Nineveh

The endonym for the city, Ninua (also Ninuwā, Ninâ), written either syllabically as URU.ni-nu-a or with the single logogram that draws a fish within the sign for “house.” It is among the oldest names in Mesopotamia, attached to the cult-place of Ishtar of Nineveh from the third millennium, and it becomes the imperial center under Sennacherib around 700 BCE, after which it falls in 612 BCE and is named in Assyrian royal inscriptions no more. The fish-in-a-house writing tempted ancient scribes toward a connection with a fish-goddess, but the name’s origin is more likely Hurrian, the city lying within the early Hurrian sphere.

Ninua is the source of every other form on this page, and its written sign is one of the small enigmas of cuneiform: a fish enclosed in a house, read as the name of a city whose real etymology no one can recover. That pictorial spelling, half a rebus and half a riddle, stands at the head of a transmission that would carry the name into a dozen languages and split it, in Greek and Latin, between a doomed city and a founding king.

The Sumerian logogram behind the city’s name, the single sign that pictures a fish within a house, conventionally transliterated NINA. The same sign names a southern Sumerian town as well, and its application to the northern city is part of how cuneiform worked, one logogram serving more than one place; at Nineveh it was read in Akkadian as Ninua. The writing appears in administrative and lexical contexts from the later third millennium onward.

The Sumerian entry is the bare sign from which the Akkadian Ninua takes its written shape, the fish-in-a-house that every later reader inherited without its key. Where most of this page records how a name changed as it moved between languages, this entry records the opposite: a single unchanging glyph, older than any of the spoken forms around it, holding the city’s name in a picture no one could quite read.

The Hebrew name for the city, Nīnəwēh, which preserves the Akkadian Ninua closely and carries the city’s moral afterlife. Genesis credits its founding to Nimrod; Jonah makes it the “great city” whose threatened destruction is averted by repentance, to the prophet’s displeasure; Nahum and Zephaniah, by contrast, exult in its fall. It is in these prophetic books, written around and after the historical destruction of 612 BCE, that Nineveh becomes a fixed type of the proud empire brought low.

Nīnəwēh is the form on which the whole biblical transmission turns. From it descend the Syriac Nīnwē, the Arabic Naynawā, the Ethiopic Nanawē, and, by way of the Septuagint’s Nineuē, the Latin Ninive; the entire scriptural family on this page passes through the Hebrew. The historical Assyrians had called their capital Ninua for two thousand years, but it was a handful of Hebrew prophets, writing of its wickedness and its doom, who made the name unforgettable.

The second of the city’s two Greek names, Ninos, which the classical historians used for both the city and its supposed founder. In the tradition that Ctesias gave and Diodorus preserved, Ninos was the first great king of Assyria, conqueror of Asia, builder of the city he named after himself, and husband of the legendary Semiramis; Herodotus already calls the city Ninos and dates events “after the taking of Ninos.” This was the Nineveh of Greek historiography, known not from scripture but from the half-mythical court histories of the East.

Where the Septuagint’s Nineuē kept the city a place, Ninos dissolved it into a person. The Greeks, lacking the cuneiform record and meeting Assyria only through legend, did what they often did with foreign cities of great fame: they gave it an eponymous founder and told his story instead of the city’s. Ninos is the city remembered as a man, the rare case on these pages where an exonym is not a place-name at all but the name of a king who never was.

The first of the city’s two Greek names, Nineuē, the transliteration by which the Septuagint carried the Hebrew Nīnəwēh into Greek in Jonah, Nahum, and the Table of Nations. It is the biblical form, faithful to the Hebrew and indifferent to the classical legend of King Ninos; the New Testament continues it, with Jesus invoking the “men of Nineveh” who repented at Jonah’s preaching. This is the name as the Greek-speaking church knew it, anchored to the prophet and his reluctant mission.

Nineuē is one of two Greek names for one city, and the contrast with the other, Ninos, is this page’s sharpest. The translators of scripture transcribed the toponym as they found it in the Hebrew, a city and nothing more; the historians, working from a different tradition, had already turned the same name into a man, the empire’s founder-king. Greek thus held Nineveh as both a place repented in and a person reigned by, and the two never met on the page.

The second of the city’s two Latin names, Ninus, taken from the Greek Ninos and naming the legendary founder-king of Assyria, after whom the city was said to be called. Justin, epitomizing the universal history of Pompeius Trogus, opens with Ninus as the first king to make war on his neighbors; the Christian historian Orosius takes him up as the very type of the warlike pagan empire, and through such works Ninus and his queen Semiramis became standard figures of medieval world chronicles.

Ninus is the king-form of the name in its Latin dress, the western continuation of the Greek historians’ personified city. That a single Mesopotamian toponym should reach Latin twice, once as the holy city Ninivē and once as the conqueror Ninus, is the fullest expression of this page’s pattern: the same four syllables, split into a place and a person, traveling side by side down both the scriptural and the historical roads into the modern West.

The first of the city’s two Latin names, Ninivē, the biblical form descending through the Greek Nineuē of the Septuagint and fixed by Jerome’s Vulgate in Jonah, Nahum, and Genesis. It is the Nineveh of the Latin church and of medieval Christendom, the city of Jonah’s preaching and Nahum’s prophecy, kept distinct from the Ninus of the classical historians who shared the Latin world’s bookshelves.

Ninivē is the scriptural half of a divided Latin inheritance. A reader of the Vulgate met Ninivē the penitent city; a reader of Justin’s epitome of Trogus met Ninus the founding king; and Latin, like Greek before it, kept the two apart, the Bible’s place-name and the historians’ eponym sitting unreconciled in the same language. The split that began in Greek thus passed whole into Latin, and from Latin into the European languages that inherited both.

The Syriac name for the city, Nīnwē, taken directly from the Hebrew Nīnəwēh in the Peshitta Old Testament. Syriac Christianity had a special closeness to Nineveh: its heartland lay in northern Mesopotamia around Mosul, in sight of the ruins, and the city’s name carried real local weight. The Church of the East kept, and still keeps, a “Rogation of the Ninevites,” the three-day fast of repentance modeled on Jonah’s Nineveh, so that the biblical city’s name became attached to a living penitential observance.

Nīnwē is the biblical name come home, the form of the city’s name used by the Christian communities that actually lived where Nineveh had stood. From this Syriac form, in turn, the Arabic Naynawā was taken. On a page where the name otherwise travels ever further from the Tigris, into Greek, Latin, and Ethiopic, this entry marks the point where the name circles back to within sight of the mound it began on.

The Babylonian Aramaic name of the city, Ninwe, the Nineveh of the book of Jonah, which the Talmud invokes chiefly as the city that repented. In the discussion of fasting and prayer for rain in tractate Taʿanit, the men of Nineveh, anshei Ninwe, stand as the precedent for an individual or a community crying out to God in time of need.

Ninwe is the great Assyrian capital remembered, in the rabbinic East, almost entirely for a single act. The city that the Assyrian kings made the largest in the world, and whose fall the prophet Nahum sang, survives in the Talmud not as the seat of empire but as the model penitents, the gentiles who heard a prophet and turned. The name of Sennacherib’s capital had become, for the rabbis of Babylonia, a byword for repentance.

The Geʿez name for the city, Nanawē, carried into Ethiopic from the Greek of the Septuagint with which the Ethiopian church received the book of Jonah. The vocalization has drifted from the Hebrew, the long ī of Nīnəwēh opening to a, but the city is unmistakable. Its fame in Ethiopian Christianity rests, as in the Syriac church, on Jonah: the Ṣoma Nanawē, the “Fast of Nineveh,” remains a fixed penitential observance of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, three days commemorating the repentance of the Ninevites.

Nanawē is the southernmost reach of the biblical name and, like the Syriac, a name still in living liturgical use rather than a mere relic of translation. The city that fell in 612 BCE and was never rebuilt is fasted for, every year, in the highlands of Ethiopia, its Geʿez name spoken in a rite of repentance modeled on the very story that made Nineveh famous. A ruined Assyrian capital survives, in this entry, as a season of the church year.

The Arabic name for the city, Naynawā, taken through the Syriac of the local Christian population. By the time it is well attested, Nineveh was long ruined, and the geographer Yāqūt describes Naynawā as the ancient site across the Tigris from Mosul, marked by the mound and shrine of the prophet Jonah, Nabī Yūnus. The Arabic name thus belongs not to a living city but to a place of pilgrimage built over the dead one.

Naynawā closes a circle. The name that the Hebrew prophets fixed to the story of Jonah returns, in Arabic, to a hill that the same tradition calls the Tomb of Jonah; the Qurʾān knows the prophet as the man of the fish, and his memorial stands on the ruins of the city he was sent to. Of all the forms on this page, the Arabic is the one still spoken on the ground, the ancient name surviving as the name of a shrine on the mound where Nineveh once stood.