Fall of Nineveh - End of the Assyrian Empire
Medes and Babylonians took Nineveh in 612 BC after a siege of three months, and the Assyrian Empire disappeared. It had ruled the Near East for three centuries — from the Nile to the Zagros — through a professional army, a road and courier system, and the mass deportation of populations, and no state had come close to breaking it. The decline was fast. Ashurbanipal died around 631 BC, and within a decade the empire was fighting a Babylonian revolt under Nabopolassar, an Elamite frontier, an Egyptian Egypt that had stopped paying, and its own succession. The Medes under Cyaxares had meanwhile unified the Iranian plateau and reformed their army into specialised units. They took Ashur in 614 BC and met Nabopolassar in the ruins to conclude an alliance, sealed by a marriage. The combined armies came to Nineveh in 612. The Babylonian Chronicle records the fall and a great slaughter, and the biblical book of Nahum — written to celebrate it — describes the chariots raging in the streets and the city as a pool of water whose waters run away. Archaeology at the gates has found arrowheads, burned mudbrick and bodies where they fell. The last Assyrian king held out at Harran until 609 BC with Egyptian help, and Josiah of Judah was killed at Megiddo trying to stop the pharaoh reaching him. Assyria then vanished so completely that Xenophon marched past the site two centuries later and could not learn who had built it. Layard rediscovered it in the 1840s, along with Ashurbanipal's library and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
- Year: 612 BCE
- Category: Military
