Who ruled Nineveh?

Nineveh lies on the east bank of the Tigris in northern Iraq, facing the old centre of Mosul across the river. Inhabited since the Neolithic, it became the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire around 700 BCE and for perhaps fifty years was the largest city in the world, until its sack in 612 BCE. Its two great mounds, Kuyunjiq and Nebi Yunus, have yielded palaces, sculptures and the clay library of Ashurbanipal.

Soundings deep beneath the mound of Kuyunjiq show that people farmed here from around 6000 BCE. By the later fifth millennium the settlement covered some 40 hectares, and in the fourth millennium it became a trading outpost of the southern city of Uruk, placed at the highest point on the Tigris that boats could reach. In the early third millennium its distinctive "Ninevite 5" pottery spread across northern Mesopotamia.

In the late third millennium Nineveh belonged to the Akkadian Empire, though with little official presence. Around the eighteenth century BCE it fell within the kingdom of Shamshi-Adad I and became known for its worship of the goddess Ishtar; in the fourteenth century the Mitanni king Tushratta even sent her statue to Egypt. Nineveh was a vassal of Mitanni until the Assyrian king Ashur-uballit I took it, and Middle Assyrian kings such as Shalmaneser I and Tiglath-Pileser I built there, although the capital remained at Assur.

From the ninth century BCE the Neo-Assyrian kings enlarged the city, but it was Sennacherib, around 700 BCE, who made it the capital of Assyria. He laid out new streets and squares, enclosed about 7 square kilometres within a wall some 12 kilometres long pierced by fifteen gates, and brought water from the hills through canals and an aqueduct at Jerwan. His South-West Palace, which he called the "palace without a rival", had at least 80 rooms lined with carved reliefs, including scenes of his siege of Lachish in Judah in 701 BCE. The city may then have held more than 100,000 people, perhaps nearer 150,000. Stephanie Dalley of Oxford has argued that the garden beside this palace was the true original of the Hanging Gardens, a view not all scholars share. A later king, Ashurbanipal, built a palace and assembled a library whose tablets, about 22,000 of them, were later found in the ruins.

After Ashurbanipal's death around 627 BCE, Assyria was torn by civil war. Its former subjects, among them the Babylonians, Medes and Scythians, turned on it, and in 612 BCE they besieged and took Nineveh after hard fighting from house to house, then razed it; see the Fall of Nineveh. Many unburied skeletons have been found by archaeologists, and in two gateways the defenders' hurried narrowing of the passages is still visible.

The city was devastated but not entirely deserted. Cyrus the Great may have restored a temple of Ishtar, though the reading of the relevant text is disputed. The Seleucids resettled it, and under the Parthian Empire it had its own mint. By 554 CE the Church of the East had made it a bishop's seat, and in 627 the Byzantine and Sasanian armies fought a major battle nearby. Arab forces took the area in 641 and developed Mosul on the opposite bank as their administrative centre; Nineveh shrank into a Christian suburb and by the thirteenth century was largely in ruins.

The site was never wholly forgotten: medieval travellers visited it, and a shrine to the prophet Jonah, of the biblical story of Nineveh's repentance, stood on Nebi Yunus. Claudius Rich described the ruins in 1820, and in the 1840s Austen Henry Layard dug into Kuyunjiq, finding Sennacherib's palace and Ashurbanipal's library and sending much of what he found to the British Museum. British, Iraqi and American teams continued the work in the twentieth century.

During its occupation of Mosul from 2014 to 2017, the Islamic State group destroyed the Jonah shrine, bulldozed the Adad, Mashki and Nergal gates, defaced the winged bull figures and wrecked Sennacherib's throne room. Since 2018 German, Italian, Iraqi and American teams have documented the damage, restored gates and resumed excavation, and an archaeological park opened at the site in 2023.