Nineveh

Nineveh, Assyrian Ninua ({{coor dm|36|22|N|43|07|E|}}), was an important city in ancient Assyria now lying in the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. This "exceeding great city", as it is called in the Book of Jonah, lay on the eastern bank of the Tigris, along which it stretched for some 50 kilometres (30 miles), having an average breadth of 20 km (10 mi) or more from the river back toward the eastern hills. This whole extensive space is now one immense area of ruins.

Archaeology

Today, Nineveh's location is marked by two large mounds, Kouyunjik and Nabī Yūnus "Prophet Jonah", and the remains of the city walls (about 12 km/7.5 mi in circumference). Kouyunjik has been extensively explored. The other mound, Nabī Yūnus, has not been extensively explored because there is a Muslim shrine dedicated to that prophet on the site.

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In the 19th century, the French consul at Mosul began to search the vast mounds that lay along the opposite bank of the river. The Arabs whom he employed in these excavations, to their great surprise, came upon the ruins of a building at the mound of Khorsabad, which, on further exploration, turned out to be the royal palace of Sargon II, which were largely explored for sculptures and other precious relics.

Related Topics:
Ruins - Khorsabad - Sargon II

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In 1847 the young British adventurer Sir Austen Henry Layard explored the ruins. In the Kuyunjik mound Layard rediscovered in 1849 the lost palace of Sennacherib across the Tigris River from modern Mosul in northern Iraq, with its 71 rooms and colossal bas-reliefs. He also unearthed the palace and famous library of Ashurbanipal with 22,000 inscribed clay tablets. The study of the archaeology of Nineveh reveals the wealth and glory of ancient Assyria under kings such as Esarhaddon (681-669 B.C.) and Ashurbanipal (669-626 B.C.).

Related Topics:
Austen Henry Layard - Sennacherib - Bas-relief - Library of Ashurbanipal - Esarhaddon

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The work of exploration will be carried on by George Smith, Hormuzd Rassam, and others, and a vast treasury of specimens of Assyria was exhumed for European museums. Palace after palace was discovered, with their decorations and their sculptured slabs, revealing the life and manners of this ancient people, their arts of war and peace, the forms of their religion, the style of their architecture, and the magnificence of their monarchs.

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The mound of Kuyunjik will be excavated again by the archaeologists of the British Museum, leaded by L.W. King, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The new efforts will concentrate on the site of the Temple of Nabu, the God of writing, where another cuneiform library was supposed to exist. However, no such library was ever found: most likely, it had been destroyed by the activities of later residents.

Related Topics:
British Museum - Nabu

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The excavations will start again in 1927, under the direction of Campbell Thompson, who already took part in King's expeditions. These excavations, however, were rather unfortunate. Some works were carried out outside Kouyunjik, for instance on the mound of Nebi Yunus, which was the ancient arsenal of Nineveh, or along the outside walls. Here, near the North-Western corner of the walls, beyond the pavement of a later building, the archaeologists will find almost 300 fragments of prisms recording the royal annals of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, besides a prisms of Esarhaddon which was almost perfect.

Related Topics:
Sennacherib - Esarhaddon - Ashurbanipal

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After the Second World War, several excavations had been carried out by Iraqi archaeologists.

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