Nineveh

Nineveh, the modern Kouyunjik, capital of the ancient kingdom of Assyria. Its original capital was Assur, the ruins of which are now called Kalah Sherghat, but the group of cities some sixty miles to the north, above the Greater Zab, and on the eastern side of the Tigris, namely Nineveh, Calah (Nimrud), and Dur-Sargon (Khor-sabad), ultimately supplanted it in importance. When Nineveh itself fell, the whole Assyrian empire—essentially a military power—perished with it. In the Sassanian period a village was built on the mounds which covered its ruins; but when its buildings had also crumbled into ruins, the very site of the proud ancient city remained for centuries unknown. Rich in 1818 conjectured that the mounds of Kouyunjik, opposite the modern town of Mosul, concealed its ruins beneath, but it was not until the excavations of Botta in 1842 and Layard in 1845 that the remains, first of Dur-Sargon, then of Nineveh itself, were revealed to the world. The sculptured monuments of its ancient kings and the relics of its clay-inscribed library soon yielded up their secrets to the investigations of scholars, and ere long the life and history of the ancient kingdom of Assyria were known almost with as much certainty as those of Greece and Rome. See ASSYRIA, and CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS.