"Ninus strengthened the greatness of his acquired dominion by continued possession. Having subdued, therefore, his neighbors, when, by an accession of forces, being still further strengthened, he went forth against other tribes, and every new victory paved the way for another, he subdued all the peoples of the East," this stated from our own accounts of ancient history.
Thus then Nimrod, or Ninus, was the builder of Nineveh and the origin of the name of that city, as “the habitation of Ninus,” is accounted for.Light is thereby, at the same time, cast on the fact that the name of the chief part of the ruins of Nineveh is Nimrud at this day. Having the origin of this great city laid to rest, what became of this wonder of ancient capital?
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.(Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib," 1815)
So wrote Byron of the siege of Jerusalem, undertaken by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BC from Nineveh capital of the greatest empire the world had ever known. For two and one-half millennia, the only known account of this momentous event was in II Kings 18-19, which reports that Sennacherib's invincible army was laid low by the angel of the Lord, after which Sennacherib returned to Nineveh where his sons murdered him. Nineveh itself fell to the Medes and Babylonians in 612 BC, its splendor buried under the shifting dust of northern Mesopotamia.
In 1847 the young British adventurer Austen Henry Layard explored the ruins of Nineveh and rediscovered the lost palace of Sennacherib across the Tigris River from modern Mosul in northern Iraq. Inscribed in cuneiform on the colossal sculptures in the doorway of its throne room was Sennacherib's own account of his siege of Jerusalem. It differed in detail from the biblical account of events, but confirmed that Sennacherib did not capture the city. The palace's interior walls were paneled with huge stone slabs, carved in relief with images of Sennacherib's victories. Here one could see the king and army, foreign landscapes, and conquered enemy cities, including a remarkably accurate depiction of the Judean city of Lachish, whose destruction by the Assyrians was recorded in II Kings 18:13-14.
Considering that the palace had been destroyed by an intense conflagration during the sack of Nineveh in 612 BC, the massive walls and many of the relief sculptures of Sennacherib's throne-room suite were surprisingly well preserved. In the 1960s, because of the palace's historical importance and unique preservation, the Iraq Department of Antiquities consolidated the walls and sculptures and roofed the site over as the Sennacherib Palace Site Museum at Nineveh, where visitors could tour one of only two preserved Assyrian palaces in the world. (The other is the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud, also restored as a site museum.)
Hislop, Rev. Alexander, The Two Babylons or The Papal Worship,
Loizeaux Brothers, 1959: Geneva Bible, A Facsimile of the 1599 edition ,
L.L. Brown Justin’s Trogus
Layard, Austen Henry, Nineveh and its Remains
Strong, James, Strong’s Wright
George Ernest, The Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible, The Westminster Press, 1956: Philadelphia, PA
Written by: Scott Malo