The Fall of Nineveh

Assyria had overreached: wars in Egypt, Elam and Babylonia ran at once, and after Ashurbanipal's death came struggles for the throne. Nabopolassar of Babylon and Cyaxares the Mede made an alliance and, after a three-month siege, took Nineveh. The city was burned and never rebuilt; the remnants of the army held out in the west a few more years and were finished off at Carchemish. A power that had terrified the whole Near East for a century and a half vanished so thoroughly that two hundred years later Greek soldiers marched past its mounds not knowing whose ruins they were.