Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad): Sargon II's Lost Assyrian Capital

Dur-Sharrukin, the “Fortress of Sargon”, was a new capital city built for the Assyrian king Sargon II at the site now called Khorsabad, north-east of Mosul in Iraq. Begun in 717 BC and inaugurated about a decade later, it was one of the most ambitious planned cities of the ancient world. Yet it served as the royal seat for only a few years: after Sargon’s death in battle in 705 BC it was abandoned as capital. Rediscovered in 1843, it was the first Assyrian palace ever excavated.

Sargon II and the need for a new capital

Sargon II became king of Assyria in 722 BC, probably by seizing power from Shalmaneser V, the son of Tiglath-Pileser III. His name, Sharru-ukin, means “the legitimate king”, echoing the famous Sargon of Akkad of 1,600 years earlier, and may hint that his claim to the throne was disputed.

Assyrian kings had moved their capital before. Ashurnasirpal II rebuilt Kalhu (Nimrud) in the 9th century BC, and it remained the main royal city when Sargon came to power. A new capital allowed a king to display his power, reward supporters with land and houses, and free himself from established elites in older cities.

Sargon chose a site near a village called Magganubba, at the foot of hills north-east of Nineveh, with access to stone and water. In his inscriptions he claims to have paid the owners of the land fairly, a detail meant to show him as a just ruler.

Building a city from nothing

Work began in 717 BC. The city was laid out as an almost square rectangle, each side roughly 1.7 km long, enclosing about 3 square kilometres. A massive mud-brick wall on stone foundations, strengthened with towers, surrounded it, pierced by seven gates.

On the north-western side stood a raised citadel. Here were the royal palace, built on a high terrace that straddled the city wall, temples to several gods including Sin, Shamash, Ningal, Adad, Ea and Ninurta, and a stepped temple tower (ziggurat). A separate temple to Nabu, god of writing, stood nearby, and a second fortified palace occupied the southern corner of the walls.

Thousands of workers, many of them deportees from conquered lands, quarried stone, made bricks and dragged timber from distant mountains. Letters from the Assyrian state archives show officials across the empire being ordered to supply labour, materials and supervision, and the king himself following the work closely.

The palace was decorated with carved stone slabs showing the king’s campaigns, tribute processions, hunts and banquets. Its gateways were guarded by colossal lamassu, human-headed winged bulls carved from single blocks of stone, some more than 4 metres high.

Art and inscriptions of the palace

The palace reliefs were designed as a visual record of Sargon’s reign. Some show the king and his officials in formal audience, including a famous pair of panels in which Sargon faces a senior official, often thought to be the crown prince Sennacherib. Others show tribute bearers leading horses, and banquets in which courtiers raise their cups.

One of the best-known series shows timber being shipped along the Levantine coast. Boats with horse-headed prows tow and carry great logs through a sea full of fish, turtles and mythical creatures, a scene now in the Louvre. Other rooms recorded campaigns in the Zagros Mountains and against Urartu, including the sack of the temple of the god Haldi at Musasir in 714 BC, known today mainly from drawings made by Flandin because the original slabs were lost.

Long cuneiform texts covered the walls, floors of gateways and the backs of slabs. The so-called Display Inscription summarised Sargon’s conquests, while foundation texts described the building of the city itself. In the 1930s American excavators also found at Khorsabad a copy of the Assyrian King List, a long register of rulers that remains one of the backbones of ancient Near Eastern chronology.

A short life as capital

Statues of the gods entered their temples in 707 BC, and the city was formally inaugurated in 706 BC with a great festival. Even then, parts of it may not have been fully occupied.

In 705 BC Sargon led a campaign in Tabal, in central Anatolia, and was killed in battle. His body was not recovered for burial, an appalling fate for an Assyrian king and widely read as a sign of divine anger. His son Sennacherib distanced himself from his father’s memory and made Nineveh the new capital.

Dur-Sharrukin was not destroyed. It remained the seat of a provincial governor and some parts stayed in use, but it never regained royal status. After the Assyrian Empire collapsed with the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC, the site slowly fell into ruin, its mud-brick walls melting into mounds.

Rediscovery

In 1843 Paul-Émile Botta, French consul at Mosul, began digging at Khorsabad after local villagers reported carved stones. He quickly uncovered walls lined with reliefs and inscriptions. Botta at first believed he had found Nineveh itself. With the artist Eugène Flandin, he published the finds in the lavish volumes of Monument de Ninive (1849–1850), and the first Assyrian sculptures reached the Louvre in 1847.

His successor Victor Place excavated from 1852 to 1855 and mapped much of the city. In 1855 disaster struck: rafts and boats carrying many of his finds were attacked and sank in the river near Qurna in southern Iraq, and most of the cargo was lost.

From 1928 to 1935 the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, with Gordon Loud among its excavators, re-examined the palace and the citadel and brought a colossal lamassu and reliefs to Chicago. Iraqi archaeologists continued work later in the 20th century.

The finds from Khorsabad caused a sensation in Europe. They were the first large-scale Assyrian sculptures most Europeans had ever seen, and together with Austen Henry Layard’s discoveries at Nimrud and Nineveh a few years later they confirmed that the Assyrian kings known from the Bible and Greek writers had left a vast record of their own.

The site suffered in recent conflict. In 2015 reports and satellite images indicated that it had been looted and damaged while under the control of the Islamic State group, though the full extent of the damage is still being assessed.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 722 BC: Sargon II becomes king of Assyria.
• 717 BC: Construction of Dur-Sharrukin begins.
• 707 BC: Statues of the gods are installed in the city’s temples.
• 706 BC: The city is formally inaugurated.
• 705 BC: Sargon II is killed in Anatolia; Sennacherib moves the capital to Nineveh.
• 1843–1844: Paul-Émile Botta excavates the palace.
• 1852–1855: Victor Place excavates; many finds are lost in the river in 1855.
• 1928–1935: The Oriental Institute of Chicago excavates the site.

Why it matters

Dur-Sharrukin shows the scale of Assyrian imperial power: a king could command the labour of an empire to raise a complete capital in about ten years. Its quick abandonment shows how much that power depended on the person and fortune of the king. As the first Assyrian palace uncovered in modern times, it also launched the European rediscovery of ancient Mesopotamia.