The Assyrian Capital Nineveh

Sir Austen Henry Layard selected as his site a place some 10 miles down the Tigris River from Khorsabad. The natives called it Kuyunjik. It turned out to be the Assyrian capital Nineveh.

Biblical names and events had begun to come to life.

Nineveh was the royal capital of Assyria under its last 3 great rulers:

1. Sennacherib
2. Esarhaddon
3. Ashurbanipal.

The Old Testament (II Kings 18:13) writes:

The mounds where Nineveh was built by Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal revealed palaces, temples, and works of art that surpassed those of Sargon.

The area where the remains of Esarhaddon’s palaces are now under a Muslim mosque and cannot be excavated.

• It was erected over the burial place of the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale when he refused to bring Yahweh’s message to Nineveh.

Layard had read in ancient Greek records that an officer in Alexander’s army saw a “place of pyramids and remains of an ancient city”—a city that was already buried in Alexander’s time!

• Layard dug it up, too, and it turned out to be Nimrud, Assyria’s military center.
• It was there that Shalmaneser II set up an obelisk to record his military expeditions and conquests.
• That obelisk is now on exhibit at the British Museum. It lists, among the kings who were made to pay tribute, “Jehu, son of Omri, king of Israel.”

Again, the Mesopotamian inscriptions and biblical texts supported each other!

Astounded by increasingly frequent corroboration of the biblical narratives by archaeological finds, the Assyriologists, turned to the 10th chapter of the Book of Genesis.

Nimrod

There, Nimrod—“a mighty hunter by the grace of Yahweh”—was described as the founder of all the kingdoms of Mesopotamia.

There were indeed mounds the natives called Calah, lying between Nineveh and Nimrud. When teams under W. Andrae excavated the area from 1903 to 1914, they uncovered the ruins of Ashur, the Assyrian religious center and its earliest capital.

Of all the Assyrian cities mentioned in the Bible, only Ressen remains to be found. The name means “horse’s bridle”. Perhaps it was the location of the royal stables of Assyria.

At about the same time as Ashur was being excavated, R. Koldewey completed the excavation of:

• Babylon
• the biblical Babel—a vast place of palaces, temples, hanging gardens
• the inevitable ziggurat.

Before long, artifacts and inscriptions unveiled the history of the 2 competing empires of Mesopotamia:

• Babylonia in the south
• Assyria in the north.

Rising and falling, fighting and coexisting, the two constituted a high civilization that encompassed some 1,500 years. They both rose circa 1900 BC.

Ashur and Nineveh were finally captured and destroyed by the Babylonians in 614 and 612 BC respectively.

As predicted by the biblical prophets, Babylon itself came to an inglorious end when Cyrus the Achaemenid conquered it in 539 BC.

They were rivals throughout their history. But there was little significant difference between Assyria and Babylonia in cultural or material matters.

• Assyria called its chief deity Ashur (“all-seeing”).
• Babylonia hailed Marduk (“son of the pure mound”).

But they pantheons were otherwise virtually alike.

The true treasures of these kingdoms were their written records:

• thousands of inscriptions in the cuneiform script
• cosmological tales
• epic poems
• histories of kings
• temple records
• commercial contracts
• marriage and divorce records
• astronomical tables
• astrological forecasts
• mathematical formulas
• geographic lists
• grammar and vocabulary school texts
• texts dealing with the names,
• genealogies, epithets, deeds, powers, and duties of the gods.

The common language that formed the cultural, historical, and religious bond between Assyria and Babylonia was Akkadian.

It was the first known Semitic language, akin to but predating Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, and Canaanite.

Akkad

The Assyrians and Babylonians did not invent their language or script called Akkadian. Many of their tablets bore the postscript that they had been copied from earlier originals.

The Book of Genesis writes: “The beginning of his kingdom: Babel and Erech and Akkad.”

Could Akkad have been a royal capital that preceded Babylon and Nineveh?

There is evidence of an Akkadian kingdom from the 3rd millennium BC established by a much earlier ruler, who called himself a sharrukin (“righteous ruler”).

He claimed in his inscriptions that:

• his empire stretched, by the grace of his god Enlil, from the Lower Sea (the Persian Gulf) to the Upper Sea (believed to be the Mediterranean)
• “at the wharf of Akkad, he made moor ships” from many distant lands

There was a leap—backward—of some 2,000 years from the Assyrian Sargon of Dur Sharrukin to Sargon of Akkad.

Assyria and Babylonia were the branches of the Akkadian trunk.

The mystery of such an early Mesopotamian civilization deepened, however, as inscriptions recording the achievements and genealogy of Sargon of Akkad were found.

They stated that his full title was “King of Akkad, King of Kish”; they explained that before he assumed the throne, he had been a counselor to the “rulers of Kish.”

Was there, then—the scholars asked themselves—an even earlier kingdom, that of Kish, which preceded Akkad?

Once again, the biblical verses gained in significance.

Many scholars have speculated that Sargon of Akkad was the biblical Nimrod. If one reads “Kish” for “Kush” in the above biblical verses, it would seem Nimrud was indeed preceded by Kish, as claimed by Sargon.

The scholars then began to accept literally the rest of his inscriptions:

Was the biblical Erech identical with the Uruk of Sargon’s inscriptions? As the site now called Warka was unearthed, that was found to be the case.

The Ur referred to by Sargon was none other than the biblical Ur, the Mesopotamian birthplace of Abraham.