Nineveh

Nineveh is not a disputed identification. It is two mounds on the east bank of the Tigris across from the centre of Mosul. Kuyunjik is the citadel mound that held the palaces and the library, and Nebi Yunus lies about a kilometre south and held Esarhaddon's arsenal. Around them runs a wall circuit of roughly 12 kilometres enclosing some 750 hectares, with fifteen named gates. Sennacherib rebuilt the city on that scale after 700 BC and recorded the work in his own inscriptions. For centuries nobody could say where the city had stood. Adam Clarke wrote in 1832 that Nineveh was so completely destroyed that its situation was not even known, and that the city of Mossoul was supposed to be near the place. Claudius James Rich had already surveyed the mounds in 1820 and made the first modern plan of them, published after his death in 1836. Paul-Emile Botta dug Kuyunjik in 1842, found little near the surface, moved north to Khorsabad, uncovered the palace of Sargon II and announced that site as Nineveh. Khorsabad is Dur-Sharrukin, Sargon's own new capital, and the mistake was corrected within a decade. Austen Henry Layard reached Kuyunjik in 1847 and found the South-West Palace of Sennacherib with its long sequence of wall reliefs. His two books, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849) and Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853), sold widely, and they are why the name came back into ordinary English reading. Hormuzd Rassam, born in Mosul into the Assyrian Christian community and trained under Layard, opened the North Palace of Ashurbanipal in 1853 with its lion-hunt reliefs and a large further body of tablets, and told the story himself in Asshur and the Land of Nimrod (1897). His share of the work was undervalued for a century, and this page names him beside Layard rather than under him. R. Campbell Thompson worked the temple area and the walls from 1927 to 1932, the Iraqi Department of Antiquities reconstructed several gates from the 1960s, and David Stronach's Berkeley excavations at the Halzi Gate between 1987 and 1990 found the gateway narrowed for defence and human remains with arrowheads lying in the passage, which is physical evidence of a fight at the gate in the city's last days. Sennacherib's palace at Kuyunjik gave up the Lachish reliefs, found by Layard in 1847 and now in the British Museum. The sequence shows the siege of Lachish in 701 BC in detail: the ramp, the battering rams, archers and slingers, defenders on the walls, prisoners and families leaving with carts, and the king enthroned outside the city reviewing the spoil, with a caption naming him and the city. That is the Assyrian army's own picture of an event 2 Kings 18 reports from the other side, and nothing about it is disputed. The Taylor Prism, a hexagonal clay prism found at Nineveh in 1830 and now in the British Museum, carries Sennacherib's own record of the same campaign, with two near-duplicates in Chicago and Jerusalem. It claims forty-six walled cities of Judah, names Hezekiah, lists heavy tribute, and says the king in Jerusalem was shut up like a bird in a cage. It never claims the capture of Jerusalem, and for a royal annal that lists every conquest, that silence is loud. It does not prove the angel of 2 Kings 19:35, and it does mean both records agree that the city was not taken. The tribute figures do not agree: Scripture gives three hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold, and the prism gives thirty talents of gold with a much larger silver figure. Three explanations are on offer, that the two documents count different things, that the Assyrian scribe inflated the silver as royal annals do elsewhere, or that the weight systems differ, and the evidence does not settle between them. Layard and Rassam recovered something over 30,000 tablets and fragments from Kuyunjik, most of them now in the British Museum, and among them the standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. In 1872 George Smith, an assistant at the museum, read Tablet XI and found a flood account: a man warned to build a boat, the boat sealed with pitch, family and animals aboard, the flood, a landing on a mountain, birds sent out to test the water, and a sacrifice once the boat is left. He announced it on 3 December 1872 and published The Chaldean Account of Genesis in 1876. The parallel is real and close, and this page prints it rather than trimming it. What the parallel means is disputed, and three positions hold the field. The first is that Genesis draws on the Mesopotamian tradition, which has been the majority reading in critical scholarship since Smith and rests on the age of the cuneiform copies and the shared order of scenes. The second is that both descend independently from a real event remembered across the region, so the shared scenes are shared memory and the differences carry the weight. The third is that Genesis is a deliberate answer to the Mesopotamian version, and reads the differences as argument rather than accident. The differences matter on any of the three. In the Babylonian account the gods send the flood because people have grown noisy, they are frightened by what they started, and they crowd over the survivor's sacrifice. In Genesis there is one God, one moral cause, and no panic. A global flood is presented on this site as a widely held belief rather than as the site's own assertion, and the flood itself is taken up on its own page. The Babylonian Chronicle records that Sennacherib was killed by his son in a revolt in 681 BC, and Esarhaddon's own inscriptions refer to the killing and the fight for the throne that followed. Assyrian sources centre on one son whose name is read Arda-Mulissi, which corresponds closely to the Adrammelech of 2 Kings 19:37, and Simo Parpola set that case out in 1980. Scripture names two sons and the Assyrian record centres on one, and this page says so rather than smoothing it. On Assyrian cruelty the kings are their own witnesses. Royal inscriptions from Ashurnasirpal II onward describe flaying, impaling and piling up the heads of the defeated, and the palace reliefs at Nineveh show deportation and impalement. That is the background to Nahum's city of blood and to Jonah's reluctance, and this page states it plainly. The primary source for the fall is a Babylonian Chronicle tablet in the British Museum, published by C. J. Gadd as The Fall of Nineveh in 1923. It records that in the fourteenth year of Nabopolassar the Babylonians and the Medes joined forces, besieged Nineveh from the month of Simanu, made three assaults, took the city, carried off great spoil and turned it into ruin heaps. Nahum 2:6 says the river gates are thrown open and the palace collapses, and readers take that line two ways. On the flood reading, drawn from Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC working from the earlier Ctesias, the river rose, broke a long stretch of wall and let the enemy in. The weakness there is the source, which is late, secondhand and unreliable elsewhere, and the Babylonian Chronicle says nothing about a flood. On the gates reading, the Khosr river ran through the city between two gates that were the weak points in an otherwise strong wall, so Nahum names the place where the wall could be forced, and the hard fighting excavated at the Halzi Gate fits an assault. Both readings are live, and this page settles neither. The southern mound carries a long tradition that Jonah is buried there. A church stood on the site and was succeeded by the Nabi Yunus mosque, venerated by Muslims and by local Christians, and the mound was never fully excavated because the shrine stood on it. The mosque was destroyed with explosives in July 2014, and tunnels dug under the ruins afterwards exposed Assyrian palace walls and inscriptions of Esarhaddon that had been sealed beneath it for centuries. The burial tradition is a tradition. Its witnesses are medieval rather than ancient, and no inscription or object ties the mound to Jonah. What is demonstrable is that more than one community venerated the site for centuries, and that an Assyrian palace lies under it. One further note belongs here: this site holds no verified photograph of the Lachish reliefs, the Taylor Prism, the flood tablet or the mounds themselves, so this band carries no pictures. That follows the site's rule on verified images rather than filling the space with an unrelated plate.