The southern of Nineveh's two main mounds, Nebi Yunus (Hill of the Prophet Jonah) was long inaccessible to archaeologists because a mosque and a dense residential neighbourhood occupied its summit. The mosque, built over what tradition held to be the tomb of the prophet Jonah, was one of the oldest and most venerated in Iraq.
ISIS destroyed the mosque in 2014, and what followed was both a desecration and an inadvertent archaeological revelation. The militants tunnelled through the mound searching for antiquities to sell, and in doing so exposed a palace of Esarhaddon (680–669 BC) that turned out to contain extraordinary carved ivories, cuneiform tablets, and architecture that archaeologists are still working to understand. The mosque above has been partially restored since 2017, and the site represents one of the most complex and painful layers of Nineveh's modern history.