Nimrud

 

Nimrud is the Arab name for the ancient Assyrian city originally called Kalhu, located 30 km from Mosul. It was a major Assyrian city between approximately 1250 BC and 610 BC and briefly the capital of the great Assyrian state under Ashurnasirpal II. The king built a large palace and temples in the city that had fallen into a degree of disrepair during the Dark Ages of the mid 11th to mid 10th centuries BC. A grand opening ceremony with festivities and an opulent banquet is described in an inscribed slab discovered during excavations. Towards the end of the 7th century BC, Assyria collapsed at the hands of the Babylonians who in turn fell to the Persians and eventually Alexander the Great.

Nimrud’s ruins, first excavated in the mid-19th century, are dated to nearly 2000 BC. In 2013, the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council established the ‘Nimrud Project’ in order to identify and record the collection of artefacts from Nimrud, distributed among at least 76 museums worldwide. In March 2015 however, iconoclasts used bulldozers and explosives to decimate the remains of the city.

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