Nineveh

Nineveh was a great city of Assyria on the east bank of the Tigris River, where the small Khosr River joins it, and its ruins now lie within the city of Mosul in Iraq (Genesis 10:11; Jonah 1:2). King Sennacherib rebuilt and enlarged it, and from about 700 BC it served as the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Bible names it among the cities built in Assyria (Genesis 10:11), sends the prophet Jonah to preach against it (Jonah 1:2), and announces its end through the prophets Nahum and Zephaniah (Nahum 1:1, 8; Zephaniah 2:13). Nineveh fell in 612 BC to the combined forces of the Babylonians and the Medes.

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Name and setting

The cuneiform sign for the city's name pictures a fish within a house. The ruins rise in two main mounds: Kuyunjik to the north and the smaller Nebi Yunus to the south. Nebi Yunus means "the Prophet Jonah" in Arabic, and the mound has long been honored as the place where the prophet was buried. The shrine and the village around it have restricted archaeological work there, and the mound is the site of the city's ancient arsenal and review palace. The city's wall ran for more than 12 kilometers and enclosed about 750 hectares (1,900 acres). Estimates put the population of Sennacherib's Nineveh at about 100,000 or more, perhaps closer to 150,000.

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Before the Assyrian Empire

Nineveh was first settled in the Neolithic period, by about 6000 BC. Ishtar, the city's patron goddess, was honored at Nineveh from the Akkadian period onward, and her temple stood in the center of the Kuyunjik mound. An inscription of Naram-Sin, a king of the Akkadian dynasty, was found there. Hammurabi, king of Babylonia, names Nineveh in the introduction to his law code as the home of a temple of Ishtar.

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Nineveh in Genesis and Jonah

Genesis tells of Nimrod, "a mighty hunter before the LORD," whose kingdom began in Babylon and other cities of the land of Shinar, and who "went forth into Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah," and Resen (Genesis 10:8-12). The LORD sent Jonah to Nineveh to preach against it, and after first fleeing toward Tarshish he went and preached; the city repented in sackcloth, and God relented (Jonah 1:1-3; 3:1-10). This Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath-hepher, had spoken the word of the LORD by which Jeroboam II, king of Israel from 782 to 753 BC, restored the boundary of Israel (2 Kings 14:25). Nineveh was "an exceedingly great city, requiring a three-day journey" (Jonah 3:3). God's closing question to Jonah speaks of the great city's "more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well" (Jonah 4:11).

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Sennacherib's capital

In 722 BC, the ninth year of King Hoshea of Israel, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried the Israelites away to Assyria (2 Kings 17:5-6). Sennacherib (705-681 BC) abandoned Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad), the new capital built by King Sargon II, and moved the seat of government to Nineveh, which was in effect rebuilt in his reign. He built a new palace that he called "the palace which has no equal," known today as the Southwest Palace, about 500 by 250 meters in size. The palace held many carved reliefs, among them a series showing the siege of Lachish in Judah, which stood in a room of its own, Room XXXVI. The campaign came in 701 BC, when Sennacherib invaded Judah (2 Kings 18:13) to put down a revolt against Assyrian rule led by King Hezekiah (716-687 BC), and Lachish, Hezekiah's main fortress, was among the first cities he attacked. The Lachish scenes include prisoners impaled on stakes. The twelve alabaster slabs of the Lachish series were sent to the British Museum. Hezekiah paid "three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold" (2 Kings 18:14), and Sennacherib's own annals say that this payment, given there as 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver, was sent after him to Nineveh. The annals also say that Sennacherib shut Hezekiah up "in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage." One copy of them, the Taylor Prism, is a clay prism from Nineveh, dated 691 BC, that lists Sennacherib's campaigns; it is now in the British Museum.

To bring water to the city, Sennacherib built a network of canals; in his own words, "eighteen canals I dug" and directed into the Khosr River. One canal crossed a ravine on an aqueduct at Jerwan, which a University of Chicago expedition excavated in 1933. Sennacherib also laid out a botanical garden stocked with trees and fruit trees gathered from across the empire. Stephanie Dalley, a Senior Research Fellow in Assyriology at Oxford, argued in a 2013 study that the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon were in fact Sennacherib's gardens at Nineveh.

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Sennacherib's death and his successors

After Sennacherib threatened Hezekiah by letter and the angel of the LORD struck down 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp, he "returned to Nineveh and stayed there" (2 Kings 19:9-14, 35-36; Isaiah 37:36-37). There, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch, his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer struck him down with the sword and escaped to the land of Ararat, and his son Esarhaddon became king (2 Kings 19:37; 2 Chronicles 32:21). A Babylonian chronicle also records that Sennacherib "was killed by his son in a rebellion." Esarhaddon's own inscription tells how rebels took up arms in Nineveh and how he then entered the city joyfully and took his father's throne. King Ashurbanipal (669-631 BC) later made Kuyunjik his residence again and built his own palace, the North Palace, at the edge of the mound.

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Ashurbanipal's library

The tablets known as the library of Ashurbanipal number about 31,000 inscribed pieces, many of them fragments, with texts of every kind and in several languages, including literature and ritual. Austen Henry Layard, excavating for the British Museum, uncovered part of the library in Sennacherib's palace in 1849-1851, where most of it had been kept. His assistant Hormuzd Rassam found more tablets in Ashurbanipal's North Palace, and the two groups together make up most of the British Museum's Kuyunjik Collection. George Smith, studying the Kuyunjik Collection in the British Museum, found among the tablets a Babylonian account of the flood, and he was sent out to Nineveh to look for the missing portion. Smith translated the account, part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in 1872, and the tablet is now numbered K.3375 in the British Museum.

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Nahum and Zephaniah

The prophet Nahum the Elkoshite delivered "the burden against Nineveh" (Nahum 1:1). Nahum points to the fall of Thebes in Egypt as a past event while foretelling Nineveh's fall as still to come, so the prophecy falls between the two events (Nahum 3:8-10). Thebes fell to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in 663 BC, which sets the earlier limit for the prophecy. Nahum opens by echoing the LORD's words to Moses: He is "slow to anger," yet He "will by no means leave the guilty unpunished" (Nahum 1:3; Exodus 34:6-7). Jonah had used the same words, "slow to anger," when he complained that God had spared Nineveh (Jonah 4:2). Nahum pictures the attack in vivid scenes: chariots dash through the streets, "the river gates are thrown open and the palace collapses," the city drains away like a pool, and its silver and gold are plundered (Nahum 2:4-9). He calls Nineveh "the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder," and ends with the verdict that its wound cannot be healed, while all who hear of its downfall applaud (Nahum 3:1, 19). To Judah, Nahum announces "good news": "Celebrate your feasts, O Judah," for "the wicked will never again march through you" (Nahum 1:15). Zephaniah, who prophesied in the days of King Josiah of Judah (641-609 BC), foretold that God would "make Nineveh a desolation, as dry as a desert," a ruin where herds lie down, the city that told itself, "I am it, and there is none besides me" (Zephaniah 1:1; 2:13-15).

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The fall of Nineveh

The fall of Nineveh came in August 612 BC, while Nabopolassar was king of Babylon (626-605 BC): after "a heavy siege" of about three months, the Babylonian army and Cyaxares, king of the Medes, "turned the city into a ruin heap," as a Babylonian chronicle now in the British Museum records. At the Halzi Gate, excavations in 1989 and 1990 under David Stronach, a Berkeley professor of Near Eastern archaeology in the University of California, uncovered the skeletons of some thirteen people who seem to have died at almost the same moment, probably among the city's last survivors before its destruction in 612 BC. At the Shamash Gate, a team led by Timothy Harrison, who directs the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, found in 2021-2023 the gate's burned destruction, which dates almost certainly to the fall of 612 BC, along with pulverized human remains that attest the violence of the city's fall. The great city was left a ruin, its splendor buried under the dust of northern Mesopotamia. After the fall, the Babylonian chronicle records, a king "ascended to the throne in Harran to rule Assyria"; Pharaoh Neco later "marched up to help the king of Assyria at the Euphrates River," and King Josiah of Judah, who went out to confront him, was killed at Megiddo in 609 BC (2 Kings 23:29).

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Excavation and archaeology

Claudius James Rich, the British East India Company's representative at Baghdad, visited the mounds in 1820 and made the first reliable map of Nineveh. French excavations on Kuyunjik from December 1842 to March 1843 found little, and the French teams moved to Khorsabad (Dur-Sharrukin), where remarkable remains soon came to light. In Sennacherib's palace Layard opened, by his own count, "no less than seventy-one halls, chambers, and passages" during his digging at Nineveh between 1846 and 1851. His two-volume Nineveh and its Remains (1849) became the first archaeological bestseller. Rassam, an Assyrian Christian from Mosul, worked at Kuyunjik from 1852 to 1854 and found Ashurbanipal's North Palace, whose reliefs of the royal lion hunt are now in the British Museum. He returned to dig for the British Museum at Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus between 1878 and 1882. George Smith dug at Nineveh in 1873 and 1874 and returned in 1876, but he died near Aleppo on the journey home. R. Campbell Thompson, digging for the British Museum from 1927, finished clearing the temple of Ishtar in the early 1930s. Working under him, the expedition sank a pit about 27 meters (90 feet) deep to virgin soil, revealing occupation back to the Hassuna period of the sixth millennium BC. From the early 1960s, Iraqi projects investigated seven of the city gates and restored the Shamash Gate and the Nergal Gate. The Islamic State later dug looters' tunnels beneath the mosque on Nebi Yunus, which exposed inscriptions of Esarhaddon and a pair of colossal figures at a palace entrance. An Iraqi-Italian expedition of the University of Bologna, working with Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, began work at Nineveh in 2019. Heidelberg University founded its Nineveh project in 2018, and from 2022 its team excavated in Ashurbanipal's North Palace. The British Museum in London now holds nearly all the inscribed finds from Nineveh, the cuneiform tablets above all, and most of its sculpture.

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Later history

When the Greek mercenary leader Xenophon came this way in 401 BC, he stayed at a place called Mespila, and his account never names Nineveh. A monastery honoring the prophet Jonah was founded on Nebi Yunus as early as the fourth century AD, and the shrine there later came to stand within a mosque. Under the Islamic State, which held Mosul until its liberation in 2017, the shrine on Nebi Yunus was destroyed.