Fall of Nineveh 612 BC
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
About the battle
The Fall of Nineveh, also called the Battle of Nineveh, was a major battle that marked the climax of the Conquest of the Assyrian Empire in 612 BC. After the Assyrian defeat at the Fall of Assur, an allied army which involved the combined forces of Medes and the Babylonians besieged Nineveh (in modern-day Mosul) and took what was, at that time, one of the greatest cities in the world. The fall of Nineveh led to the destruction of the Neo-Assyrian Empire as the dominant state in the Ancient Near East over the following three years. Archeological records show that the capital of the once-mighty Assyrian Empire was extensively de-urbanized and depopulated in the decades and centuries following the battle. A garbled account of the fall of the city later led to the story of the legendary king Sardanapalus.
Babylon became the imperial center of Mesopotamia for the first time in over a thousand years, leading to the Neo-Babylonian Empire, claiming imperial continuity as a new dynasty.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Fall of Nineveh (revision 1379442153), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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Other battles of the Medo-Babylonian conquest of the Assyrian Empire
- Siege of Harran 609 BC
Browse more: battles in Iraq · Asia · Ancient battles