Nineveh
- History Fix Podcast
- 5 days ago
- 20 min read
Episode 147: How a Rediscovered Biblical City Provided a Wealth of Knowledge About the Ancient World
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Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if something is real or imaginary, fact or fiction, especially if that thing came from thousands of years ago. Take the writings of Plato, ancient Greek philosopher. Plato wrote in the form of dialogues, conversations, almost always involving his teacher Socrates. And in these dialogues, he told stories that taught lessons, we call these parables. Jesus did the same. He didn’t write them down but his followers did. Jesus told all sorts of parables: the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan. He told stories to teach people lessons. And then we have other famous texts, the Iliad and the Odyssey credited to Homer, the ancient Greek bard, more lessons. But it becomes a bit murky you see. Because all of these, the writings of Plato, the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey, they all include both real people, places, and events and fictional people, places, and events. So how do we know what’s real and what’s a myth? Socrates… real. Odysseus… myth. Troy… real. Trojan war… myth. Jerusalem… real. Atlantis… probably myth. How do we unravel fact from fiction when everyone who knows the truth has been dead for millenia? For example, there’s a city mentioned in the Bible 19 times called Nineveh. Nineveh is written about very much in a lesson teaching way. It’s described as evil, a sinful city that was ultimately destroyed because of its wickedness. It’s also used as an example of God’s mercy in the story of Jonah. In the Bible, Nineveh is a setting for stories, an example to teach a lesson. But was it a real place? Many thought not. After all, there was absolutely no evidence that the city of Nineveh had ever existed outside of what was written in the Bible. Until it was rediscovered in 1845 and, with it, a wealth of knowledge about a people who once ruled the ancient world. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Not too long ago I put out two part episodes about lost cities, a collection of stories about lost cities, episodes 131 and 132. I talked about Troy from the Greek myths the Iliad and the Odyssey and how no one believed it was a real place until it was actually dug up in northwestern Turkey in 1871. Well there’s one lost city I left out that I can’t stop thinking about: Nineveh. I’ve been researching the history of writing for a live show I have coming up this Wednesday, January 28th in Manteo, North Carolina, shameless plug, and Nineveh plays a significant role in that story, the history of writing, which is really the history of history. So, this week, I decided to deep dive into the story of Nineveh, the capital city of the ancient empire of Assyria, once the largest empire in the world.
As I said in the opener, Nineveh is mentioned in the Bible 19 times. So let’s start there. Because, whether we believed it to be a real place or a fictional setting, that’s where our knowledge about Nineveh begins. So what does the Bible say about Nineveh. Well, it was essentially this evil, wicked city, the enemy of Israel. Nineveh is described in the Bible as being very cruel and ruthless. It’s also known for its great wealth, power, and prestige as the capital of the Assyrian empire. But God is unhappy with Nineveh for obvious reasons. They are cruel conquerors who worship idols. So he sends Jonah. He tells Jonah to go deliver a message to the Ninevites, the people of Nineveh. He’s supposed to go tell them that God is unhappy with them and that judgement is coming and they should repent for their sins. Jonah doesn’t want to do this. The Ninevites are scary. So he tries to run from this command and is famously swallowed by a whale or a large fish or whatever. Inside the belly of this big fish, Jonah prays for three days and three nights. He prays for forgiveness for his disobedience so god has the fish barf him back out or whatever. He goes to Nineveh and he tells them you know “you guys have been misbehaving over here. God told me to tell you that you need to ask for forgiveness or he’s gonna put a hurtin’ on you,” in a matter of words. Now, Jonah’s expectations are low cause these are bad dudes, these Ninevites, these guys are bullies. But, surprisingly, they fall to their knees and they beg for forgiveness. From the king to the lowliest peasant, they humble themselves and they repent and God forgives them. It’s a story meant to teach a lesson, a few lessons, really. Sinners will be punished and God has mercy on those who repent.
Later, also in the Old Testament, the prophet Nahum (Nay-hum) prophesies that Nineveh will be destroyed. He’s like “they may have scraped by last time but this time, God’s gonna let um have it. Repentance has an expiration date.” And Nineveh is destroyed in 612 BC, sacked by Babylon and some other cities who are carrying out God’s will to destroy this wicked city. Jesus also mentions Nineveh briefly in the New Testament saying in the book of Matthew quote “The people of Nineveh will also stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it, for they repented of their sins at the preaching of Jonah. Now someone greater than Jonah is here—but you refuse to repent,” end quote.
So people had been reading those words for over a thousand years but that was it. That was the only evidence that the city of Nineveh ever existed. It certainly wasn’t there any more, wherever it even was. There were a couple of possible references to it in ancient Greek writings. Greek historians Diodorus Siculus (Die-oh-door-us Sick-uh-lus) and Xenophon (Zen-a-fin) both mentioned a massive city with huge walls near the Tigris River. But this easily could have been Babylon, not Nineveh. You know, different cultures are calling these old cities by different names and it gets very confusing. So those mentions in the Bible were really it. So that, coupled with the fact that there’s a whole school of thought that the story of Jonah and the whale is really more of a parable than a factual account, led many people to believe that Nineveh was a fictional place, the setting of a parable, a made up story.
By the Middle Ages people had gotten real religious. Times were tough, these were the Dark Ages. There was a lot of death and violence, famine, and sickness and people turned hard to religion. And so during the Middle Ages people became a little bit obsessed with trying to prove that the stories in the Bible were true and so they started to look for this city, Nineveh that is mentioned 19 times. But it wasn’t until the mid 1800s when archaeology sort of became a thing, that anything was discovered.
For the story of Nineveh’s rediscovery we have to go to Mosul (Mow-sool) which, in the 1800s, was part of the Ottoman Empire, but today is in northern Iraq. At the time, both France and Britain had consulates in Mosul. They also had a bit of a rivalry going which led them to sort of compete to try to locate antiquities. You know, France had the Louvre Museum where they were collecting all these treasures and Britain wanted treasures too. So both France and Britain start digging around in Mosul. This starts in 1842 when the Louvre gets the French consul there in Mosul, a guy by the name of Paul Emile Botta, to start doing some digging, see what he can find. Botta does discover a city at the modern day site of Khorsabad. It was a city built by an Assyrian king named Sargon II called Dur-Sharrukin. But, Botta mistakenly believed that he had found Nineveh. Dur-Sharrukin came before Nineveh and it was meant to be this great grand city, this capital city but it was never finished. Sargon II died and the city remained unfinished and was slowly buried by time. So, nice try Botta, but this is not Nineveh, it was its failed precursor.
But, this discovery, Botta’s discovery, caught the attention of a British explorer named Austen Henry Layard (Laird). Layard was working as an assistant to the British ambassador in Constantinople and he convinced him to fund excavations at a site called Nimrud a little bit to the south of where Botta was digging. Soon, as Layard and his team are digging into the ground there looking for whatever they might find, they unearth these massive statues of winged bulls and lions that once flanked the gates of an Assyrian palace. So this is very promising. He goes to the British Museum, he’s like “look what I found. You have to sponsor this. I bet there’s so much more out there.” So the British Museum takes over as sponsor and the excavations expand.
Layard goes across the river, across the Tigris River, and starts digging some more and it’s there that he ultimately finds the ruins of this mythic city that can only be Nineveh. It was absolutely massive. The largest city in the world at the time. It would take three entire days to walk from one side of the city to the other. It was also, just like the Greek historians said, it was surrounded by a huge wall with 18 gates. Each gate into the city was flanked by these huge statues made of alabaster depicting bulls with human heads called lamassu which were supposed to prevent evil forces from entering the city.
I know that the bible talks about Nineveh as this kind of scary debaucherous place. Jonah didn’t want to go there. But, in reading about what it was like, it kind of seems like a paradise. Like, you forget that you’re reading about a city that existed well over 2,000 years ago. It seems, in a lot of ways, like a modern city, a modern metropolis. Here I’ll tell you about it and I think you’ll see what I mean. It’s on the Tigris River, on the east bank of the Tigris River, so it’s pretty easy to get to. There are ferries that operate on the river that will take you right into the city. It gets plenty of rain and the soil is great for growing crops so once you get there you’ll find tons of orchards, fruit trees, and olive groves. Plus the wheat and barley grow like crazy, providing plenty of food to feed all the Ninevites. There are aqueducts which provide plenty of fresh drinking water too. The city is massive so, once you get inside the walls, you might want to grab a donkey or mule to ride around on. You can rent one pretty easily. You can also hop a ride on a gondola to cruise around the many canals that criss-cross the city. As you make your way around, be sure to admire the lavish palaces, temples, the ziggurat pyramid, and definitely don’t miss the terraced botanical gardens. They might have actually been the hanging gardens of Babylon mentioned by the Greeks and we just got confused and thought they were in Babylon when they were really in Nineveh. Maybe. There you’ll find all kinds of medicinal plants, herbs, and fruit trees, plus flowers from all over the empire. There’s even a game reserve where you can hunt wild boar, deer, and maybe even a lion. Hopefully you’ll catch one of the many festivals that happen in Nineveh throughout the year. There will be music, dancing, and plenty of food. They give out fresh bread, beer, and honey cakes during festivals. The shopping is excellent in Nineveh too. You’ll find all kinds of markets selling woven carpets, hemmed garments, bronze work, livestock, plus exotic goods like purple fabric from Phoenicia, spices and incense from Arabia, and wine from Syria. Food stalls line the streets as well serving local favorites like broths, flatbreads stuffed with mutton and vegetable fillings, cheese, fresh fruit, honey cakes, dates, roasted grasshoppers on a stick and spiced grilled river-carp. And there’s beer everywhere, taverns all over the city, usually with live music. The fig beer is particularly popular. But you can also find wine in the north west part of the city where the wealthier residents live. Oh and you don’t have to worry about safety at all. Nineveh is an incredibly safe city. There is almost no crime at all. Severe punishments have ensured that, like you could be impaled for stealing, make sure you’re following the laws while you’re there. But otherwise, it’s pretty great, tons to see, tons to do, lots of food and drink, lots of shopping and entertainment. Ten out of ten.
See what I mean? It doesn’t really sound as scary as Jonah thought it was gonna be. So, with Layard’s rediscovery of the city, we have evidence of all this. We have the remains of the walls and the ziggurat, and the statues, and the palaces, and the gardens, and all of it. But we have something even more informative than all that. We have the discovery of an entire library. And within that library there are thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, of clay tablets with writing on them, books, these are early books, except these books have survived for over 2,000 years because they weren’t written on paper which rots and disintegrates. They were written on clay tablets which are easily preserved. Layard said of the discovery of this library quote “The chambers I am describing appear to have been a depository for such documents [historical records and public documents]. To the height of a foot or more from the floor they were entirely filled with them; some entire, but the greater part broken into fragments,” end quote. So he found the remains of a room inside of a palace that was full of these tablets, the floor covered up to a foot or more high with them. And it’s these tablets that tell us everything we could ever want to know about Nineveh and about the ancient empire of Assyria. It’s all there.
So what do they tell us? Well they tell us that this library was the Library of Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal was one of the last kings of Assyria. He’s known as the last king of Assyria, that’s kind of his claim to fame but he wasn’t actually. There were a few kings after him, his sons, as he died decades before the collapse of the empire. I guess he’s just called the last king of Assyria cause he’s the significant king. We know that, during the time Ashurbanipal was king, based in his palace at Nineveh, the capital, Assyria was the largest empire in the world. In fact, Ashurbanipal called himself “the king of the world.” Very Jack from Titanic but, I mean he wasn’t that far off. He was king of the largest empire, to him that was the world. So, for some context, Assyria came before Greece and Rome. Greece was really just getting started as an empire when Ashurbanipal was king around 650 BC and Rome was just a small settlement at this point.
But here’s something else we learned. Ashurbanipal, king of the world, was never supposed to be king at all. In fact, he had two older brothers in line for the throne before him. But, his oldest brother, heir to the throne died young. So, it should have passed to the next brother who was also older than Ashurbanipal. His name was Shamash-shum-ukin. Seriously that was his name. But, for some reason, their father, whose name was Esarhaddon, gave the throne to Ashurbanipal, the younger son. Now this was a very strange move on the part of Esarhaddon. Because, we’ve also learned that Esarhaddon’s father did the same thing. Esarhaddon was a younger brother too and his older brothers had been passed over and, you know what they did? They sought revenge on their father and they brutally murdered him. So it’s surprising that Esarhaddon would repeat this same mistake, but that’s what he does, putting Ashurbanipal on the throne. He does make Shamash-shum-ukin the king of Babylon. Which sounds great, right, king of Babylon. But, keep in mind that Babylon was part of the Assyrian Empire too and Ashurbanipal was king of the entire empire so his older brother is still very much beneath him. This will cause problems later of course. Of all this Ashurbanipal wrote quote “At the command of the great gods, [my father] greatly preferred me over the assembly of my elder brothers,” end quote.
Ashurbanipal was a bit of a contradictory figure. On one hand he was this incredibly fierce dude. He hunted lions writing quote “I pierced the throats of raging lions, each with a single arrow.” Some of the relief carvings he had commissioned to decorate the walls of his palace even show him strangling lions with his bare hands. He was also known for absolutely crushing his enemies. He was ruthless. Upon becoming king, he inherited a war that was going on with Egypt and just absolutely dominated, destroying his Egyptian foes and growing the empire even larger. According to the British Museum, he once put a dog chain through the jaw of a defeated king and made him live in a dog kennel. So maybe this was more of what Jonah was afraid of. Although, more context, the story of Jonah takes place around a hundred years before Ashurbanipal so he would have been dealing with one of Ashurbanipal’s predecessors.
He had a lot of problems with a neighboring empire called Elam. Elam kept plotting against Assyria and finally Ashurbanipal had had enough. He sent his guys into Elam and just utterly destroyed it. They robbed the palaces and temples, opened up the royal tombs and removed the bones of past kings, and enslaved all survivors, marching them back to Assyria. Ashurbanipal wrote quote “I had the sanctuaries of the land Elam utterly destroyed and I counted its gods and its goddesses as ghosts… I destroyed and devastated the tombs of their earlier and later kings… I took their bones to Assyria. I prevented their ghosts from sleeping and deprived them of funerary-offerings and libations… On a march of one month and twenty-five days, I devastated the districts of the land Elam and scattered salt and cress over them,” end quote.
He also killed his own brother, of course. Remember, Shamash-shum-ukin was the older brother but he had been passed over when Ashurbanipal was made king of the empire. Well Shamash-shum-ukin was tired of answering to his little brother and so he conspired against him. He started gathering supporters and conquering cities in the empire in the name of Babylon, remember he was king of Babylon which was in Assyria. So it’s a bit of a civil war developing really. Babylon, under Shamash-shum-ukin is pulling away and trying to form its own empire. Ashurbanipal discovers this conspiracy though and that his own brother was behind it and he lays siege to Babylon for two years, essentially starving them into defeat. It is said that things got so bad during the siege of Babylon that people resorted to eating their own children. Which is unfathomable to me. I feel like we’ve come a long way since then in how much we value our children. I’d be like chopping off my own arm to feed my children this day in age. But anyway, horrible thing to think about. In the end, Shamash-shum-ukin chose to burn to death in his own palace rather than be captured by his brother. His co-conspirators were captured though and killed. Ashurbanipal wrote of this quote “As for the rest of the people, those still alive … I myself now laid flat those people there as a funerary-offering... I fed their dismembered flesh to dogs, pigs, vultures, eagles, birds of the heavens, and fish of the apsû [waters],” end quote. So yeah dude was tough. Dude was this ruthless, unyielding, powerful figure, this king of the world. Probably why his father chose him over his brother honestly.
But, there was another side to Ashurbanipal too. He was also very educated. He was taught to read and write, which was rare at the time. Kings didn’t need to know how to read and write, they had scribes for that. But Ashurbanipal was a scribal king, as his father had been before him. His father ensured that he could read and write. And Ashurbanipal took this very seriously. He believed that knowledge is power and that the more texts he had access too, the more he would know, the more powerful he would be. So he built a library and he started to collect tablets, texts, from all over the ancient world. He gathered them in his library which he planned to use as a sort of artificial memory to become the most knowledgeable and therefore most powerful king the world had ever known. So we have these two sides to Ashurbanipal. We have Ashurbanipal the conqueror and we have Ashurbanipal the scholar. And because of his great love of literacy, we have the Library of Ashurbanipal where we learned much of this information.
Within that library we also found what is believed to be the earliest ever piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh which I touched on in my episode about the Great Flood, episode 120. The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Bible, it predates epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s the first example of a foundational text and it served, we think, as a basis for a lot of the other ancient texts that came after it. I mentioned it in the Great Flood episode because the Epic of Gilgamesh also talks about a Great Flood. It talks about what is possibly the same flood mentioned in the bible but from a different perspective. So we have some really interesting historical corroboration in an earliest work of writing we didn’t know existed until it was discovered in Ashurbanipal’s library. Pretty amazing.
But what happened to Ashurbanipal, this great king of Assyria, king of the world? That we don’t know. We know a lot about what was happening during his life, the sack of Elam, the siege of Babylon, the death of his brother, because he was writing this stuff down. Unfortunately, he was unable to record the details of his own death. So we don’t know how he died. Now, there are, probably inaccurate, mythic accounts of his death that we should at least consider. The Greeks called Ashurbanipal Sardanapalus which is part of the reason why we weren’t sure if the Greek historians were talking about Nineveh or not because they were determined to call everything and everyone anything but their actual names. And this guy Sardanapalus, who we now think was probably Ashurbanipal, pops up in some ancient writings. One Persian account says that Sardanapalus committed suicide. That he burnt himself alive while in his palace surrounded by gold and silver and concubines when Nineveh fell under his enemies. But, you know what, that doesn’t sound like Ashurbanipal. That sounds like his brother Shamash-shum-ukun who we know burnt to death in his palace in Babylon rather than face capture and punishment by his brother for the conspiracy plot. Also, Nineveh didn’t fall to enemies under the reign of Ashurbanipal. Two of his sons ruled after him. So, you know, it may be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Sardanapalus, the last king of Assyria, was Ashurbanipal, considering Ashurbanipal was not the last king of Assyria and did not intentionally burn to death in his palace. I mean he might have, we don’t know how he died, but that would be kind of crazy if he and his brother died the exact same very specific and uncommon way of death by palace fire suicide. I’m just not buying it. I feel like the Sardanapalus of Greek and Persian myth is a fictional sort of composite character based off of Ashurbanipal, his brother Shamash-shum-ukin and his sons who took over after him during the collapse of the empire. It’s like they took bits and pieces from all of those stories and smushed them together into this myth. I don’t think it explains how the man died.
But we know he died and that two of his sons took over after him, one after the other, and that when the second son was king, the Assyrian Empire collapsed. So what happened? Well a lot of it was because of instability within the empire after Ashurbanipal’s death. His sons were not very well equipped to rule in his stead. He had been this unstoppable larger than life ruler and his sons were young and inexperienced when they were forced to take over. There was actually a usurper who took the throne for a minute between the two sons. So their grip on the empire was not strong and this instability opened up cracks in the armor for enemies to take aim. The Babylonians of course were still not happy after the 2 year siege and utter destruction of their city, the feeding of the dismembered parts to the pigs and the eagles and whatnot. So Babylon teamed up with Medes which was also part of the empire, both of these cities were part of the Assyrian Empire but they revolted and ultimately took the empire down from the inside. The city of Nimrud fell in 614 BC followed by Ashur and then Nineveh in 612 as had supposedly been predicted by the prophet Nahum (Nay-hum). With the fall of Nineveh, the Assyrian Empire completely fell apart and by 609 BC it was done.
And so, literally piecing all this together, with the broken fragments of clay tablets found in the Library of Ashurbanipal, we start to understand the world of ancient Assyria. We know now that Nineveh was a real place and that it was home to a fierce if not contradictory ruler, a man who ruled with an iron fist as well as a reed stylus, a fighter and a writer. But, what I find really interesting about the sort of contradiction that is Ashurbanipal, this coalescence of mind and matter is that it actually closely mirrors what’s described in the Bible. When Jonah is sent by God to go preach to the Ninevites. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to go because the Ninevites are these bad, mean guys. They are cruel and evil and sinful. There’s no way they’re going to listen to him. There’s no way they are going to repent. It’s a death sentence. He’s going to march in there to deliver God’s message and they’re going to kill him. They’re going to strangle him with their bare hands like they do lions during a hunt. He doesn’t want to go. He disobeys God. He gets eaten by a whale, he doesn't want to go so bad. But then later when he musters his courage and he finally marches into Nineveh, the Ninevites respond in this extremely unexpected way. They humble themselves, they get down on their knees, they admit that they have sinned and they ask for forgiveness. Jonah was convinced the Ninevites were stubborn, unyielding tyrants and yet here they are, yielding instantly.
There are a few lessons in the story of Jonah. Don’t disobey God or you might get eaten by a whale, right that’s one. Also, God is merciful and he forgives those who repent that’s another. But then there’s a third: don’t so harshly judge people you don’t actually understand. Jonah had all these ideas about how he thought the Ninevites were going to react based on stereotypes about Ninevites that came from Israel. Jonah didn’t understand the Ninevites at all. He couldn’t. He didn’t have any perspective. This is something, a mistake, I see repeated often throughout history, groups of humans forming opinions about other groups of humans without actually understanding them at all. Look at the opinions Christopher Columbus formed about Indigenous Americans, episodes 80 and 81. That they were godless savages, brutal blood thirsty cannibals. He didn’t try to truly understand them. He formed these opinions because they were convenient. They allowed him to oppress them and enslave them. He didn’t want them to be civilized. He didn’t want them to be Christians. Who would work the sugar plantations then? I saw this again in more recent episodes. Japanese Internment camps, episode 143. Americans were so quick to assume that Japanese Americans were surely passing information to Japan after Pearl Harbor. Of course they were. The Japanese were unruly tyrants out to destroy America and so was anyone with Japanese ancestry. Didn’t matter that they were American citizens, that they were born and raised in the United States. Doesn’t matter. This, of course, was not the case at all. It was born out of fear and panic, a lack of perspective. I saw it in mini fix number 26 I did recently about the Christmas Truce during World War I, how many people refused to believe that the Christmas Truce happened, that it was initiated by the Germans who put down their guns, climbed out of their trenches, and spent Christmas with their enemies, singing carols, sharing cigarettes and champagne, taking photos, kicking a soccer ball. Many British people refused to believe it was true. They had been told terrible, horrible things about the Germans. They were truly evil. They were monsters who ate babies. That’s what they were told, this propaganda about their enemies in the war. And so it couldn’t possibly be the Germans who initiated peace on Christmas Eve. They refused to believe it. But it seems it did happen, the Christmas Truce. And it was the Germans in many places who initiated it. So what does that mean? It means the British misunderstood their enemy in the same way the Israelites misunderstood the Ninevites. We are so quick to judge those who are different from us, and really it’s been the root of a lot of unnecessary conflict throughout history. So, keep Nineveh in mind the next time you want to jump to conclusions about another person or a group of others. The Ninevites, sinful tyrants who fell to their knees and humbled themselves before God, much to Jonah’s surprise. And Ashurbanipal, King of Nineveh, King of Assyria, King of the world who bested Egypt, destroyed Elam, and had his own brother killed, all while building the world’s first library. Few things are so black and white as good and evil. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that they are.
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