Nineveh

Nineveh, the largest city in the world 2,700 years ago, will be resurrected in the National Museum of Antiquities from October 20, 2017. More than 250 objects and works of art from home and abroad are brought together in this exhibition.

For the first time since their discovery more than 180 years ago, the jewelry, clay tablets and statues will be together again. Special are the large reliefs from the city palaces and the reconstruction of a hall from the palace of King Sennacherib.

Nineveh takes you back to the heyday of the Neo-Assyrian capital in northern Iraq. With more than 100,000 inhabitants, it was for a time the largest and most important city in the world around 700 BC. But the story of the exhibition is also about the first occupation of the place. Moreover, you will learn everything about the adventurous rediscovery of the remains of Nineveh in the nineteenth century. The search for Classical and Biblical Nineveh is also discussed. The story ends with the recent destruction of the ruins.

Nineveh pays special attention to heritage in crisis situations and ways to preserve the past for the future. In addition to life-size computer animations of the old city, the exhibition features a number of reliefs from a palace hall that have been precisely recreated using 3D techniques and projection of the original colors. An international research team (including from Delft University of Technology) used photos for the reconstruction that were taken before the recent destruction.