Junction city on the Tigris beside ancient Nineveh
Mosul, capital of Iraq’s Nineveh Governorate and the country’s second-largest city, spreads across both banks of the Tigris. Its Arabic name means linking point, and on its eastern side lie the ruins of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital that was once the biggest city on Earth.
Nineveh was settled as early as 6000 BC and became a centre for the worship of Ishtar. Around 700 BC King Sennacherib made it the Assyrian capital, and building on a vast scale let it overtake Babylon; many scholars think the Hanging Gardens actually stood here. The Kuyunjik mound inside modern Mosul holds the palaces of Sennacherib and his successors, among them Ashurbanipal, whose famous library was kept there. After the empire collapsed, survivors founded the town of Mepsila from the ruins, which took over Nineveh’s role as the Tigris crossing on the road toward Anatolia. Xenophon may have noted it in 401 BC.
Christianity took root among local Assyrians as early as the first century. Arab armies annexed the city to the Rashidun Caliphate in 637 or 641, and later dynasties followed, from the Arab Hamdanids of the tenth century to the Zengids, whose Mosul held off Saladin in 1182 and again in 1185. Its ruler Badr al-Din Lu’lu’ submitted to the Mongol Hulagu in 1258, sparing the city, and in 1165 the traveller Benjamin of Tudela found about 7,000 Jews living there.
The city was famous in the thirteenth century for brass vessels inlaid with silver, and of all medieval Islamic artefacts, Mosul brasswork carries the most inscriptions. Marble and oil have long been key local products, and the surrounding region holds rich oil reserves.
Modern Mosul has spread from its western old town to cover both the Left Bank and the Right Bank, as residents call them. Most people are Arabs who speak a local dialect known as Maslawi, alongside Kurdish, Assyrian and other communities, and the University of Mosul’s medical college is well known. Nicknames include the Pearl of the North and the Green.
Source: Mosul
