“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens' famous opening line of his A Tale of Two Cities is just one of many examples of the author's use of doubles in the book. Throughout the work the author pairs people, cities, and events. A characteristic of doubles is that they can replace one another even if they are opposites: At the end of the Tale, the idle drunk Carton dies in the place of the virtuous Darnay. Similarly Dickens ties the fates of the cities Paris and London essentially together, and one can easily think of other doubles in that respect: New York and Baghdad today or Nineveh and Babylon in the first millennium BC. In all three cases the connection is more imaginary or literary than real. It is important, however, for historians to ask why these connections were made, and how they influenced the record with which they work.

This paper will deal with Nineveh and Babylon, and how the fates of these two cities were fundamentally connected — not in reality, but in the ancient discourse regarding them. In her article “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens”, Stephanie Dalley pointed out in detail how classical and Biblical authors were confused with respect to these two cities and had difficulties keeping them apart (Dalley 1994). For example, Ktesias locates Nineveh on the Euphrates instead of the Tigris, and the Biblical Book of Chronicles states that Esarhaddon deported the Judean king Manasseh to Babylon, while he must have meant Nineveh. Other examples abound. We can look at these mistakes one by one and try to explain them. We can find an explanation in the fact that Nineveh at times was called “Old Babylon” in Assyrian sources, or excuse the Biblical authors for being obsessed with the great deportations to Babylonia under Nebuchadnezzar. Those are valid remarks, but do not explain why the confusion was so widespread. I will argue here that the misunderstanding was due to an actual objective in the late cuneiform tradition to tie the fates of Nineveh and Babylon together. At least with respect to their destructions, these cities were each other's mirror images, each other's doubles.

The goal of this article is to investigate the enigma of the Old Akkadian presence at Nineveh. After reviewing the written and archaeological evidence for such a presence, the lack of evidence at Nineveh will be compared with the comparatively richer testimony of the Old Akkadian occupation at Assur. The thesis of this paper is that Šamši-Adad's claim that Maništušu was the original builder of the temple of Ištar of Nineveh should be regarded as suspect in the absence of any other data to back up his claim. I would like to make it clear that I am not insisting that Nineveh was a desolate site with no inhabitants during the Old Akkadian period. On the contrary, I do believe that it was inhabited at this time, although the evidence is meagre. However, who these inhabitants were is a question that needs to be answered. An official residence or presence of the Old Akkadians at the site seems unlikely, and I hope that I can prove this thesis to you.

The previously cited proof of an Old Akkadian presence in Nineveh rests on primary and secondary evidence. The primary evidence said to reflect such a presence implies Old Akkadian texts and objects. However, the Old Akkadian texts consist of a few fragments of two broken stone inscriptions bearing royal dedications of the Old Akkadian king Naram-Sin. The fragments were found in the area of the first-millennium Nabû temple. These dedications apparently recorded Naram-Sin's rebuilding of the Ekur in Nippur and were not concerned with any northern site. Consequently, the original inscriptions, of which these fragments are remnants, were probably brought to Nineveh in the seventh century from Nippur. They were carried there presumably at the same time as the Šulgi foundation document from Kutha and the Warad-Sin inscription from Ur, so they can hardly be used as evidence of an official Old Akkadian residence in Nineveh. Moreover, there is not one reference to the town of Nineveh in Old Akkadian sources.

To speak about Nineveh from the perspective of the archives of Mari may seem rash: the Middle Euphrates is a long way from the banks of the Tigris. Yet the importance of Nineveh and its shrine was such that several texts found at Mari mention it as what must then have been a religious metropolis.

During the period when Mari was under the dominion of Samsî-Addu, his son, Yasmah-Addu, sat on its throne. He was primarily responsible for affairs in the west, but personally participated in the military campaign marked by the fall of Nineveh and received numerous letters informing him of military events related to this event. Even after the conquest of Mari, when Yasmah-Addu had left the area, news of Nineveh and its surroundings went on arriving at the capital of the Middle Euphrates and continued to do so more sporadically in the era of Zimrî-Lîm.

I would like first to present the data relevant to the geography and toponymy of the kingdom of Nurrugûm, to which Nineveh belonged at that time, and then to reconstruct the campaign that led to the fall of Nineveh and the complete annexation of the kingdom. I will end with some remarks on the famous commemorative inscription placed by Samsî-Addu in the temple Emenue at Nineveh.

Dans un article au titre très évocateur «Aššur avant l'Assyrie», J.-M. Durand et D. Charpin avaient montré comment Samsî-Addu (ca. 1813–1775), quoiqu'il ne fût pas roi d'Assyrie, avait eu, en conquérant des territoires en amont d'Ekallâtum et à l'est du Tigre «la prescience géniale d'une unité géo-politique fondamentale permettant d'organiser toute la région du Nord-Est du Proche-Orient». Dans ce territoire conquis par le roi d'Ekallâtum, les deux auteurs signalent que deux villes, Aššur et Ninive, «semblent avoir été de tout temps majeures». Pour l'époque médio-assyrienne plus précisément, l'étude des relations des deux villes est éclairante à deux titres. D'une part l'époque médio-assyrienne est le premier moment où justement l'Assyrie comme entité politique commence à exister sous le règne du roi Aššur-uballiṭ (ca. 1363–1328). Ce dernier prit le titre de roi du pays d'Aššur, donnant ainsi pour la première fois à sa charge une dimension territoriale. D'autre part, on peut s'interroger sur la place de Ninive dans l'empire médio-assyrien dont P. Garelli a montré dès 1967 la très forte centralisation, qui paraît confirmée par chaque nouvelle découverte archéologique ou épigraphique.

Ištar of Nineveh at first glance presents a dilemma for the researcher. While she was a most important goddess, patron of a major town in north Mesopotamia, very little is known about her. As to her importance, in Hurrian religion Teššub and Ša'uška of Nineveh were heads of the pantheon. Here she is given her Hurrian name, Ša'uška. Thus the Mitanni king Tušratta in the Amarna letter no. 23, to Amenophis III, writes that Ša'uška of Nineveh, lady of all the lands (dMÙŠ šauruni-i-na nin kur-kur gáb-bi-i-ši-na-ma), wanted to travel to Egypt and to return. She is further called “lady of heaven” (nin ša-me-e) and “our lady” (nin-ne). Amarna letter no. 24, from the same Mitanni king to the same Pharaoh, refers to Ša'uška of Nineveh as “my goddess” (uruni-i-nu-a-a-we dša-uš-ka-a-wa de-en-ni-iw-wu-ú-a: VS XII 200 iii 98). One might conclude that “lady of heaven” alludes to her as Venus in the sky, but it might also mean the abode of the good gods without any astral allusion. It has been alleged that her wish to travel to Egypt was in the capacity of a goddess of healing, to cure the Pharaoh of his malady, but this is mere speculation. The letter gives no hint of this.

This brief international affair illustrates the problems excellently. There is a mass of cuneiform material bearing on the Sumerian Inanna and her Babylono-Assyrian counterpart Ištar, especially hymns and prayers. From them one can extract her major attributes — sexuality and war — and her astral presence in the planet Venus. The occurrence of related gods in other ancient Near Eastern regions — Aštart and Anat in Syria, Aṯtar in Arabia — suggests that the origins of the cult go back perhaps to neolithic time or even earlier, and the certain relationship with the Greek Aphrodite and Roman Venus attests to the power of this cult, however one explains the connection. However, in each Mesopotamian well-established centre of this cult one can assume that local customs and traditions will have added something to the basic “theology” we extract from our general knowledge of the goddess. For Ištar of Nineveh the episode of Tušratta may or may not allude to her star Venus, but otherwise it is totally uninformative about her “theology”. And that is typical for most of the other dated and precisely located evidence.

In a hymn written for Assurbanipal (K. 1290, cited here from Alasdair Livingstone's recent edition), the king describes how Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela have collaborated in helping him during his reign. The text is described in its colophon as a song of Assurbanipal for “the Lady of Nineveh”, a title reserved for Ishtar of Nineveh. Although this suggests that the text may have been copied out on this tablet to serve as a guide for performance of the text for Ishtar of Nineveh, the text itself is quite clearly a two-goddess hymn. It opens by urging listeners to glorify the Lady of Nineveh and magnify the Lady of Arbela “who have no equal among the gods” (1. 3: šá-ni-na la i-šá-a). Significantly, the verb “have” appears here in the feminine plural form. The praises that follow similarly employ feminine plural pronominal suffixes: “Their names (1. 4: zi-kir-ši-na) are most precious among the goddesses, their cult centers (1. 5: ma-ha-za-ši-na) have no equal”, and “the word from their lips (1. 6: zi-kir šap-te-ši-na) is blazing fire”. The grammar makes it unmistakably clear that we are dealing here with two separate and distinct goddesses, each named Ishtar.

The British excavations at Nineveh, initiated in 1845 by Austen Henry Layard, produced about 30,000 clay tablets or fragments of tablets, most of them coming from the citadel mound of Kuyunjik. This textual material can be divided into two main groups: on the one hand, library tablets, consisting of literary, lexical and historical texts, rituals, medical compendia, Sumerian prayers and above all omen texts, and on the other, archival documents, such as letters, contracts and administrative notes. The great, and rather unique, potential of the texts from Kuyunjik lies in the fact that they reveal to us, more than any other repository of cuneiform tablets ever found, how culture, represented by the first group of texts, and politics, represented by the second, were related to each other in ancient Mesopotamia.

While the archival documents from Kuyunjik date to the reigns of several Assyrian rulers from the eighth and seventh centuries, the library texts seem to belong mostly, though not exclusively, to the reign of a single Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (669 to about 630), a man deeply interested in the scribal arts of ancient Mesopotamia. His enthusiasm for reading and writing, which he seems to have shared with his wife, Libbāli-šarrat, can be traced back to his youth. From an autobiographical sketch about his intellectual socialization, we know that Ashurbanipal had received the education of a future scholar. In a passage somewhat reminiscent of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, Ashurbanipal described the scribal training of his early years as follows:

In both its versions the Marduk Ordeal text states that “enūma eliš, which is recited and chanted before Bel in Nisan, concerns his imprisonment”. Diverse clever and mostly correct interpretations of this somewhat weird statement have been offered, generally dwelling on the obvious attempt at Assyrianising Babylonian lore (and dogma) underlying this text and related material. These explanations, however, seem to overlook an important point: the statement is simply untrue. This is in stark contrast with the other unequivocal mention of enūma eliš: the reference to Anšar in MO A. 1. 54, who is presented having come into being before heaven and earth were created. The reason why this notion is taken over wholesale seems simple: to an Assyrian audience the identity between AN.ŠAR and the god Aššur (probably via *aššar — an almost universal assimilation feature of Akkadian) will have been obvious and convincing. It should be noted that Bel's defence in MO A 1. 35 “I only did what was beneficent to Aššur” also hinges on this identification. But this leaves us with the palpable untruth of 1. 34. How is this to be understood? I suggest that no answer to this question should be attempted without taking into account the text as a whole, and in particular its specific and highly idiosyncratic texture and structure.

The text is made up from bits of different types of discourse, strung together very loosely and without any apparent structure. The prevalent types are:

1. short bits of apparently narrative material, such as “Bēlet-ilī, who roams the streets, is looking for Marduk (saying:) ‘Where is he kept prisoner?’”;

2. short point-to-point equivalencies of disparate materials, such as “The dog which crosses Esabad is a messenger. Gula is sending it to him”;

3. somewhat longer passages explaining some point by reference to other texts (the note about Bel's imprisonment seems to belong to this group).

The purpose of the British Museum's Ashurbanipal Library Project is to investigate the content of the significant tablet collection that this Assyrian king assembled for his royal library. The initial project is focused on the Babylonian texts in order to establish the compositions involved and their relation to the rest of the Kouyunjik Collection and to the collecting activities of Ashurbanipal (668–627 BC).

The examination of the Babylonian texts of Ashurbanipal's library is a difficult task. Whoever is familiar with the Nineveh texts knows that the tablets were originally stored in four different buildings (see Fig. 1): in the South-West Palace, in the North Palace, and in the vicinity of the temples of Ištar and Nabû, with some additional find spots on and off the mound Kouyunjik. It is the tablet collection of the South-West Palace that formed the library of Ashurbanipal, but the excavation reports of Nineveh very seldom refer to the places where the tablets were found. To reconstruct the different libraries and archives is a very time-consuming task and beyond the possibilities of the six-month timetable for this project. Therefore, for the time being, I decided to consider the Babylonian literary tablets and all legal documents written during the reign of Ashurbanipal and his predecessors as coming from one place, namely Ashurbanipal's library or libraries at Nineveh.

While surveying the approximate figure of 26,000 tablets and fragments that the British excavators unearthed in Nineveh I entered the genre and content of the Babylonian texts in a database, together with a short description of the fragments, e.g. shape, colour, number of columns, lines and dividing lines. This database includes information on about 4290 tablets and fragments, of which 610 have already been rejoined to other fragments. Therefore, until now, the total number of Babylonian texts and fragments excavated in Nineveh is about 3680 — or in other words about one-seventh of all of the British Museum's Nineveh collection. The database I created also serves as a basis for collecting all texts of the same kind in order to identify joining fragments.

According to his inscriptions, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, conquered and razed the city of Babylon in 689 BCE. Previous Neo-Assyrian monarchs had employed a variety of strategies while attempting to deal with what Machinist has dubbed their “Babylonian Problem”. None of these previous tactics, however, approached the level of violence and destruction evidenced in Sennacherib's own descriptions of this campaign. Indeed, as elaborated by Brinkman, the Neo-Assyrian court traditionally venerated Babylonian culture.

Machinist's interpretation, while not dismissing the unprecedented destructiveness of Sennacherib's actions, positions these actions in the context of a larger struggle faced by all the Sargonid monarchs, the struggle of maintaining sovreignty over Babylonia while honoring its religious and cultural traditions. However, such an utter devastation of Babylon, its treatment as one of Assyria's many other de-cultured vassals, is disparate enough from the actions of Sennacherib's predecessors so as to place his son and successor, Esarhaddon, in a difficult position with respect to Babylon and the Babylonian population.

Esarhaddon's decision to abandon his father's extreme tactics and adopt a primarily peaceful policy, comparable in aspects to those of the earlier Neo-Assyrian monarchs, was therefore a risky one. It is, however, a decision he stands by and justifies through many of the compositions produced during his reign. In the wake of the destruction and de-culturation in the service of Assyrian hegemony wreaked by his father, Esarhaddon designs a policy toward Babylonia based on construction and acculturation that influences and affects the cultures of both Assyria and Babylonia.

The Assyrian Netherworld is often depicted in literature as a grim “hell” whose residents are clad like birds, deprived of light, and have soil and clay as their food and sustenance. It is the land of no return, erṣet la târi, “the house which none who enters ever leaves”, reached by a “path that allows no journey back”. In addition to such a dreary “hell,” however, the Assyrian Netherworld should also be understood in its capacity as a locus of initiation to which the hero or the spiritual adept is able to pay a visit while still alive without being permanently engulfed by it, and as a result attains a superior level of consciousness, perhaps even immortality.

This paper focuses on such initiatic aspects of the Netherworld. Especially two poems composed in the Standard Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, the Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a work long ingrained in the Mesopotamian religious consciousness, and the poem known as the Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Prince, may be thought to shed light on this more covert perception of the Netherworld. Further, since both of these works come from “libraries” in Nineveh, they may after all be thought to reflect the way the Ninevite intellectual elite themselves perceived the Netherworld. This “Underworld Vision” of the Ninevite scholarly milieu is by no means confined to contemporary literature; it is also visible in the royal palaces of Nineveh through representations of gate-guardians, Mischwesen, that belong to that very Netherworld. Nor is this “Underworld Vision” exclusive to the Ninevite elite alone, as it is one which the latter inherited from a long-standing Mesopotamian mystical tradition. Here, however, I shall try to present a glimpse of this Netherworld from a Ninevite perspective.

As has been shown and extensively dealt with in early and more recent scholarship, Neo-Assyrian palatial wall reliefs went through many thematic changes throughout their two hundred and fifty years of existence. One of their conspicuous traits was a gradual abandoning of magical-religious subject matters, represented by protective supernatural beings, in favour of larger and more detailed historical compositions — mostly of a belligerent nature — revealing, for the first time in antiquity, a truer sense of narrative display. As the narrative-historical themes were rightly considered to be an innovative and prominent contribution of Assyrian imagery to the history of art, extensive efforts have been devoted to the study of these compositions within the context of Assyrian palaces.

In the present contribution I intend, however, to concentrate on the “losing” side of Assyrian palatial decoration, namely to focus on the visibility of apotropaic fantastic creatures rendered on wall reliefs and to offer some explanation for their gradual expulsion from the pictorial display of the Assyrian palace. Following Porada, in this essay these hybrids are called demons, in accordance with the Greek term daimon. Benevolent demons appear already in early ninth-century Neo-Assyrian wall reliefs, both in temples, as shown by a small number of slabs from the Ninurta Temple at Nimrud, and much more commonly in palaces, in particular within the North-West Palace.