Ancient Nineveh
Across the Tigris from central Mosul lie the mounds of Nineveh, once the greatest city on Earth. Around 700 BCE the Assyrian king Sennacherib made it his capital and ringed it with a wall some 12 kilometres around, pierced by fifteen monumental gates and guarded by colossal human-headed winged bulls — the lamassu — that could weigh up to 30 tonnes. At its centre stood the palace he proudly called the "Palace Without Rival," its halls lined with carved reliefs of his wars, his hunts and his building works, and fed by an ingenious system of canals and a great stone aqueduct.
Sennacherib's grandson Ashurbanipal made Nineveh a city of learning, gathering tens of thousands of clay tablets into what is often called the world's oldest royal library. Among them lay a tablet that would astonish the modern world: in 1872 the self-taught scholar George Smith deciphered a Babylonian account of a great flood — a hero building a boat and releasing a dove — written long before the Book of Genesis. It is the flood story of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it was found here.
Nineveh fell in 612 BCE, besieged and burned by the Medes and Babylonians, an end that finished the Assyrian Empire. The Bible remembered it as the "exceedingly great city" that Jonah was sent to warn. In 2016 ISIS bulldozed its restored gates; since then Iraqi and Italian teams have rebuilt them, and an archaeological park now welcomes visitors in through the restored Adad Gate.
3 stops to discover
- 1
The Restored Mashki Gate
The Mashki Gate was one of the great gateways in Nineveh's 12-kilometre wall, where flocks were once led down to drink at the Tigris. Bulldozed by ISIS in 2016, it has been rebuilt by an Iraqi-American team — and during the work, carved Assyrian stone reliefs never seen before were found buried in it.
- 2
Palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal
On the Kuyunjik mound stood the palaces of the Assyrian kings — Sennacherib's 'Palace Without Rival' and the great library of Ashurbanipal, whose tens of thousands of clay tablets preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh and much of what we know of Mesopotamian literature.
- 3
The Great Walls and Gates
Nineveh was ringed by a wall some twelve kilometres long, pierced by fifteen named gates such as the Adad, Nergal and Shamash gates. Several have been partly reconstructed, giving a sense of the scale of what was once the largest city on earth.
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