Nineveh

=Ancient Society - Ancient Assyria =

 - Assessment - Links - Nimrud - Khorsabad - Nineveh - Sources - Virtual Excursion - Ancient Near East

Nineveh
Capital of Assyria c. 700 - 612 BC. Occupied c. 6000 BC - AD 600

Nineveh lies 250 miles (400 km) north of Baghdad just across the Tigris from Mosul. This is the main crossing of the Tigris in the northern plain, and at the centre of a rich agricultural region, ancient Assyria. Excavation on the principal mound, Kuyunjik, has shown that it was occupied from the 6th millennium onwards. By the mid 3rd millennium it possessed a temple of Ishtar which became one of the great shrines of Mesopotamia, maintained by successive kings who controlled this strategic point: the Agade dynasty about 2300 BC, Shamshi Adad of ASHUR about 1800, and in the mid 2nd millennium the rulers of Mitanni, a kingdom centred around Nusaybin, who sent the goddess on a diplomatic visit to Egypt. With the revival of Assyrian power in the late 2nd and 1st millennium Nineveh was often a royal residence and was finally established as the capital about 700 by Sennacherib, whose successors lived there until its destruction by the Medes in 612. There was intermittent occupation for another thousand years, but the main settlement now lay in the plain beneath Kuyunjik. In the Parthian period Nineveh had a Greek city constitution and a temple of Hermes near the river crossing, and the Ishtar temple survived until at least AD 200, but before the Islamic conquest the site had become a suburb of Mosul.

The city wall has a circumference of over seven and a half miles (12 km), and five gates have been excavated. The flanking towers of the Nergal Gate in the north wall are a modern reconstruction, but the original bull colossi still flank the entrance. The first, ashlar faced stage of the east wall on either side of the Shamash Gate, by the Erbil road, has been rebuilt to parapet height; above and behind this there was a second stage of unbaked brick. On the mound of Kuyunjik the throne room suite of Sennacherib's palace has been re excavated and roofed with some of its relief slabs depicting the king's conquests still in position; many sculptures of Sennacherib and his grandson Ashurbanipal were removed to the British Museum and the Louvre in the 19th century. No other buildings are now exposed on the citadel. The mound of Nebi Yunus, the site of the imperial arsenal a mile (1.6km) south of Kuyunjik, has long been covered with houses grouped around a mosque, containing the reputed tomb of Jonah.