Nineveh

Capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal. Center of the cult of Ishtar of Nineveh. Ashurbanipal's Library preserved the Epic of Gilgameš and thousands of tablets — an unlikely akashic ark of Mesopotamia.

Location and Name

Nineveh (Akkadian Ninu(w)a, Ninâ; Hebrew Nīnəwēh; Arabic Naynawa) is a city-state and imperial capital on the banks of the Tigris River, in northern Mesopotamia. The modern site is the complex of Kuyunjik and Tell Nebi Yunus, within the urban area of Mosul, in Iraq (Nineveh Governorate).

Period

The site’s occupation is ancient (Neolithic layers around 6000 BC), but political importance comes much later:

Akkadian/Babylonian Period — Nineveh is a center of local Ishtar worship but politically secondary.
Middle Assyrian Period (~1400–1050 BC) — Nineveh rises as a royal city.
Neo-Assyrian Period (~911–612 BC) — absolute apogee. Under Sennacherib (~705–681 BC), Nineveh becomes the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, with monumental walls, palaces decorated with narrative reliefs, an aqueduct system, and gardens. Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal (~668–627 BC) consolidate its status.
Fall — in 612 BC, a coalition of Medes, Persians, and Babylonians destroys Nineveh. The devastation is so complete that the memory of the city is lost, and for centuries its location remains only approximate. Systematic rediscovery comes only in the 19th century with Layard and Rassam.

The Library of Ashurbanipal

The most important cultural legacy of Nineveh is the Library of Ashurbanipal — a collection of approximately 30,000 cuneiform tablets that King Ashurbanipal (literate, rare among Assyrian kings) ordered copied from temples and archives throughout Mesopotamia. The library burned in the sack of 612 BC, but the clay tablets were fired by the blaze, preserving themselves intact when they would otherwise have been destroyed by moisture.

It was in this library that, in the 19th century, the complete version of the Epic of Gilgameš was discovered — including Tablet XI of the Flood, the direct parallel to the biblical Genesis. Nearly everything that modern Assyriology knows about Mesopotamian literature passes, in some measure, through Nineveh.

Tutelary Deity: Ishtar of Nineveh

Ishtar possesses a local avatar: Ishtar of Nineveh, cultically distinct from Ishtar of Arbela. Assyrian kings attribute their victories to her; she is the war goddess par excellence of the Neo-Assyrian pantheon. Sennacherib builds monumental temples for her. The combination of military imperialism and the cult of Ishtar gives the Neo-Assyrian state a particularly bloody theology.

Lamassu

The most recognizable iconography of Nineveh is the lamassu — colossal winged bulls with human heads, positioned at the entrances of royal palaces as magical guardians. Each weighs tons; they were carved in situ from limestone and transported to London, Paris, Berlin, and Chicago in the 19th century, where they still form central pieces of Assyrian collections.

Game Perspective

In Mensageiros do Vento, Nineveh occupies a paradoxical place under the lens of the game.

On one hand, it is the capital of a demiurgic empire — the Neo-Assyrian refinement of the political machinery of Babylon and, before it, Eridu. The war theology of the Neo-Assyrian state is carceral architecture taken to its utmost cruelty: mass deportations, palaces with reliefs narrating impalements, Ishtar reduced to a conquest mascot-goddess. Under this reading, Nineveh deserved the fate it met in 612 BC.

On the other hand, it is the place where the akashic memory of the Mesopotamian world was preserved by the improbable coincidence of a literate king and a library that caught fire. Without Ashurbanipal and without the fire, the Epic of Gilgameš, the Atrahasis, the Enuma Elish, the hymns of Enheduanna, and so many other texts would have been lost. The akashic continuity that allows the game’s lore to connect ancient Mesopotamia to the post-Apocalypse world passes, literally, through the tablets of Kuyunjik.

The mensageiros who access akashic Nineveh encounter both things superimposed without easy synthesis: the imperial machine that produced the trauma of the Ten Tribes of Israel, and the library that saved three millennia of written memory of the very people the empire had tortured.