Nineveh

One of four major cities of Assyria (the others were Ashur, Calah, and Arbela) and situated on eastern bank of the Euphrates just north and across from the modern city of Mosul, Nineveh became its capital only in the last few decades of the Assyrian Empire in the 7th cent. BC. Gen 10:11 attributes the founding of the city to ">Nimrod, the great hunter. The phraseology of the verse also suggests that the city was a conglomerate of several smaller cities/towns, including "Rehoboth Ir, Calah and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah: that is a great city."

The city has ancient ">Sumerian roots, founded possibly earlier than 3000 BC. The city gained its importance partly because it was the centre of the cult of Isthar, goddess of love and war. It became the royal residences of kings Shalmaneser I (c.1260 BC) and Tiglath-pileser I (c.1100 BC) of the old ">Assyrian Empire, and was made only capital of the neo-Assyrian Empire by ">Sennacherib in the 8th cent. BC, when he began a lavish building programme, digging grand canals and aqueducts to water its garden and constructing enormous walls and gates, some of which can still be seen in its present ruins. At the height of its influence it held a population of some 175,000 people (three times Calah's). ">Jonah describes the city, at about this time, as "a very important city—a visit required three days" (Jon 3:3).

The Assyrian Empire, and the city, went into swift decline after a coalition of ">Babylonians, ">Medes and ">Scythians captured and razed the city in 612 BC; by the time of the Greek historian ">Xenophon (401 BC), the city was already unrecognizable. It remained forgotten, the substance of myths, until it was rediscovered by the archaeologist Sir Austen Layard and his team in 1847.

Wish-List Notice: We would like very much to construct a virtual "Nineveh Museum." If you have source materiel—photographs of sites and artefacts related to the city—that we can use, we would love to hear from you.

Resources:

Paul Ferguson, "Who was the 'King of Nineveh' in Jonah 3:6?" Tyndale Bulletin 47.2 (1996): 301-314.☰