Ancient Nineveh reborn — the comeback city of the 21st century
Mosul is one of the most historically layered cities on Earth — built on and around Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capital that was the world's largest city in the 7th century BCE. It is also one of the 21st century's most dramatic stories of destruction and rebuilding: occupied by ISIS from 2014 to 2017, the old city was 80% destroyed in the battle for liberation. Since 2017, an extraordinary international reconstruction effort — UNESCO, the Aga Khan Trust, French and Italian architects — has been rebuilding the Al-Nouri Mosque (from whose minaret Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate),…
Nineveh, on the eastern bank of the Tigris opposite modern Mosul, was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and under Sennacherib (705–681 BCE) was the world's largest city — a metropolis of perhaps 150,000 people with palaces, gardens, aqueducts, and the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal (whose clay tablets are now in the British Museum). The Medes and Babylonians destroyed it in 612 BCE. Mosul grew as a Hellenistic, Parthian, and Sasanian city on the western bank, and under the Umayyad caliphate became a major Arab city. The Hamdanid dynasty (10th century) made it a centre of Arab poetry and c…