Where is Nineveh today?

Across the river from Mosul

Mosul stands on the west bank of the Tigris, about 350 kilometers (220 miles) north of Baghdad. Its old city faces the river. On the other side, the east bank, lie the remains of Nineveh: a long circuit of earthen walls, about 12 kilometers around, and two great mounds inside them. Over the last century Mosul spread across the river, so today the ancient walls are hemmed in by streets and houses. Nineveh is not the same place as Mosul, but it now sits inside the modern city, and the province around it still bears its name: Nineveh Governorate.

The bigger mound is Kuyunjik, where the kings had their palaces. The smaller is Nebi Yunus, “the prophet Jonah,” named for a shrine that tradition held to be Jonah’s tomb. For centuries a mosque on top made digging there almost impossible.

The capital of Assyria

Genesis already lists Nineveh among the first cities of Assyria (Genesis 10:11). It became the empire’s capital under Sennacherib, who ruled from about 705 to 681 BC. He rebuilt its walls and raised a palace he called “without rival.” The Bible remembers him there too.

So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, went home, and lived at Nineveh.

That verse closes his failed siege of Jerusalem. On the walls of his palace he had carved a campaign he was prouder of, the siege of Lachish in Judah, now in the British Museum. In the book of Jonah, Nineveh is simply “that great city,” with “more than one hundred twenty thousand persons” (Jonah 4:11). Jonah’s own walk through it is told in why the book of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur.

Fallen, and found again

In 612 BC an alliance of Babylonians and Medes stormed Nineveh and burned it. The prophet Nahum wrote a whole book on its fall (Nahum 1:1), and Zephaniah saw it coming.

He will stretch out his hand against the north, destroy Assyria, and will make Nineveh a desolation, as dry as the wilderness.

Two centuries later, the Greek soldier Xenophon marched past a vast deserted city with ruined walls, which he called Mespila (Anabasis 3.4.10–12). Local memory kept the name, and the shrine of Jonah on its mound. Then the diggers came. The French consul Paul-Émile Botta tried Kuyunjik in 1842 and gave up. Austen Henry Layard, from 1847, found Sennacherib’s palace, and his team uncovered tens of thousands of clay tablets from the library of King Ashurbanipal. Among them was the flood story that George Smith read in 1872 (the Gilgamesh flood).

War and the ruins

In 2014 the Islamic State seized Mosul. That July its fighters blew up the shrine of Nebi Yunus. In 2015 they filmed themselves defacing the winged bulls of Nineveh’s Nergal Gate, and they later bulldozed parts of its rebuilt gates. After Iraqi forces retook the city in 2017, archaeologists entered tunnels the militants had dug under the ruined shrine, looking for loot, and found parts of an Assyrian royal palace with inscriptions of King Esarhaddon. Iraqi and foreign teams are back at work on the mounds. And in the villages of the Nineveh Plain, Syriac and Chaldean Christians still keep a three-day fast each year, the Rogation of the Ninevites, in memory of the city that repented.