RAI 49: Nineveh
RAI 49: Nineveh
Nineveh is a topic well suited to the celebration of the British Museum's quarter millennium. On the museum's behalf excavations were conducted at the site intermittently for more than eighty years, from 1847 to 1932. The attractive bas-reliefs that adorned the palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal have become some of the museum's most familiar exhibits. The vast numbers of clay tablets sent back from Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard and his successors are less eye-catching but remain the cornerstone of almost all Assyriological research.
But there is more to Nineveh than a great imperial capital of the seventh century BC. Mallowan's famous deep sounding of 1931-2 took the history of the settlement back another five thousand years. More recent research has collected evidence for the city's history in the post-Assyrian periods. Looking beyond the local horizons, the renown of Nineveh as an important city survived the end of ancient Mesopotamian civilization in the literatures of the Greeks and the Jews. Today the great ruin-mound of Kuyunjik and its open-air museum stand as abiding monuments to the power and fascination of the civilization of ancient Mesopotamia. Nineveh has long been a symbol as well as a reality.
