Sennacherib
c. 705 BCE · Nineveh
Sennacherib (r. 705–681 BCE), son of Sargon II, made Nineveh his magnificent capital, building the 'Palace Without Rival' and an elaborate system of canals and aqueducts to water the city. His campaigns included the destruction of Babylon (which he sacked in 689 BCE) and a famous Levantine campaign against Hezekiah of Judah and the siege of Jerusalem, recorded both in his annals and in the Hebrew Bible. He was assassinated by one of his sons and succeeded by Esarhaddon.
Did you know?
A stone aqueduct centuries before Rome
Around 690 BCE, King Sennacherib of Assyria built a canal system over 50 km long to water his capital Nineveh, including a stone aqueduct at Jerwan made of some two million dressed limestone blocks that carried water across a valley on arches of stone. It predates Rome's first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia of 312 BCE, by nearly four centuries.
How we know
Sennacherib's Jerwan aqueduct / Nineveh canal system c. 703–690 BCE (~2 million dressed limestone blocks, stone arches, ~50 km) vs. Rome's Aqua Appia, 312 BCE; gap 690−312 = 378 yrs (~4 centuries); age today 690+2026 = 2,716 yrs.
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Nineveh
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Nineveh
Capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire on the east bank of the Tigris opposite modern Mosul; the Kuyunjik mound held Ashurbanipal's great library. A pin here marks where the tablet was unearthed, not where its text was first composed.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Sennacherib’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.