History

Nimrud entered the historical record as a settlement of Shalmaneser I (c. 1274–1245 BC), who built a citadel here during the Middle Assyrian period. It was Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BC) who transformed it into an imperial capital, constructing the Northwest Palace — a sprawling complex of stone-lined throne rooms, reception halls, and residential quarters whose walls were entirely sheathed in carved alabaster relief panels depicting royal hunts, military campaigns against Aramaean and Syrian kingdoms, and elaborate ceremonial processions. The palace entrance was guarded by lamassus: human-headed, eagle-winged colossal bulls and lions carved from single blocks of alabaster, approximately 4 metres tall and weighing up to 30 tonnes, their bodies shown in five-legged perspective (four legs in profile, two in frontal view) so that they appeared correctly proportioned from any angle. Ashurnasirpal’s inaugural banquet inscription records feeding 69,574 guests for ten days at the palace’s completion.

The city’s biblical resonance was enormous. Layard’s 1845–1851 excavations arrived at Nimrud knowing it might be Nineveh or Calah from Genesis 10:11–12, and his discoveries — the winged bulls, the carved reliefs, the cuneiform tablets — confirmed that these were the very Assyrian capitals mentioned in the books of Kings and Isaiah as the instruments of God’s punishment on Israel. The reliefs provided the first visual evidence for the siege of Lachish described in 2 Kings 18, showing Assyrian soldiers attacking a walled city that matched the archaeological evidence from Lachish itself. Max Mallowan’s post-war excavations (1949–1958) — accompanied periodically by his wife Agatha Christie, who helped clean and photograph small finds — uncovered the Fort Shalmaneser arsenal, the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (now in the British Museum), and extensive ivory carvings of Syrian and Phoenician manufacture that had been deposited as tribute from vassal states.

In 1988, during construction work near the throne room of the Northwest Palace, Iraqi archaeologists Muzahim Mahmoud Hussein and his colleagues discovered four intact royal tombs dating to the 9th–8th centuries BC, containing the burials of Assyrian queens — Yaba, Banitu, Atalia — and a male burial. The tombs yielded 57 kilograms of gold jewellery of extraordinary craftsmanship: crowns, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and vessels of goldsmith technique not previously known from Assyria, together with approximately 1,000 precious and semi-precious stones. Removed for safekeeping during the Gulf Wars to a central bank vault in Baghdad, the treasures survived the post-2003 looting of the Iraq Museum and were rediscovered in a flooded vault in 2003.