Who ruled Nimrud?

Nimrud, known to the Assyrians as Kalhu and in the Bible as Calah, lies on the Nineveh Plains of northern Iraq, about 30 kilometres south of Mosul and a short distance north of where the Great Zab flows into the Tigris. For nearly two centuries in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE it was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and its palaces yielded some of the most celebrated Assyrian sculpture and ivories. In 2015 much of the excavated city was deliberately destroyed by the Islamic State group.

The site lay on an important route between Assur and Nineveh. A trading settlement was founded there under the Middle Assyrian king Shalmaneser I in the thirteenth century BCE, but it later decayed. In the early ninth century BCE Ashurnasirpal II chose it as the new royal seat of Assyria. He cleared the old ruins and built a fresh city enclosed by walls some 7.5 kilometres long, with temples, offices, homes, a palace meant to outshine those of all earlier kings, gardens planted with trees from his campaigns, and an enclosure for wild animals. His inscriptions give no reason for leaving Assur; modern historians have suggested the lack of space in the old capital, Kalhu's more central position, its trade connections, or a wish to escape the influence of Assur's leading families.

A stele records that Ashurnasirpal marked the completion of the city in 864 BCE with a ten-day feast for 69,574 guests, at which, his inscriptions claim, the guests were served 10,000 skins of wine and 10,000 jugs of beer. By one estimate the city held around 75,000 people by 800 BCE, which would have made it the most populous in the world at the time.

Ashurnasirpal's son Shalmaneser III built an even larger palace, with more than 200 rooms, as well as the great ziggurat. His Black Obelisk, found at Nimrud, commemorates his campaigns in 24 relief panels, and its inscription is widely thought to name Jehu, king of Israel, although other readings exist. Kalhu remained the capital under a succession of kings, including Tiglath-Pileser III, who carried out major building works. While the kings themselves were buried at Assur, several queens were laid to rest at Kalhu; Iraqi archaeologists found four queens' tombs in 1988.

In 706 BCE Sargon II moved the capital to his new city of Dur-Sharrukin, and his son Sennacherib then moved it to Nineveh. Kalhu remained a major city and royal residence until it was largely destroyed during the Median and Babylonian conquest of Assyria in the late seventh century BCE. The Greek writer Xenophon later described the ruins of an Assyrian city in the area that he called Larissa, and medieval Arab geographers referred to the site as Athur. The local name Nimrud, after the biblical figure Nimrod, was recorded by European travellers in the eighteenth century.

Austen Henry Layard dug at Nimrud between 1845 and 1851, uncovering palace reliefs and colossal winged human-headed lions and bulls known as lamassu. With enormous effort he shipped a pair to the British Museum, which also received the Black Obelisk. Hormuzd Rassam, William Loftus and George Smith worked there in the following decades. From 1949 a British team under Max Mallowan resumed excavation, finding the Nimrud Letters and, in palace storerooms, hundreds of carved ivories brought from across the Near East. Iraqi, Polish and Italian teams continued the work until the early 1990s, and the Treasure of Nimrud, 613 pieces of gold jewellery and precious stones, survived the looting of 2003 in a bank vault.

The Islamic State group occupied the area in 2014 and declared the site's Assyrian remains idolatrous. The Iraqi government announced in March 2015 that its fighters had bulldozed Nimrud, and later videos showed them hammering and blowing up parts of the site. The director-general of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, stated that "deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime". When the Iraqi army retook Nimrud in November 2016, around 90 per cent of the excavated area had been destroyed, the ziggurat had been flattened and little remained of Ashurnasirpal's palace. A UNESCO-supported restoration programme began in 2017, and new excavations by the University of Pennsylvania started in 2022.