Nineveh: Encyclopedia II - Nineveh - Archaeology

Nineveh - Archaeology

Today, Nineveh's location is marked by two large mounds, Kouyunjik and Nabī Yūnus "Prophet Jonah", and the remains of the city walls (about 12 km/7.5 mi in circumference). Kouyunjik has been extensively explored. The other mound, Nabī Yūnus, has not been extensively explored because there is a Muslim shrine dedicated to that prophet on the site.

In the 19th century, the French consul at Mosul began to search the vast mounds that lay along the opposite bank of the river. The Arabs whom he employed in these excavations, to their great surprise, came upon the ruins of a building at the mound of Khorsabad, which, on further exploration, turned out to be the royal palace of Sargon II, which were largely explored for sculptures and other precious relics.

In 1847 the young British adventurer Sir Austen Henry Layard explored the ruins. In the Kuyunjik mound Layard rediscovered in 1849 the lost palace of Sennacherib across the Tigris River from modern Mosul in northern Iraq, with its 71 rooms and colossal bas-reliefs. He also unearthed the palace and famous library of Ashurbanipal with 22,000 inscribed clay tablets. The study of the archaeology of Nineveh reveals the wealth and glory of ancient Assyria under kings such as Esarhaddon (681-669 B.C.) and Ashurbanipal (669-626 B.C.).

The work of exploration would be carried on by George Smith, Hormuzd Rassam, and others, and a vast treasury of specimens of Assyria was exhumed for European museums. Palace after palace was discovered, with their decorations and their sculptured slabs, revealing the life and manners of this ancient people, their arts of war and peace, the forms of their religion, the style of their architecture, and the magnificence of their monarchs.

The mound of Kuyunjik would be excavated again by the archaeologists of the British Museum, lead by L.W. King, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The efforts concentrated on the site of the Temple of Nabu, the God of writing, where another cuneiform library was supposed to exist. However, no such library was ever found: most likely, it had been destroyed by the activities of later residents.

The excavations started again in 1927, under the direction of Campbell Thompson, who had already taken part in King's expeditions. These excavations, however, were rather unfortunate. Some works were carried out outside Kouyunjik, for instance on the mound of Nebi Yunus, which was the ancient arsenal of Nineveh, or along the outside walls. Here, near the North-Western corner of the walls, beyond the pavement of a later building, the archaeologists found almost 300 fragments of prisms recording the royal annals of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, besides a prisms of Esarhaddon which was almost perfect.

Nineveh was revisited by famed British archaeologist and Assyriologist Professor David Stronach of U.C. Berkeley (1981 to present). He conducted a series of surveys and digs at the site from 1987-1990, focusing his attentions to the several gates and the exsistant mud brick walls, as well as the system that supplied water to the city in times of siege. After the Second World War, several excavations had been carried out by Iraqi archaeologists.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Archaeology", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki