Carsten Niebuhr recorded its location during the 1761–1767
Danish expedition. Niebuhr wrote afterwards that "I did not learn that I was at so remarkable a spot, till near the river. Then they showed me a village on a great hill, which they call Nunia, and a mosque, in which the prophet Jonah was buried. Another hill in this district is called Kalla Nunia, or the Castle of Nineveh. On that lies a village Koindsjug." In 1820 the site was explored and described by archaeologist
Claudius Rich. In 1842, the French Consul General at Mosul,
Paul-Émile Botta, began to search the vast mounds that lay along the opposite bank of the river. While at Tell Kuyunjiq he had little success, the locals whom he employed in these excavations, to their great surprise, came upon the ruins of a building at the 20 km far-away mound of
Khorsabad, which, on further exploration, turned out to be the royal palace of
Sargon II, in which large numbers of reliefs were found and recorded, though they had been damaged by fire and were mostly too fragile to remove. In 1847 the young British diplomat
Austen Henry Layard explored the ruins. Layard did not use modern archaeological methods; his stated goal was "to obtain the largest possible number of well preserved objects of art at the least possible outlay of time and money". He also unearthed the palace and famous
library of Ashurbanipal with 22,000 cuneiform clay tablets. Most of Layard's material was sent to the
British Museum, but some was dispersed elsewhere: two large pieces were given to
Lady Charlotte Guest and these eventually found their way to the
Metropolitan Museum. The work of exploration was carried on by
Hormuzd Rassam,
George Smith and others, and a vast treasury of specimens of Assyria was incrementally exhumed for European museums. Palace after palace was discovered, with their decorations and their sculptured slabs, revealing the life and manners of this ancient people, their arts of war and peace, the forms of their religion, the style of their architecture, and the magnificence of their monarchs. The mound of Tell Kuyunjiq was excavated again by the archaeologists of the
British Museum, led by
Leonard William King, between 1902 and 1904. Their efforts concentrated on the site of the Temple of
Nabu where another cuneiform library was supposed to exist. However, no such library was ever found: most likely, it had been destroyed by the activities of later residents. The excavations started again in 1927, under the direction of
Campbell Thompson, who had taken part in King's expeditions. Some works were carried out outside Kuyunjiq, for instance on the mound of Tell Nebi Yunus, which was the ancient arsenal of Nineveh, or along the outside walls. Here, near the northwestern corner of the walls, beyond the pavement of a later building, the archaeologists found almost 300 fragments of prisms recording the royal annals of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal, beside a prism of Esarhaddon which was almost perfect. After the
Second World War, several excavations were carried out by
Iraqi archaeologists. From 1951 to 1958, Mohammed Ali Mustafa worked the site. The work was continued from 1967 through 1971 by Tariq Madhloom. Some additional excavation occurred by Manhal Jabur from the early 1970s to 1987. For the most part, these digs focused on Tell Nebi Yunus. The British archaeologist and Assyriologist Professor
David Stronach of the
University of California, Berkeley conducted a series of surveys and digs at the site from 1987 to 1990, focusing his attentions on the several gates and the existent mudbrick walls, as well as the system that supplied water to the city in times of siege. The excavation reports are in progress. After Mosul’s liberation from the control of the
Islamic State (IS), , University of Heidelberg, established a rescue project in 2018, exploring and documenting the intrusive IS tunnels in the Assyrian Military Palace that is located below the destroyed Mosque of the prophet
Jonah on Tell Nebi Yunus. Archaeological excavations have been conducted since 2019. Subsequently, an extensive research project, first under the direction of
Stefan M. Maul and now of Aaron Schmidt, University of Heidelberg, developed, focusing also on other areas of Nineveh. At Tell Kuyunjiq, activities started in 2021 with rescue and restoration measures for the destroyed reliefs in the throne room wing of the Southwest Palace. Excavations in the North Palace commenced in 2022. Since 2023, work has also been conducted at the Nergal Gate, which was bulldozed by IS. In the lower town, geophysical surveys were carried out north of Kuyunjiq in 2021 and 2023 in preparation of future research on residential areas. An Iraqi–Italian Archaeological Expedition by the
Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna and the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH), led by Nicolò Marchetti, began (with five campaigns having taken place between 2019 and 2023) a project aiming at the excavation, conservation and public presentation of the lower town of Nineveh. Work was carried out in nineteen excavation areas, from the Adad Gate – now completely repaired (after removing hundreds of tons of debris from ISIL's 2016 destructions), explored and protected with a new roof – deep into the Nebi Yunus town. In a few areas a thick later stratigraphy was encountered, but the late 7th century BC stratum was reached everywhere (actually in two areas in the pre-Sennacherib lower town the excavations already exposed older strata, up to the 11th century BC until now, aiming in the future at exploring the first settlement therein). In October 2023 an archaeological park was inaugurated at the site. Since 2024, an expedition led by Tim Harrison of the
ISAC at the University of Chicago has taken over from the University of Bologna the investigation of the eastern lower town at Nineveh.
Archaeological remains The site is marked by two large mounds, Tell Kuyunjiq and Tell
Nabī Yūnus "Prophet
Jonah", and the remains of the city walls (about in circumference), enclosing a vast lower town extensively encroached by modern buildings. The Neo-Assyrian levels of Kuyunjiq have been extensively explored. The other mound,
Nabī Yūnus, has not been as extensively explored because there was an Arab Muslim shrine dedicated to that prophet on the site. On July 24, 2014, the
Islamic State destroyed the shrine as part of a
campaign to destroy religious sanctuaries it deemed "un-Islamic", but also to loot that site through tunneling. The ruin mound of Tell Kuyunjiq rises about above the surrounding plain of the ancient city. It is quite broad, measuring about . Its upper layers have been extensively excavated, and several Neo-Assyrian palaces and temples have been found there. A deep sounding by
Max Mallowan revealed evidence of habitation as early as the 6th millennium BC. Today, there is little evidence of these old excavations other than weathered pits and earth piles. In 1990, the only Assyrian remains visible were those of the entry court and the first few chambers of the Palace of Sennacherib. Since that time, the palace chambers have received significant damage by looters and by the removal of the protective roof. Portions of relief sculptures that were in the palace chambers in 1990 were seen on the antiquities market by 1996. Photographs of the chambers made in 2003 show that many of the fine relief sculptures there have been reduced to piles of rubble and a conservation effort ensued. In 2016 Sennacherib's throne room was bulldozed by Daesh and the sculpted fragments were left exposed until 2022. excavated at Tell Nebi Yunus by Iraqi archaeologists Tell Nebi Yunus is located about south of Kuyunjiq and is the secondary ruin mound at Nineveh. On the basis of texts of Sennacherib, the site has traditionally been identified as the "armory" of Nineveh, and a gate and pavements excavated by Iraqis in 1954 have been considered to be part of the "armory" complex. Excavations in 1990 revealed a monumental entryway consisting of a number of large inscribed
orthostats and "bull-man" sculptures, some apparently unfinished. Following the
liberation of Mosul, the tunnels under Tell Nebi Yunus were explored in 2018, in which a 3000-year-old palace was discovered, including a pair of reliefs, each showing a row of women, along with reliefs of
lamassu. Gate, taken prior to the gate's destruction by
IS in April 2016 During the restoration project, seven damaged alabaster carvings from the time of Sennacherib were found at the gate in 2022. • Nergal Gate: Named for the god
Nergal, it may have been used for some ceremonial purpose, as it is the only known gate flanked by stone sculptures of winged bull-men (
lamassu). The reconstruction is conjectural, as the gate was excavated by Layard in the mid-19th century and reconstructed in the mid-20th century. The lamassu on this gate were defaced with a jackhammer by
IS forces and the gate was utterly destroyed. • Adad Gate: Named for the god
Adad. A roofing above it was begun in the late 1960s by Iraqis but was not completed. The result was a mixture of concrete and eroding mudbrick, which nonetheless does give some idea of the original structure. The excavator left some features unexcavated, allowing a view of the original Assyrian construction. The original brickwork of the outer vaulted passageway was well exposed, as was the entrance of the vaulted stairway to the upper levels. The actions of Nineveh's last defenders could be seen in the hastily built mudbrick construction which narrowed the passageway from . Around April 13, 2016,
IS demolished both the gate and the adjacent wall by flattening them with a bulldozer. Located in the eastern wall, it is the southernmost and largest of all the remaining gates of ancient Nineveh. • A new gate has been discovered in 2021 to the north of the Shamash Gate and south of the Khosr river (in the area labeled as N by the Iraqi-Italian expedition), next to a spectacular water tunnel running for 42 m under the 31m-thick city wall (area G, excavated in 2020 and 2021). == Threats to the site ==