Once Assyria’s second capital, the ancient city of Nimrud lies about 37km southeast of Mosul, on the eastern bank of the River Tigris, south of Nineveh. It was first designated as the Assyrian capital by Ashurnasirpal II in 879BC and was known as Kalhu (mentioned in Genesis as Calah). Kalhu was one of the four great cities said to have been built by Nimrod himself. The other three are Nineveh, Rehoboth, and Resen. (Genesis 10, v. 11, 12) Kalhu in the Hebrew tongue means complete or maturity and it wouldn’t be long before this evident truth that Assyria’s great reign had reached its completeness.
Later, with the accession of King Sargon II, Khorsabad replaced it as the new capital in about 720BC. SARGON II (763 - 705 BC) King of Assyria, was one of the great kings of Assyria during the last century of its history. He extended and consolidated the conquests of his father Tiglath-pileser III. His many conquests included Babylon, Armenia, Philistia, and ancient Israel, which was wiped out by its defeat. Sargon died in battle in one of the mountain districts in Persia. In 612BC the Medes of Northern Persia destroyed it at the same time as the fall Nineveh.
The British under Henry A. Layard excavated Nimrud, and subsequent excavations by Sir Max Mallowen discovered vast palaces of the Assyrian kings. The most impressive of these is that of King Ashurnasirpal II, the city’s founding monarch. Impressive statuary at the palace entrance shows two hawk-winged lions with human heads, in the well-known Assyrian style.
A further great discovery made by Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud, was the Palace of Ashur-nasir-pal II on the citadel of Nimrud (ancient Kalhu) during his sojourn in Mesopotamia between 1847 and 1851. Using local workmen, Layard excavated stone bas-relief -- some still lining, others fallen -- in the debris of the mud brick walls of the "public rooms" of the Palace. The public rooms are the ones that seem to have been frequented by Ashur-nasir-pal II’s public officials (civil, military and religious) and visited by representatives of the peoples he conquered.
Despite several subsequent attempts to make further excavations at the site of Nimrud, for nearly half-a-century, except for essentially private visits/excavations to the site of Nimrud by Iraqi families and antiquities dealers, to pick up fragments or re-excavate in the Palace ruins, interest in Nimrud waned. Also, there seemed to be nearly enough pieces of Assyrian sculpture around to satisfy interested collectors and museums. Anyway, the world political situation established different sets of priorities. No work by trained archaeologists was done again at Nimrud and the Northwest Palace until 1949, when, a century after Layard, Max Mallowan, on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and the British Museum, re-opened the site and paid attention to this monument of Ashur-nasir-pal II's reign.
To view a time line: http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/civil_n2/hist_1.html
Haberman, Frederick; Tracing Our Ancestors, Covenant Publishing Company,
Hislop, Rev. Alexander, The Two Babylons or The Papal Worship, Loizeaux Geneva Bible, A Facsimile of the 1599 edition,
L.L. Brown Publishing, 1995: Layard, A. H., Nineveh and Its Remains, 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam,
Strong, James, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible,
Wright, George Ernest, The Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible, The Westminster Press, 1956: Philadelphia, PA
Written by: Scott C. Malo