Nineveh

Nineveh sits on the east bank of the Tigris opposite modern Mosul, spreading across two principal mounds — Kuyunjik to the north and Nebi Yunus to the south. From the late eighth through the seventh century BC it was the political capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal — the largest city in the world at its peak, ringed by twelve kilometers of fortification and watered by an aqueduct system Sennacherib carved through the Zagros foothills. Austen Henry Layard worked Kuyunjik from 1845 to 1851 on commission from the British Museum and recovered Sennacherib's Southwest Palace, including the Lachish Reliefs — the alabaster panels depicting the 701 BC siege of the Judahite city. Hormuzd Rassam, Layard's Iraqi-born assistant, returned in 1853 and uncovered Ashurbanipal's North Palace and the royal library beneath it. R. C. Thompson's Oxford expedition continued the work between 1903 and 1932. The Library of Ashurbanipal yielded over thirty thousand cuneiform tablets — the largest single corpus of Mesopotamian literature ever found. Among the texts: the Gilgamesh Epic (whose flood narrative parallels Genesis 6–9), the Atrahasis Epic, the Erra Epic, the Enuma Elish creation account, and Sennacherib's prism originals recording the campaign against Hezekiah. Jonah 3:3 calls Nineveh "an exceedingly great city, a three days' walk across," and the prophet's mission to its inhabitants is the only Old Testament account of an Assyrian capital repenting at Hebrew preaching. Nahum 3 and Zephaniah 2:13 prophesied the city's fall; in 612 BC a coalition of Medes under Cyaxares and Babylonians under Nabopolassar broke the walls and burned the palaces — the destruction layer on Kuyunjik is roughly a meter thick. ISIS detonated portions of the Nebi Yunus mound and the Mashki and Adad gates in 2014 and 2015. The Nineveh tablets remain at the British Museum and the Iraq Museum, Baghdad. Sources: Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains (John Murray, 1849); Julian Reade, "More about Adiabene" (Iraq 63, 2001); David Stronach, "Notes on the Fall of Nineveh" (in Assyria 1995, Helsinki, 1997); Jonah 3; Nahum 3.