Battle of Nineveh (612 BC)

612 BCE: three months, then a ruin heap

After a three-month siege running from Simanu through Abu, the armies of Nabopolassar of Babylonia and Cyaxares of Media broke Assyrian resistance at Nineveh, in present-day northern Iraq, in 612 BCE.

The Babylonian chronicle compresses the outcome into a sequence: a major defeat, the death of the Assyrian king Sîn-šar-iškun, vast booty removed from city and temple, and Nineveh reduced to a ruin heap.

What the tablet does not say

The chronicle survives on tablet BM 21901, 132 millimetres by 69, covering 616 to 609 BCE. The year is securely fixed by Nabopolassar's fourteenth regnal year, but the numeral giving the day of the capture is missing from the damaged tablet.

It records that Sîn-šar-iškun died "at that time" without saying how. Accounts that have him fall in combat or take his own life go beyond it, as do the stories of flooding opening the walls.

It also names no Susian or Elamite contingent — only the Babylonian and Median kings and their armies.

Assyria did not end that day

Cyaxares's army went home after the sack. Aššur-uballiṭ II then took the Assyrian throne at Harran, where a court survived until the campaigns of 610–609 BCE.

Nineveh had been Assyria's principal government center, and the alliance that took it had been years in the making: Babylonia had broken from Assyrian rule under Nabopolassar, and the Medes had already destroyed Aššur in 614 BCE. Archaeologists found the remains of roughly forty defenders in the ruined city.