Fall of Nineveh

In 612 BCE, a coalition of Babylonians and Medes captured and sacked Nineveh, the great capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The fall of the city, which had been the political heart of the most powerful state the Near East had yet seen, effectively broke Assyrian power. Within a few years the empire was gone, and the region's balance shifted to Babylon and Media.

Assyria had risen over centuries to dominate Mesopotamia, the Levant, and for a time Egypt, using a formidable army, mass deportations, and a reputation for brutality that its own royal inscriptions proudly advertised. Nineveh, on the Tigris near modern Mosul in Iraq, was transformed under King Sennacherib around 700 BCE into a vast showpiece city with monumental palaces, gardens, and an elaborate water system. His grandson Ashurbanipal assembled there a famous library of cuneiform tablets, a major source for our knowledge of Mesopotamian literature and scholarship. Yet Assyria's conquered subjects resented its rule, and after Ashurbanipal's death, probably in the 630s or 620s BCE, the empire was weakened by succession disputes and civil war.

The crisis came when Nabopolassar, a Babylonian leader, broke away from Assyrian control around 626 BCE and founded a new dynasty. He later allied with Cyaxares, king of the Medes, whose forces from the Iranian plateau had been pressing on Assyria's heartland. The Medes took the old religious center of Assur in 614 BCE, and the allies then joined forces. In 612 BCE they besieged Nineveh, reportedly for about three months, before breaking through its walls. The Babylonian Chronicle, a contemporary record, describes the city's fall and its heavy plunder. Archaeology confirms burning and destruction at the palaces and temples. Later traditions say that flooding of the Tigris helped bring down the defenses, but this comes from much later writers and is uncertain. The Assyrian king Sin-shar-ishkun seems to have died in the defense of the city.

Assyrian resistance continued for a time under Ashur-uballit II, who established a remnant regime at Harran in the west. Harran fell in 610 BCE, and an attempt to retake it, supported by Egypt, failed. Assyria was never restored as a political power.

The empire's destruction reshaped the Near East. Babylon, under Nabopolassar and then his son Nebuchadnezzar II, inherited much of Assyria's territory in the Neo-Babylonian Empire, while the Medes expanded across Anatolia and Iran. A few decades later, both would give way to Persian power. Nineveh itself was never rebuilt on its former scale, and its ruins lay buried until nineteenth-century excavations revealed its palaces and library. The Hebrew prophets Nahum and Zephaniah foretold or celebrated the city's downfall, and its fate became a lasting symbol of the transience of imperial might.