Nineveh

Nineveh was an old cult centre long before it was an imperial capital. Ishtar of Nineveh was distinguished from Ishtar of Arbela and had her own temple, priesthood and reputation, and her statue was important enough that a king of Mitanni sent it to Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE, apparently as a healing measure for the pharaoh. Prophetic oracles addressed to Assyrian kings in the name of Ishtar survive on tablets, spoken by named men and women attached to her temples, promising protection and demanding loyalty in return.

Sennacherib made the city his capital around 700 BCE, ringing it with a wall of some twelve kilometres, laying out gardens and bringing water from the hills by an aqueduct whose stone channel still stands at Jerwan. His grandson Ashurbanipal assembled in his palaces the collection that has shaped everything known about Mesopotamian religion: tens of thousands of tablets and fragments, gathered by agents sent to copy the holdings of temples across Babylonia, covering omens, incantations, rituals, medicine, lexical lists and literature.

Among them was the standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. When George Smith read the flood tablet in the British Museum in 1872 and found a Mesopotamian account of a man told to build a boat, of birds released to test for land, and of a sacrifice on a mountain, the discovery was reported as front page news and changed how the Bible was studied. Nineveh fell to a coalition of Medes and Babylonians in 612 BCE, and the burning of the palaces baked the tablets and preserved them.

Nineveh appears in the Hebrew Bible as the enemy capital, and two of its books celebrate the fall. Nahum is a poem of triumph over the destruction, and Zephaniah promises the city will become a dry waste where flocks lie down. Set against them is Jonah, which is a satire on the prophet rather than an oracle against the city. Sent to announce destruction, Jonah runs the other way, is swallowed and returned, preaches a single sentence, and watches the entire population repent including a king who puts sackcloth on the animals. God spares them, and Jonah is furious. The book ends with a question about whether mercy to a city of the ignorant is worth resenting, and gives no answer.

The story travelled. The gospels use the sign of Jonah for the three days in the tomb, and the Quran tells of Yunus, also called Dhu al-Nun, who left in anger and called out from the darkness. A mosque on the mound of Nebi Yunus within modern Mosul, built over an earlier church, was venerated by Muslims, Christians and Jews as his tomb.

That shrine was destroyed with explosives in July 2014 by the group holding the city, along with other shrines and the Nergal Gate reliefs. Tunnels dug beneath the mound afterwards, apparently looking for antiquities to sell, opened into an unexcavated Assyrian palace. The same period drove out most of the region's Christian population and produced the campaign against the Yazidis of Sinjar that a United Nations commission of inquiry found to constitute genocide.