The world’s largest city fell in 612 BCE and never recovered
Nineveh sat on the Tigris inside today’s Mosul and served as the Neo-Assyrian realm’s chief metropolis—briefly the biggest on Earth—until Medes, Babylonians, and Scythians sacked it in 612 BCE after Assyrian civil war. Political primacy never returned afterward.
The English name passes through Latin and Greek from Biblical Hebrew Nīnəweh and ultimately from Akkadian Ninua. Texts from Mari wrote Ninuwa, Aramaic and Arabic say Ninawa, and Syriac Ninwe. The two main mounds carry later names: Nabī Yūnus is Arabic for Prophet Jonah, while Kuyunjiq, according to the excavator Layard, is a Turkish diminutive of the word for sheep, possibly connected to the Qara Qoyunlu dynasty.
The ruins spread over 750 hectares of level plain where the Khosr joins the Tigris, enclosed by a fortification wall twelve kilometres long, and about a third now lies under the suburbs of eastern Mosul. North of the Khosr is Kuyunjiq with its acropolis; to the south is Nebi Yunus, where the mosque of Jonah stands above a palace of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. Benjamin of Tudela described the site in 1170, showing the location was never forgotten.
People lived here as early as 6000 BC. Deep soundings reached layers of the Hassuna culture, and in the Halaf period Nineveh was an ordinary farming village much like nearby Tepe Gawra and Arpachiyah. Around 5000 BC it became an Ubaid village, and in the Late Chalcolithic it was one of the few in Upper Mesopotamia to grow into a proto-city, reaching forty hectares between 4500 and 4000 BC.
Under the Neo-Assyrian kings it became the empire’s chief city and one of the richest anywhere, the largest in the world for about fifty years. After a civil war weakened Assyria, Babylonians, Medes and Scythians sacked it in 612 BC, and it never regained its political standing.
Source: Nineveh
