After his unexpected death his son and successor Sennacherib abandoned the project, and relocated the capital with its administration to the city of Nineveh, 20 km south.

[1] On 8 March 2015 the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant reportedly started the plunder and demolition of Dur-Sharrukin, according to the Kurdish official from Mosul Saeed Mamuzini.

[5] In addition to the great city, there was a royal hunting park and a garden that included "all the aromatic plants of Hatti[6] and the fruit-trees of every mountain", a "record of power and conquest", as Robin Lane Fox has observed.

This Mound was planted with cedars and cypresses and was modelled after a foreign landscape, the Amanus mountains in north Syria, which had so amazed the Assyrian kings.

[9]Dur-Sharrukin is roughly a square with a border marked by a city wall 24 meters thick with a stone foundation pierced by seven massive gates.

[10] While Dur-Sharrukin was abandoned in antiquity and thus did not attract the same level of attention as other ancient Assyrian sites, there was some awareness of the origins of the mound well before European excavation.

For instance, the medieval Arab geographer Yaqut Al-Hamawi recorded that the site was called Saraoun or Saraghoun, which demonstrates the original Assyrian name was not completely forgotten before the city's rediscovery.

[13] The English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard recorded the event as follows: "The small party employed by M. Botta were at work on Kouyunjik, when a peasant from a distant village chanced to visit the spot.

On being informed that they were in search of sculptured stones, he advised them to try the mound on which his village was built, and in which, he declared, many such things as they wanted had been exposed on digging for the foundations of new houses.

After a little opposition from the inhabitants, they were permitted to sink a well in the mound; and at a small distance from the surface they came to the top of a wall which, on digging deeper, they found to be built of sculptured slabs of gypsum.

He soon found that he had entered a chamber, connected with others, and surrounded by slabs of gypsum covered with sculptured representations of battles, sieges, and similar events.

Unlike Kuyunjik, the Assyrian ruins at Khorsabad were much closer to the surface of the mound, and therefore it was not long before Botta and his team reached the ancient palace, leading to the discovery of numerous reliefs and sculptures.

Additionally, shortly after the convoy reached Baghdad, Place was summoned to his new consular post in Moldavia due to the ongoing Crimean War, and had to leave the shipment in the hands of a French schoolteacher, M. Clement to finalise its return to Paris.

[27] The troubles began once the convoy left Baghdad in May 1855, as the banks of the river Tigris were controlled by local sheikhs who were hostile to the Ottoman authorities and frequently raided shipping sailing by.

[28] During the journey, the convoy was boarded several times, forcing the crew to relinquish most of their money and supplies in order to be allowed further passage on the river.

[25][27] Once the convoy reached Al-Qurnah (Kurnah) it was assaulted by local pirates led by Sheikh Abu Saad, whose actions sank the main cargo ship and forced the four rafts aground shortly afterwards.

[33] Archeologists returned to excavating in the area in 2023, after political conditions had limited their work in early 21st century, and unearthed in Dur-Sharrukin a massive sculpture of lamassu weighing almost 20 tons.