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Nineveh stands on the east bank of the Tigris River, now enclosed within the urban sprawl of Mosul in northern Iraq. The ancient city mound forms two principal tells: Kuyunjik (the main citadel, approximately 40 hectares) and Nebi Yunus (traditionally the burial place of the Prophet Jonah, now largely inaccessible under a mosque and residential buildings). The site has been occupied since at least the seventh millennium BCE, with Neolithic and Halaf-period levels below the later Assyrian remains.
Nineveh reached its greatest extent under Sennacherib (r. 705–681 BCE), who declared it his capital and undertook one of the most ambitious urban building programs of antiquity. His "Palace Without Rival" on Kuyunjik covered approximately 10,000 square metres of floor area and was decorated with 2 to 3 kilometres of carved limestone relief panels depicting military campaigns, royal hunts, and ritual scenes. The outer city walls, as described in his annals and confirmed by archaeological survey, enclosed approximately 750 hectares — enormous by ancient standards — making Nineveh one of the largest cities in the world at the time, with an estimated population of 100,000–150,000.
Sennacherib's son Esarhaddon and grandson Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 BCE) continued the palace complex. Ashurbanipal's North Palace contained the Royal Library: a systematic collection of approximately 30,000 clay tablets assembled from scribal schools and temple libraries across Mesopotamia, including the most complete copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh (the world's oldest literary epic), omen texts, astronomical records, medical treatises, and mythological narratives. The tablets were intentionally organized — labeled, catalogued, and cross-referenced — making this arguably the world's first deliberately assembled reference library.
Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to a coalition of Babylonians, Medes, and Scythians. The city was sacked and burned with a thoroughness that seemed, to ancient writers, almost providential — the Hebrew prophet Nahum had predicted it, and classical writers used the destruction of Nineveh as a moral exemplum for the inevitable downfall of arrogant empires. The burning of the palace actually preserved the clay tablets, which were fired by the conflagration into the durable objects that Layard and Rassam excavated in the 1840s–1850s and sent to the British Museum.