Which great Assyrian city is named in the opening line of the poem Cargoes by John Masefield?
"of all the nations that were dominated by the Assyrian empire. He is a great criminal. He has had one hundred prisoners of war executed. After a long struggle the town is conquered by Median and Babylonian troops led by prince Arbaces and priest Belesis. The king sets his own palace on fire and dies inside together with all his concubines. Atherstone's friend, the artist John Martin, created a painting of the same name inspired by the poem. The English poet John Masefield's well-known, fanciful 1903 poem ""Cargoes"" mentions Nineveh in its first line. Nineveh is also mentioned in Rudyard"
"Kipling's 1897 poem ""Recessional"". The 1962 Italian peplum movie, ""War Gods of Babylon"", is based on the sacking and fall of Nineveh by the combined rebel armies led by the Babylonians. Nineveh Nineveh (; ; ) was an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia, located on the outskirts of Mosul in modern-day northern Iraq. It is located on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, and was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Today it is a common name for the half of Mosul which lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris. It was the largest city in the"
"the new capital of Assyria. Immense building work was undertaken, and Nineveh eclipsed Babylon, Kalhu and Aššur in both size and importance, making it the largest city in the world. A number of scholars believe the true location of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were in fact at Nineveh. The mound of Kuyunjik in Mosul is the site of the palaces of King Sennacherib, and his successors Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal, (who established the Library of Ashurbanipal) and Ashur-etil-ilani. The Assyrian Empire began to unravel from 626 BC onwards, being consumed by a decade of brutal internal civil wars, greatly weakening it."
"Pasargadae Pasargadae (from , from Old Persian ""Pāθra-gadā"", ""protective club"" or ""strong club""; Modern Persian: ""Pāsārgād"") was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great who had issued its construction (559–530 BC); it was also the location of his tomb. It was a city in ancient Persia, located near the city of Shiraz (in Pasargad County), and is today an archaeological site and one of Iran's UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Cyrus the Great began building the capital in 546 BC or later; it was unfinished when he died in battle, in 530 or 529 BC. The remains of"
"Dur-Sharrukin Dur-Sharrukin (""Fortress of Sargon""; ), present day Khorsabad, was the Assyrian capital in the time of Sargon II of Assyria. Khorsabad is a village in northern Iraq, 15 km northeast of Mosul. The great city was entirely built in the decade preceding 706 BC. After the unexpected death of Sargon in battle, the capital was shifted 20 km south to Nineveh. Sargon II ruled from 722 to 705 BC. The demands for timber and other materials and craftsmen, who came from as far as coastal Phoenicia, are documented in contemporary Assyrian letters. The debts of construction workers were nullified"
"the Assyrian cities of Arbela and Arrapha (modern Kirkuk), probably as a reward for their help in the capture of Nineveh. The Persian emperor Cyrus the Great occupied Assyria in 547 BC and established it as an Achaemenid satrapy called in Old Persian ""Aθurā (Athura)"", with Arbela as the capital. The Battle of Gaugamela, in which Alexander the Great defeated Darius III of Persia in 331 BC, took place approximately west of Erbil. After the battle, Darius managed to flee to the city, and, somewhat inaccurately, the confrontation is sometimes known as the ""Battle of Arbela"". Subsequently, Arbela was part"
"Nineveh Nineveh (; ; ) was an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia, located on the outskirts of Mosul in modern-day northern Iraq. It is located on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, and was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Today it is a common name for the half of Mosul which lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris. It was the largest city in the world for some fifty years until the year 612 BC when, after a bitter period of civil war in Assyria, it was sacked by a coalition of its former subject peoples,"
"legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or even the actual Hanging Gardens. Assyria began as a Bronze Age city-state or small kingdom on the middle-Tigris. The kingdom collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, but was reconstituted at the beginning of the Iron Age, and under Tiglath-Pileser III and his sons Shalmaneser V and Sargon II (combined reigns 744–705 BCE), Assyria extended its rule over Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Syria-Palestine, making its capital Nineveh, one of the richest cities of the ancient world. The empire's rise aroused the fear and hatred of its neighbours, notably Babylon, Elam and Egypt, and the"
"in order to attract a sufficient labour force. The land in the environs of the town was taken under cultivation, and olive groves were planted to increase Assyria's deficient oil-production. The great city was entirely built in the decade preceding 706 BC, when the court moved to Dur-Sharrukin, although it was not completely finished yet. Sargon was killed during a battle in 705. After his unexpected death his son and successor Sennacherib abandoned the project, and relocated the capital with its administration to the city of Nineveh, 20 km south. The city was never completed and it was finally abandoned"
"of Assyria, and he took Ijon, and Abelbethmaachah, and Janoah, and Kedesh, and Hazor, and Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali, and carried them captive to Assyria. () In 722 BCE, nearly ten to twenty years after the initial deportations, the ruling city of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Samaria, was finally taken by Sargon II after a three-year siege started by Shalmaneser V. Against him came up Shalmaneser king of Assyria; and Hoshea became his servant, and gave him presents. And the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea: for he had sent messengers to So king"
"of technological, scientific and cultural achievements for its time. At its peak, the Neo-Assyrian Empire stretched from Cyprus and the East Mediterranean to Iran, and from what is now Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, to the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt and eastern Libya. Assyria is named after its original capital, the ancient city of Aššur, which dates to c. 2600 BC, originally one of a number of Akkadian-speaking city states in Mesopotamia. In the 25th and 24th centuries BC, Assyrian kings were pastoral leaders. From the late 24th century BC, the Assyrians became subject to Sargon of Akkad, who united"
"at its peak. At its peak, the Assyrian empire ruled over what the ancient Mesopotamian religion referred to as the ""four corners of the world"": as far north as the Caucasus Mountains within the lands of what is today called Armenia and Azerbaijan, as far east as the Zagros Mountains within the territory of present-day Iran, as far south as the Arabian Desert of today's Saudi Arabia, as far west as the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea, and even further to the west in Egypt and eastern Libya. Assyria is named for its original capital, the ancient city"
"one of the main five cities of the Philistine Pentapolis, Ashdod had great regional significance. Ashdod-Yam is first mentioned in documents from the time of Sargon II of Assyria when in 713 BCE the Assyrian king speaks of having to depose a usurper who had taken over control of the city of Ashdod and had fortified three towns: Ashdod itself, Gath, and ""Asdudimmu"" (Ashdod-Yam). When general Pompey restored to Ashdod its independence previously lost to the Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus, the city consisted of two twin towns, the regional center of ""Azotos Mesogeios"" or ""A. Hippenos"" (lit. ""inland Ashdod"" and"
"the 24th and 22nd centuries BC, following the conquests of king Sargon of Akkad. Because of the policies of the Akkadian Empire toward linguistic assimilation, Akkad also gave its name to the predominant Semitic dialect: the Akkadian language, reflecting use of ""akkadû"" (""in the language of Akkad"") in the Old Babylonian period to denote the Semitic version of a Sumerian text. Assyria was originally (in the Middle Bronze Age) a region on the Upper Tigris, named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur. Later, as a nation and empire that came to control all of the Fertile Crescent,"
"Kalhu (Calah, Nimrud), Sippar, Opis, Arrapha (Kirkuk), Harran, Arbela (Erbil) and Ekallatum. Outside of Assyria proper, major cities at various times under Assyrian domination were Babylon, Damascus (Dimashq), Thebes, Memphis, Tyre, Sidon, Ecbatana, Hattusa, Jerusalem, Susa, Persepolis, Carchemish, Sardis, Ur, Uruk, Nippur and Antioch. At the end of the Bronze Age, Nineveh was much smaller than Babylon, but still one of the world's major cities (population about 33,000). By the end of the Neo-Assyrian period, it had grown to a population of some 120,000, and was possibly the largest city of that time. All free male citizens were obliged to"
"the king of Assyria, according to Flavius Josephus in his record ""Antiquities of the Jews"" and various christian commentators, such as Matthew Henry and John Peter Lange. Such accounts render the battle as King Josiah either heroically trying to rescue the Assyrians from their enemies or attempting to avoid being surrounded by an enemy. Battle of Carchemish The Battle of Carchemish was fought about 605 BC between the armies of Egypt allied with the remnants of the army of the former Assyrian Empire against the armies of Babylonia, allied with the Medes, Persians, and Scythians. When the Assyrian capital Nineveh"
"an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia. The historic Nineveh is mentioned during the reign of Shamshi-Adad I (c. 1754 BC – c. 1721 BC) as a centre of worship for the god Ishtar, whose cult was responsible for the city's early importance. The goddess' statue was sent to the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III (c. 1386 BC – c. 1349 BC), by orders of the king of the Mitanni. The Assyrian city of Ninâ became one of Mitanni's vassals for half a century until c. 1378 BC. Assyrian merchants had established the ""karum"" (Akkadian: ""kārum"" ""quay, port, commercial district"", plural"
"Sidon instead of Byblos. Archaeological evidence at Byblos, particularly the five Byblian royal inscriptions dating back to around 1200–1000 BC, shows existence of a Phoenician alphabet of twenty-two characters; an important example is the Ahiram sarcophagus. The use of the alphabet was spread by Phoenician merchants through their maritime trade into parts of North Africa and Europe. One of the most important monuments of this period is the temple of Resheph, a Canaanite war god, but this had fallen into ruins by the time of Alexander the Great. In the Assyrian period, Sibittibaal of Byblos became tributary to Tiglath-Pileser III"
"is listed on the Parthian Stations Itinerarium and is also shown on the Tabula Peutingeriana. Alexandria Ariana The first of many Alexandrias in the Far East of the Macedonian Empire, Alexandria in Ariana was a city in what is now Afghanistan, one of the twenty-plus cities founded or renamed by Alexander the Great. The third largest Afghan city, Herat, is the city's modern name. In 330 BC, the Greek armies of Alexander moved the capital of the satrapy of Aria from Artacoana to the new site. In doing this, he expanded an existing Persian fortress. The location of this town"
"""-istān"" (""land of""). The name Assyria, in the form ""Asōristān"", was shifted to include ancient Babylonia by the Parthians, and this continued under the Sasanians. The historical country of Assyria (Athura), however, lay to the north of Babylonian Asoristan, in the independent frontier province of Osroene. During the Achaemenid (550–330 BCE) and Parthian Empires (150 BCE – 225 CE), this region had been known by the Old Persian name ""Athura"". Asōristān, Middle Persian ""land of Assyria"", was the capital province of the Sasanian Empire and was called ""Dil-ī Ērānshahr"", meaning ""Heart of Iran"". The city of Ctesiphon served as the"
"of the plain near the junction of the Tigris and the Khosr Rivers within an area of circumscribed by a brick rampart. This whole extensive space is now one immense area of ruins overlaid in parts by new suburbs of the city of Mosul. Nineveh was an important junction for commercial routes crossing the Tigris on the great highway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, thus uniting the East and the West, it received wealth from many sources, so that it became one of the greatest of all the region's ancient cities, and the capital of the Neo-Assyrian"
"and five thousand"" (i.e. 185,000), so by morning most of the Assyrian army was found to have died, mysteriously, in their sleep (2 Kings 19:35), and Sennacherib went back to Nineveh. The Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem is historical (dated 701 BC), but the Assyrian annals report that the result was the payment of tribute by Jerusalem, with Hezekiah remaining in office as a vassal ruler. The poem was popular in Victorian England and, when the first Australian cricket team to tour England defeated a strong MCC team, including W G Grace, at Lord's on 27 May 1878, the satirical magazine"
"The mind taking hold of the body, the body react- Ha! 'twas a glorious ride, Though I miss an old friend from my side, And sadness is mingled with pride. Still, 'twas a glorious ride— That race through the darkness, the straining, the The struggle, and slaughter by Kassassin lock.</poem> Kassassin Kassassin () is a village of Lower Egypt by rail, west of Ismailia on the Suez Canal. At the Sweet Water Canal, on August 28, 1882 the British force was attacked by the Egyptians, led by Amed Urabi Pasha. They needed to carve a passage through Ismailia and the"
"the Persian synthesis of various traditions, drawing on precedents from Elam, Babylon, Assyria, and ancient Egypt, with the addition of some Anatolian influences. The first capital of the Achaemenid Empire, Pasargadae lies in ruins 40'40 kilometers from Persepolis, in present-day Fars province of Iran. Pasargadae was first archaeologically explored by the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld in 1905, and in one excavation season in 1928, together with his assistant . Since 1946, the original documents, notebooks, photographs, fragments of wall paintings and pottery from the early excavations are preserved in the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. After"
"Nimrud Nimrud (; ) is the name that Carsten Niebuhr attributed for the ancient Assyrian city of Kalhu (the Biblical ""Calah""), located south of the city of Mosul, and south of the village of Selamiyah (), in the Nineveh plains in Upper Mesopotamia. It was a major Assyrian city between approximately 1350 BC and 610 BC. The city is located in a strategic position north of the point that the river Tigris meets its tributary the Great Zab. The city covered an area of . The ruins of the city were found within of the modern-day Assyrian village of Noomanea"
"Sepharvaim Sepharvaim - taken by a king of Assyria, probably Sargon II, (cited in the Old Testament in 2 Kings 17:24, 31; 18:34; 19:13; Isa. 37:13). It was a double city, and received the common name Sepharvaim, i.e., ""the two Sipparas,"" or ""the two booktowns."" The Sippara on the east bank of the Euphrates is now called Abu-Habba; that on the other bank was Akkad, the old capital of Sargon I, where he established a great library. The recent discovery of cuneiform inscriptions at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt, consisting of official despatches to Pharaoh Amenophis IV. and his predecessor from"
"capital of both the Parthian and Sasanian Empire, and was for some time the largest city in the world. The main language spoken by the Assyrian people was Eastern Aramaic, with the local Syriac language becoming an important vehicle for Syriac Christianity. The Church of the East was founded in Asōristān. Asōristān was largely identical with ancient Mesopotamia. The northern border is somewhat uncertain but probably went along a line from Anta to Takrīt. Ḥīra was probably the southernmost point, the border then following the northern part of the swamps of Wasit. The Parthians had exercised only loose control at"
"Shulgi mentioned the city of Urbilum – the ancient name of modern-day Erbil. The great Assyrian capitals of Assur, Nineveh, Nimrud and Dur-Sharrukin were all located in the foothill zone where the Great Zab flows into the Tigris, and the Great Zab basin became increasingly integrated into the Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian empires. Nimrud, the capital of the empire until 706 BCE, was located only away from the confluence of the Great Zab with the Tigris. The Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II constructed a canal called ""Patti-Hegalli"" that tapped water from the Great Zab to irrigate the land around Nimrud, and"
"""lingua franca"" of the empire, whose dialects still endure among the Christian Assyrians of the region today. However, in 706 BC Sargon II (722–705 BC) moved the capital of the empire to Dur Sharrukin, and after his death, Sennacherib (705–681 BC) moved it to Nineveh. It remained a major city and a royal residence until the city was largely destroyed during the fall of the Assyrian Empire at the hands of an alliance of former subject peoples, including the Babylonians, Chaldeans, Medes, Persians, Scythians, and Cimmerians (between 616 BC and 599 BC). The Nineveh Province in which the ruins of"
"is usually considered to have begun with the ascension of Adad-nirari II, in 911 BC, lasting until the fall of Nineveh at the hands of the Medes/Persians and Babylonians, Chaldeans in 609 BC. Assyria maintained a large and thriving rural population, combined with a number of well fortified cities, Major Assyrian cities during this period included; Nineveh, Assur, Kalhu (Calah, Nimrud), Arbela (Erbil), Arrapha (Karka, Kirkuk), Dur-Sharrukin, Imgur-Enlil, Carchemish, Harran, Tushhan, Til-Barsip, Ekallatum, Kanesh, Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, Urhai (Edessa), Guzana, Kahat, Amid (Diyarbakir), Mérida (Mardin, Tabitu, Nuhadra (Dohuk), Ivah, Sepharvaim, Rachae, Purushanda, Sabata, Birtha (Tikrit), Tell Shemshara, Dur-Katlimmu and Shekhna. Assyria once"
"Seleucia Seleucia (), also known as or , was a major Mesopotamian city of the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian empires. It stood on the west bank of the Tigris River opposite Ctesiphon, within the present-day Baghdad Governorate in Iraq. Seleucia (, ""Seleúkeia"") is named for Seleucus I Nicator, who enlarged an earlier settlement and made it the capital of his empire around 305 BC. It was the largest and most important of the many cities to bear its name but is sometimes distinguished as or () from the name of its river. Texts from the Assyrian Church of the East's"
"Khalid ibn Urfuta. Weh Antiok Khosrow Wēh Antīōk Khosrow (Middle Persian; literally, ""better than Antioch, Khosrow built this""), also called Rūmagān (Middle Persian for ""Romans' City""), Antiocheia Chosroou (Greek), al-Rūmīya (), or Beh-az-Andīw-e Khosrow (New Persian: , ""Better-than-Antioch of Khosrow""), was a city founded by Khosrow I in the vicinity of Ctesiphon, Sasanian Empire, that was populated by the deported Roman prisoners-of-war. The Persians used deportation as a tool of policy. Khosrow I captured Antioch in 540 during the Byzantine–Sasanian wars; the city was destroyed and its population was deported to this new city. According to Jacob of Edessa, prisoners-of-war"
"Assyria proper along the Tigris river and further upriver into Upper Mesopotamia, although there are various other theories placing it sometimes a little further out to the north, west, and/or east within the Tigris–Euphrates river system. Assur was the capital city of Assyria c. 2025 BC – c. 1754 BC and c. 1681 BC – c. 1379 BC. The oldest remains of the city were discovered in the foundations of the Ishtar temple, as well as at the Old Palace. In around 2025 BC, Puzur-Ashur I founded a new dynasty, and his successors such as Ilu-shuma, Erishum I and Sargon"