bible's, but both affirm that Sennacherib did not capture the city. Many people felt this vindicated their faith in the Bible, which had been attacked by "increasing religious doubt and scriptural revisionism." The palaces walls were covered with stone slabs chronicling Sennacherib's victories. One of these stone slabs chronicles in what appears to be remarkable detail the Judean city of Lachish, whose destruction the Bible records (2 Kings 18:13-14).

General view of Sennacherib Palace Site Museum at Nineveh

This find generated an excitement that is difficult to imagine today, because amid the increasing religious doubt and scriptural revisionism of the mid-nineteenth century, it gave Christian fundamentalists an independent eyewitness corroboration of a biblical event, written in the doorway of the very room where Sennacherib may have issued his order to attack. The palace's interior walls were paneled with huge stone slabs, carved in relief with images of Sennacherib's victories. Here one could see the king and army, foreign landscapes, and conquered enemy cities, including a remarkably accurate depiction of the Judean city of Lachish, whose destruction by the Assyrians was recorded in II Kings 18:13-14.

View of Room V with sculptures still in place

General view of Kuyunjik, the palace mound of Nineveh

Courtesy John M. Russell

Within Nineveh there are two citadels or tells called Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus (Prophet Jonah). Of these only Kuyunjik has been extensively explored. The other mound, Nebi Yunus has not been extensively explored, because there is a Muslim shrine dedicated to the prophet Jonah (Nebi Yunus in Arabic) on the site. A whale bone hangs inside the mosque/shrine on Nebi Yunus, recalling the story of Jonah and the whale. A major site of particular importance to those interested in the archaeology of the Bible is the palace of Sennacherib in Nineveh.

Unfortunately Sennacherib's palace was vandalized in the 1990's. Assyrian reliefs from the palace, which had survived for centuries, were apparently broken, and fragments have appeared on the market.

Stone Images

Considering that the palace had been destroyed by an intense conflagration during the sack of Nineveh in 612 B.C., the massive walls and many of the relief sculptures of Sennacherib's throne-room suite were surprisingly well preserved. In the 1960s, because of the palace's historical importance and unique preservation, the Iraq Department of Antiquities consolidated the walls and sculptures and roofed the site over as the Sennacherib Palace Site Museum at Nineveh, where visitors could tour one of only two preserved Assyrian palaces in the world.

(The other is the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud, also restored as a site museum.) The four restored rooms of the throne-room suite, designated H, I, IV, and V by Layard, contained some 100 sculptured slabs in various states of preservation. In two of these rooms, IV and V , parts of nearly every slab survived, making these the most completely preserved decorative cycles in the palace. Most of these reliefs have never been published. Some show unusual subjects and provide valuable information on visual narrative composition in Assyrian palace decoration. These reliefs needed to be documented in case the originals were lost or damaged and to guide future conservation efforts.

Illustration of an unidentified sculpture from Nineveh

Layard unearthed the great palace of King Sargon along with a library of over 22,000 cuneiform documents. King Sargon was mentioned by Isaiah the prophet (Isa. 20:1).


CHRONOLOGY

6000 BC: First settlements of Nineveh.

2nd and 3rd millennia BC: Nineveh is a religious centre devoted to among other gods Ishtar.

9th century BC: Large architectural projects start in Nineveh with the initiative of rulers of the Assyrian Empire.

705 BC: King Sennacherib establishes Nineveh as the new capital of the Assyrian Empire, at the expense of Dar Sharrukin. Large scale construction work is started, together with the building of the largest palace of its time, which was 42,000 km2 large with at least 80 rooms.

Around 650 BC: Under king Ashurbanipal, a new palace is constructed, together with a large library.

Ashur - King of Assyria. He was grandson of the famous Sennacherib and son of Esarhaddon. Ashurbanipal, or, as he was known to the Greeks, Sardanapalus, reigned from 668 to 626 B.C. He is best known for amassing a library of literary texts including an epic of creation, the Flood and others. Modern scholars have reason to be grateful to Ashurbanipal because he was a lover of learning and collected a great library of cuneiform clay tablets (over 22,000 in number) that have given to us most of what we know of Babylonian and Assyrian literature. In Ezra 4:10, his name is also rendered "Asnapper" or "Osnapper".

612 BC: Ashurbanipal's successor held the Assyrian throne and at his death Sin-shar-ishkin became king. In the summer of 612, Nabopolassar, a Chaldean leader, aided by Medes and northern nomads, attacked, looted and destroyed Nineveh, an event that marked the crumbling of the last vestiges of power in Assyria and established the foundations for the Neo-Babylonian Empire. There is some evidence that the defeat of Nineveh was the occasion of rejoicing in Judah, although the Assyrians established a new capital at Harran. Within a few years Harran was conquered by the Medes.

13th century AD: Nineveh becomes an important city under Atabeg rulers.

16the century: The last settlements of Nineveh are abandoned.

1820: Nineveh is mapped by the British archaeologist Claudius J. Rich.

1845-51: The palace of Sennacherib is discovered.











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