When was Nineveh destroyed?

Who destroyed Nineveh

The best witness is a clay tablet, the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle, part of the Babylonian Chronicles in the British Museum (BM 21901), published by C. J. Gadd in 1923. It reports the war year by year. In 614 BC the Medes, from the mountains of today’s Iran, took Ashur, Assyria’s old holy city, and their king Cyaxares made a pact with Nabopolassar of Babylon. In 612 BC the two armies marched up the Tigris together. They fought at Nineveh from the month of Simanu to the month of Abu, roughly June to August, then made a great assault and took the city. The chronicle tells of enormous plunder and a city turned into ruin mounds. The tablet is broken where it gives the fate of Assyria’s king, Sin-shar-ishkun; most historians think he died in the fall.

The empire did not die in a day. An Assyrian prince, Ashur-uballit II, was crowned at Harran, in today’s Turkey. Harran fell in 610 BC, and an attempt to retake it with Egyptian help failed in 609 BC. That same year Pharaoh Necho, marching north to Assyria’s aid, killed King Josiah of Judah at Megiddo (2 Kings 23:29; Kings says Necho went up “against” Assyria, but the Babylonian record shows Egypt fighting on its side). In 605 BC, at Carchemish, Babylon crushed what was left (Jeremiah 46:2).

From Jonah to the fall

1. About 780 BC: Jonah prophesies under Jeroboam II of Israel (2 Kings 14:25).
2. 763 BC: an eclipse of the sun, listed in Assyria’s own records.
3. 722 BC: Assyria takes Samaria and deports the people of Israel (2 Kings 17:6).
4. About 700 BC: Sennacherib makes Nineveh his capital.
5. 668 to about 631 BC: Ashurbanipal reigns and gathers his famous library there.
6. 614 BC: Ashur falls to the Medes.
7. 612 BC: Nineveh falls.
8. 609 BC: the last Assyrian stand at Harran.

So the city Jonah saw spared stood for about a century and a half more. In those years it became the most feared capital on earth.

The prophets who saw it coming

A whole book of the Bible is about this fall. Nahum, a prophet of Judah, writes “a revelation about Nineveh” (Nahum 1:1) that pictures chariots in the streets and treasure carried off: “The gates of the rivers are opened, and the palace is dissolved” (2:6). His verdict is pitiless.

It will happen that all those who look at you will flee from you, and say, ‘Nineveh is laid waste! Who will mourn for her?’ Where will I seek comforters for you?

Nahum’s book, like Jonah’s, ends with a question, and Zephaniah foresaw the same end (where Nineveh is today). The book of Tobit, in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, has old Tobias hear the news before he dies (Tobit 14:15). Tobit names the conquerors as Nebuchadnezzar and Ahasuerus; history says Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar’s father, and Cyaxares.

A flood and a funeral pyre

Greek writers turned the fall into legend. Diodorus of Sicily, following the earlier and unreliable Ctesias, says an oracle had promised that Nineveh would not fall until the river became its enemy. In the third year of the siege, he writes, the river rose with rain and broke down a stretch of the wall, and the last king, whom the Greeks called Sardanapalus, burned himself in his palace with his treasure and his women (Library 2.26–27). Many readers have connected that flood with Nahum’s opened “gates of the rivers.” Byron made Sardanapalus a play in 1821, and Delacroix painted his death in 1827, a canvas now in the Louvre. Herodotus says only that the Medes took Nineveh (Histories 1.106). Two centuries later, the Greek soldier Xenophon marched past its empty walls and called the place Mespila, never naming Nineveh.