![]() People continued to live there for centuries, with archaeological remains dating to the 1500s CE. A series of outsiders attacked the city around 612 BCE, including invaders from Babylon. The city not only boasted a spectacular and sprawling palace, but its residents benefited from a well-engineered canal system that brought water to the city.īut Nineveh was not alone in the ancient world. These archaeological expeditions have since shown that the once-fertile site was first inhabited around 9,000 years ago, though it began its period of greatest glory under king Sennacherib in the 8th century BCE. Excavations of the ancient Assyrian settlement began in the early 19th century and included an extraordinary cache of cuneiform-inscribed tablets from the library of king Ashurbanipal. Practically all life in Tall el-Hammam would have been incinerated in an instant, while the city's buildings were reduced to rubble a blink later.Īs much as ancient writers made hay of Nineveh's lawless reputation, it wasn't just a metaphor. Its effects would have been equivalent to a nuclear weapon far more powerful than those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Researchers suspect that the most likely culprits were the combined effects of an "airburst" and a shockwave created by a meteor or comet disintegrating above the city, melting pottery and creating distinctive quartz crystals. A 2021 study published in Nature Scientific Reports argues that around 1650 BCE, the city of Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley was devastated by a sudden blast of intense heat and pressure. ![]() Or perhaps the detail that God rained down destruction upon the cities points to another explanation. An earthquake that occurred around 1900 BCE may have so disrupted the area that any cities there would have been brought to ruin. Some point to a strip of land that bisects the Dead Sea in Israel, noting that it once supported agriculture and presumably many people and their settlements. However, quite a few archaeologists think that Sodom and Gomorrah actually existed.
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