Sennacherib Destroys Babylon
Sennacherib destroyed Babylon in 689 BC, and his own inscriptions describe doing it more thoroughly than any Assyrian king had destroyed anything. Babylon was not a foreign enemy. It was the ancient cultural centre of Mesopotamia, whose gods, literature and scribal tradition Assyria had inherited, and Assyrian kings normally claimed its kingship and repaired its temples. Sennacherib had tried that. He installed a puppet, then his own son, and the city revolted repeatedly under Marduk-apla-iddina and with Elamite support. His son was handed to the Elamites and killed. The response was total. He recorded that he levelled the city and its walls, temples and ziggurats and threw them into the Arahtu canal, that he dug canals through the site to flood it, and that he made its destruction more complete than a flood — so that in future no one would recognise the site of the city or its temples. The statue of Marduk was carried off to Assyria. The act was regarded as sacrilege even by Assyrians, and it is very probably why he died as he did. He was murdered in 681 BC by one or more of his own sons while praying in a temple, which the Babylonian chronicle and the book of Kings both record. His son Esarhaddon, who succeeded after a civil war, immediately began rebuilding Babylon and explained the destruction as Marduk's own anger at the city, with the god's decree of seventy years' desolation conveniently reversed by turning the cuneiform numeral upside down. Babylon recovered and outlived Assyria, and its army helped destroy Nineveh in 612 BC.
- Year: 689 BCE
- Category: Military
