Fall of Nineveh (612 BC): The Collapse of the Assyrian Empire

The fall of Nineveh in 612 BC was the capture and destruction of the capital of the Assyrian Empire by an alliance of Babylonians and Medes. After a siege of about three months, the greatest city of the Near East was sacked and burned. Within three years the empire that had dominated the region for three centuries had disappeared, one of the most sudden collapses of a great power in ancient history.

Background: Assyria at its height

By the mid-7th century BC the Neo-Assyrian Empire controlled an area stretching from western Iran to Egypt and from southern Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. Its kings ruled through provincial governors, deported conquered peoples on a large scale and maintained the most effective army of the age.

Nineveh, on the east bank of the Tigris, had been an important city for thousands of years. Around 700 BC King Sennacherib made it the imperial capital and transformed it. He built the “Palace Without Rival”, laid out broad streets and surrounded the city with walls about 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) long, pierced by some 15 gates. Canals and aqueducts brought water from the hills to orchards and gardens.

At its height Nineveh covered roughly 750 hectares, making it one of the largest cities in the world at the time. Its population is unknown; modern estimates commonly range from about 100,000 to 150,000 people, though some are higher.

Under Ashurbanipal (reigned 669–c. 631 BC) Assyria seemed at the peak of its power. His armies defeated Egypt, Babylon and Elam, and his palace held a great library of cuneiform tablets.

Causes of the collapse

Civil war and succession crisis

The final years of Ashurbanipal are poorly documented, and even the date of his death, around 631 BC, is uncertain. His successors, Ashur-etil-ilani and then Sin-sharra-ishkun, faced rival claimants, including a general named Sin-shumu-lishir. Internal fighting weakened the army and the provinces at a critical moment.

The revolt of Babylon

In 626 BC Nabopolassar seized the throne of Babylon. Assyria fought for years to regain control of Babylonian cities but failed. By 616 BC Nabopolassar was strong enough to carry the war into Assyrian territory, as described in Nabopolassar and the Rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

The rise of the Medes

To the east, the Medes of western Iran had become a major military power under their king Cyaxares. In 614 BC they captured Assur, the old religious capital of Assyria, slaughtering many of its people. Nabopolassar arrived after the city had fallen, and the two kings formed an alliance there.

Strain and overextension

Assyria’s wealth depended on tribute and on a large, often deported, population. Some historians argue that decades of constant war, the cost of huge building projects and resentment among subject peoples left the empire brittle. A 2019 study of cave deposits in northern Iraq suggested that a run of severe droughts may have weakened Assyrian agriculture in this period, but the link to the collapse is still debated.

The siege of 612 BC

The main source is a Babylonian chronicle tablet now in the British Museum (BM 21901), often called the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle. According to its terse account, in the 14th year of Nabopolassar (612 BC) the Babylonian army met the forces of Umakishtar, king of the Umman-manda, usually identified with Cyaxares and the Medes. Together they marched along the Tigris and set up camp against Nineveh.

From the month of Simanu (around June) to the month of Abu (around August), the chronicle reports, three battles were fought. In Abu the city was taken and a great defeat inflicted on the population. The text is damaged where it refers to the fate of the Assyrian king, but Sin-sharra-ishkun is not heard of again and almost certainly died at this time. The victors carried off a huge amount of plunder and left the city in ruins.

Archaeology confirms the violence. Excavations at the Halzi Gate in the south-eastern wall, carried out in 1989–1990 by a University of California team under David Stronach, found that the gate’s passage had been hastily narrowed to make it easier to defend. Inside lay skeletons of people killed in the fighting, along with arrowheads and other weapons. Elsewhere in the city, palaces show signs of burning, and many reliefs were deliberately defaced.

The end of Assyria

Nineveh’s fall did not end the war at once. An Assyrian prince or senior official proclaimed himself king at Harran, in northern Mesopotamia, as Ashur-uballit II, a name recalling a great Assyrian king of the 14th century BC. Egypt, which had backed Assyria against Babylon, sent troops to support him.

In 610 BC Babylonians and Medes advanced on Harran, and Ashur-uballit abandoned it. In 609 BC he returned with an Egyptian army under Necho II to try to retake the city, but failed. After this he vanishes from the records, and Assyria ceased to exist as a state.

The struggle for Assyria’s western lands continued between Babylon and Egypt until 605 BC, when the Babylonian crown prince Nebuchadnezzar won the Battle of Carchemish.

Consequences

The victors divided Assyria’s lands. Babylon gained Syria, the Levant and at least part of the old Assyrian heartland, while the Medes dominated the highlands to the north and east; exactly where the border lay is still debated. Under Nebuchadnezzar II the Neo-Babylonian Empire inherited much of the old imperial system, including tribute collection and mass deportations.

The Assyrian heartland itself declined sharply. Its great cities, including Nineveh, Nimrud and Assur, were left largely in ruins, and much of the population that had served the empire was killed, scattered or deported. Aramaic, already the everyday language across the empire, continued to spread, and local communities in northern Iraq kept some memory of Assyria for centuries. Assur itself recovered as a modest town under later Parthian rule.

Key people

• Nabopolassar (reigned 626–605 BC): king of Babylon and founder of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
• Cyaxares (reigned c. 625–585 BC): king of the Medes, whose army played a leading role in the siege. See Cyaxares and the Median Kingdom.
• Sin-sharra-ishkun (reigned c. 627–612 BC): king of Assyria, who died when Nineveh fell.
• Ashur-uballit II (reigned 612–c. 609 BC): the last Assyrian king, based at Harran.
• Necho II (reigned 610–595 BC): Egyptian pharaoh who tried to save the last Assyrian state.

Myths and facts

Myth: King Sardanapalus burned himself in his palace. The Greek writer Ctesias, followed by Diodorus Siculus, told of an effeminate last king called Sardanapalus who built a pyre and burned himself with his wives and treasure. The name seems to derive from Ashurbanipal, who did not die in the siege, and the story is a literary legend. It later inspired works such as Delacroix’s painting “The Death of Sardanapalus” (1827).

Myth: a river flood broke the walls. Diodorus also says that a flood of the river destroyed part of the walls, fulfilling a prophecy. The biblical Book of Nahum, which celebrates Nineveh’s fall, speaks of “the gates of the rivers” being opened. The Babylonian Chronicle mentions no flood, so this remains possible but unproven.

Fact: the city was not completely abandoned. Parts of the site were later reoccupied on a smaller scale, and in later centuries a town stood on the mound of Nebi Yunus. However, Nineveh never again became a major city, and in 401 BC the Greek soldier Xenophon passed its ruins without recognising them as Assyrian.

By the numbers

Rediscovery and legacy

For more than two thousand years Nineveh was known mainly from the Bible and Greek writers. In 1842 the French consul Paul-Émile Botta dug briefly at Kuyunjik, the main mound, and in 1846–1847 the British traveller Austen Henry Layard began excavating there and found Sennacherib’s palace. Hormuzd Rassam later uncovered the North Palace of Ashurbanipal with its famous reliefs, including the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal.

The burning of the palaces in 612 BC had an unexpected effect. Tens of thousands of clay tablets, including the royal library, were baked hard and buried, preserving texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh for modern scholars.

The ruins lie within modern Mosul. During the occupation of the city by the Islamic State group from 2014 to 2017, several reconstructed gates, including the Mashki and Adad gates, were damaged, and the Nebi Yunus shrine was blown up in 2014. Iraqi and international teams have since worked to document and restore the site.

Timeline

• c. 700 BC: Sennacherib makes Nineveh the capital of Assyria.
• c. 631 BC: Ashurbanipal’s reign ends; succession disputes follow.
• 626 BC: Nabopolassar becomes king of Babylon.
• 614 BC: The Medes sack Assur; Babylonians and Medes form an alliance.
• 612 BC, June–August: Siege and fall of Nineveh; Sin-sharra-ishkun dies.
• 610 BC: Harran falls to Babylonians and Medes.
• 609 BC: Ashur-uballit II and Egypt fail to retake Harran; Assyria ends.
• 605 BC: Babylon defeats Egypt at Carchemish.

Why it matters

The fall of Nineveh ended the Assyrian Empire, the largest state the world had yet seen, and handed power in the Near East to Babylon and the Medes, and soon after to Persia. Its sudden collapse became a lasting symbol of how even the mightiest empire can fall.