After a three-month siege, allied Babylonian and Median armies breached the walls of Nineveh, the greatest city of the ancient world and seat of Assyrian kings. The city's destruction was so total that the Hebrew prophet Nahum celebrated it as divine vengeance, and within decades Nineveh's very location had faded into legend until archaeologists rediscovered its ruins in the 19th century.
Nineveh in the seventh century BC was arguably the largest city on Earth, ringed by walls so massive that ancient writers considered them unbreachable—one Greek historian claimed a chariot could race along their top. King Sennacherib had rebuilt it into a showpiece of aqueducts, gardens, and a library that would later yield the Epic of Gilgamesh to modern archaeologists.
But Assyria's brutal expansion had bred enemies on every border. In 612 BC, Babylonian king Nabopolassar allied with the Median king Cyaxares, and their combined armies—bolstered by Scythian horsemen—besieged the city. Ancient accounts describe the Khosr River, diverted or flooded, undermining the walls and letting the attackers pour through.
The destruction was methodical and complete. Palaces burned, populations were slaughtered or scattered, and the Assyrian Empire, which had terrorized the Near East for centuries, simply ceased to exist within a few years. So thorough was the erasure that by the time Xenophon's Greek mercenaries marched past the site two centuries later, they found only unnamed mounds, not knowing they were walking over the ashes of history's first great empire.
Key people: Nabopolassar, Cyaxares, Sinsharishkun