Nineveh

← Encyclopedia

A man stands in a reading room in the British Museum, in 1872, with a broken clay tablet in front of him and a cloth still half-stuck to its baked surface where an attendant has been cleaning off the centuries. He reads down the columns of wedges, and somewhere in the middle of them he comes to a flood, and a ship grounded on a mountain, and a bird sent out across the water and returning because it found no place to rest. According to a colleague he leapt up, ran about the room in his excitement, and began to pull off his clothes. The tablet had come, with tens of thousands of its fellows, out of a single ruined mound on the east bank of the Tigris. The mound was Nineveh, and the literature that men were learning to read again had been buried in it for two and a half thousand years.

The city on the east bank

Nineveh stood on the eastern side of the Tigris, on the plain that the river shares today with the city of Mosul on the opposite bank. The site is marked by two great mounds — Kuyunjik, the citadel, and Nabi Yunus, the “Prophet Jonah,” which carries a shrine over what is held to be the tomb of Jonah — within a ring of city wall some twelve kilometers around. People had lived there an extraordinarily long time: settlement on the spot reaches back into the Neolithic, into the sixth millennium BCE, and by the early second millennium Nineveh was a town of standing, a cult center of the goddess Ishtar whose temple there drew kings from far down the Euphrates to renew her statue and pay their respects.

For most of its long life, though, Nineveh was a city among other Assyrian cities and not the first of them. The Assyrian heartland had its old religious capital at Ashur on the Tigris to the south, and the kings of the ninth and eighth centuries built their showpiece residences elsewhere — Ashurnasirpal at Nimrud, Sargon II at the brand-new foundation of Dur-Sharrukin to the north. What raised Nineveh above all of these was a single reign. Around 705 BCE, Sennacherib came to the throne of an empire that under his father Sargon had grown to span from the Persian mountains to the Mediterranean, and he chose to make Nineveh, the city of his accession, into a capital worthy of it.

The Palace Without Rival

What Sennacherib then did to the city he recorded at length on his own clay prisms, in the boasting annalistic style that Assyrian kings used for their works. He pulled down the cramped old quarters, widened and straightened the streets so that none should encroach on the royal way, and on the southwest corner of the Kuyunjik mound raised a palace that his scribes called, in Akkadian, the palace ša šanina lā išû — “the palace that has no rival.” It was vast, more than five hundred meters along one axis, with scores of rooms, and its lower walls were lined for some three kilometers with carved stone reliefs: campaigns, sieges, the dragging of colossal bull-figures up earthen ramps, the very building of the palace itself rendered in stone on the palace’s own walls. At its gates stood the lamassu, the human-headed winged bulls, five-legged so that they seemed to stand still when seen from the front and to stride forward when seen from the side, set there to guard the threshold against whatever might come at it.

A city of that ambition needed water, and the getting of it was perhaps Sennacherib’s most remarkable single work. To feed the new quarters, the orchards, and a garden laid out beside the palace, his engineers tapped the streams of the hill country to the north and east and led the water down to Nineveh through a system of canals running, in its final and most monumental phase, some ninety-five kilometers from the headworks at Khinis. Where the channel had to cross a wide valley at Jerwan it ran over an aqueduct of dressed limestone blocks nearly three hundred meters long, carried on piers above the wadi — among the oldest stone aqueducts known anywhere. The whole complex was built in stages between roughly 702 and 688 BCE, and at Khinis Sennacherib cut his account of it into the living rock, beside reliefs of himself before the gods.

The garden beside the palace has become the center of a particular modern argument. The classical authors located the famous Hanging Gardens at Babylon and credited them to Nebuchadnezzar, but no Babylonian king ever mentions such a thing, and Babylon’s flat alluvial plain has yielded no trace of them. The Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has assembled the case that the gardens the tradition remembered were in fact Sennacherib’s, at Nineveh: a tiered, irrigated planting watered by his canals and, on her reading of an obscure passage, by some form of raising-screw, with the confusion of cities arising because later Greek writers folded “Babylonia” and Assyria together and lost track of which capital was which. The thesis is argued, not settled; what is certain is that Sennacherib built a watered garden of pride beside his palace and moved a river’s worth of water across the country to keep it green.

The library of the last great king

Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal, who ruled from about 668 BCE, was a king of an unusual kind. He had been schooled as a scribe — a thing Assyrian princes were not ordinarily made to be — and he says so, with relish, in his own inscriptions: that he had mastered the scribal craft, that he could read the obscure Sumerian and the difficult Akkadian, that he could solve problems of multiplication and division and read inscriptions from before the Flood. Whatever one makes of a king’s praise of himself, the boast was backed by an act. Ashurbanipal set out to gather into his palaces at Nineveh a copy of everything worth knowing, and his agents went down into Babylonia, the old land of learning, to buy and borrow and copy and sometimes simply to confiscate the tablets of the southern temples and scholars.

The result, dug out of the Kuyunjik mound in the nineteenth century, is what the modern world calls the Library of Ashurbanipal: on the order of thirty thousand tablets and fragments, now the largest single block of the British Museum’s Mesopotamian collection. It was not a library of literature in the narrow sense. Its bulk was the working apparatus of Mesopotamian knowledge — the omen series that read the future in the liver of a sheep or the markings of the sky, the lexical lists that paired Sumerian words with their Akkadian meanings, the incantations and the medical recipes and the rituals, the hymns and the prayers, the letters and reports of the king’s scholars. But among it, copied and preserved, were the great poems. Here was the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian account of how Marduk split the body of Tiamat and made the heavens and the earth from her. Here was the Epic of Gilgamesh in its fullest surviving form, the twelve-tablet recension carrying the king of Uruk through his friendship and his grief to the edge of the waters of death. And here, on tablet after tablet, was Enuma Anu Enlil — “When the gods Anu and Enlil,” from its opening words — the canonical series of some seventy tablets and several thousand celestial omens, the lunar and solar and planetary signs by which the scholars of the empire read the intentions of the gods in the sky, the great trunk from which the long history of astrology grew.

The “Flood Tablet,” Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the Library of Ashurbanipal, 7th century BCE; British Museum (K.3375). Photo: BabelStone, CC0 1.0.

In the frame within which these tablets were written, this was not a museum of dead texts but a working instrument of rule. The omens were read because the sky and the entrails were a language in which the gods spoke about what was coming, and a king who could read that language could meet it or avert it. The flood that George Smith found on his tablet was, inside the story, the time the gods grew weary of mankind’s noise and resolved to wipe it out, and one man — Utnapishtim, the Babylonian counterpart of the biblical Noah — was warned to build a great vessel and load it with the seed of all living things, so that after the waters fell he sent out a dove, a swallow, and a raven to find the dry land. To gather such things into one palace was to gather, in the Assyrian understanding, the whole inheritance of the gods’ instruction to men, set down by the sages from before the Flood and recopied ever since.

Carved alabaster relief from the lion hunt of Ashurbanipal, North Palace at Nineveh, 7th century BCE; British Museum. Photo: Yair Haklai, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The fall, and the doubting of it

Ashurbanipal died around 631 BCE, and the empire he left did not long survive him. Within two decades it was unmaking itself in civil war while its old subjects pulled free. Babylon rose in the south under Nabopolassar, and the Medes came down from the Iranian highland under Cyaxares, and the two made common cause against Assyria. In 612 BCE their combined armies came up the Tigris, broke through the walls of Nineveh after a siege of some months, and burned it. The fire that destroyed the city is the same fire that saved the tablets: baking the clay of the library harder where it would otherwise have crumbled, and sealing the rooms under their own collapse.

The destruction was so thorough, and the imperial machinery of Assyria so completely gone, that the memory of where Nineveh had stood began to fade within a few generations. When the Greek soldier Xenophon marched his Ten Thousand past the spot in 401 BCE, he saw great deserted walls and did not know whose they were; he calls the place by another name entirely. By the classical age it had become possible to wonder whether the vast Assyria of the histories had ever really existed, or whether its capital was a thing of legend. The city that had ruled the Near East had become a pair of nameless mounds with a Muslim shrine on one of them.

It kept, however, a second life in scripture. The Hebrew Bible remembers Nineveh as the seat of the power that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and besieged Jerusalem under Sennacherib, and two of its books take the city as their subject. In the book of Jonah the prophet is sent, against his will, to cry out against “that great city,” and to his disgust the Ninevites — king and people and even the beasts — repent in sackcloth and are spared. In the book of Nahum the mood is the opposite: a savage prophetic exultation over the city’s coming ruin, “Woe to the bloody city,” a poem of vengeance answered, as if written to be read across the smoke of 612. For more than two thousand years it was through these few chapters, and not through any stone, that the West knew the name of Nineveh at all.

The Adad Gate, one of the ancient gateways of Nineveh, partly reconstructed in the twentieth century over original Assyrian masonry. Photo: Fredarch, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The spade and the decipherers

The recovery began in the 1840s. Working out of Mosul, the British traveler and diplomat Austen Henry Layard dug into the mounds across the river — first into Nimrud, then in 1847 into Kuyunjik itself, where in 1849 he uncovered the southwest palace of Sennacherib with its miles of reliefs and its guardian bulls. Alongside him and after him worked Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian Christian born in Mosul, who in the early 1850s opened the North Palace of Ashurbanipal and its lion-hunt reliefs and, with them, came upon the great mass of the library: room upon room of tablets, swept up and crated and shipped down the river and across the sea to London.

The objects were spectacular, but at first they were illegible. The breakthrough came not at the dig but at the desk, in the slow nineteenth-century cracking of the cuneiform script and the Akkadian language behind it, a labor shared across Europe and tested in 1857 when four scholars were set to translate the same unseen inscription independently and produced versions close enough to prove the decipherment sound. Into this work came George Smith, a former banknote engraver who had taught himself Assyriology among the museum’s tablets, and it was Smith who, in 1872, picked from the Kuyunjik fragments the broken eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh and read on it the flood. He announced it that December to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, to an audience that is said to have included the prime minister, and the news that a flood story older than Genesis had come out of the ground touched off a public sensation. A newspaper paid for Smith to go back to Nineveh to find the rest of the tablet; he found it, and on later journeys he found more, until he died of fever in Aleppo in 1876, not yet thirty-six. From the tablets he and his successors read came back into the world, after their long burial, the Enuma Elish and the full Epic of Gilgamesh and the omen literature on which the whole edifice of Babylonian sky-reading had stood.

That the tablets were Babylonian learning found in an Assyrian palace is no accident. Assyria took its high culture, its gods, and its scribal tradition from the older south, from the land of Babylon and beyond it the still older cities of Sumer; Ashurbanipal’s collectors went south precisely because that was where the texts were. What the burnt library of Nineveh preserved, in the end, was less the literature of Assyria than the accumulated memory of all Mesopotamia, gathered at the empire’s height and sealed by its fall.

Afterlife and ruin again

The Nineveh that the nineteenth century recovered became, through the museum cases and the popular books, one of the founding images of the ancient Near East in the modern imagination — the winged bulls, the lion hunts, the cuneiform that turned out to hold the oldest written stories men possessed. The site itself remained, across the river from a growing Mosul, a guarded archaeological landscape of mounds and partly reconstructed gates and the shrine of Nabi Yunus.

In 2014 the city of Mosul and its surroundings fell to the militants of the Islamic State, and over the following two years the group set out to destroy what it judged idolatrous in the Assyrian heritage. In February 2015 it released video of men taking sledgehammers and a power drill to the statues in the Mosul Museum and to the lamassu still standing at the Nergal Gate of Nineveh, breaking the faces from the winged bulls that had guarded that threshold for twenty-seven centuries. The shrine of Nabi Yunus on the southern mound was blown up; the Adad Gate and other monuments were damaged or razed. Some of what was smashed at the museum proved to be plaster casts, the originals safe in Baghdad or London; the great gate-bulls of Nineveh were not. When Mosul was retaken in 2017, archaeologists picking through the rubble under the destroyed shrine found, beneath it, the previously unexcavated remains of a palace of Assyrian kings — a buried Nineveh older than the ruin laid over it, exposed by the very act meant to erase the place. The tablets, at least, were elsewhere. The flood that Sennacherib’s grandson gathered into clay, and the fire of 612 that hardened it, and the spade of the 1850s that lifted it out, had already carried the words of Nineveh past the reach of the latest men to burn it.

→ Related: The Assyrians · Assyria · Babylon · Gilgamesh · Astrology · Chaldeans · Sin · Ishtar · Marduk · Nergal · Nabu · Shamash · Anu · Ur · The Sumerians · Eridu · Etemenanki · Berossus · Oannes