Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan

The presence of stone masonry at Jerwan, about thirty miles northeast of Mosul, had been known, but thorough study of it was impossible without the excavation that was undertaken by the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute in 1933. The masonry proved to belong to an aqueduct built by Sennacherib of Assyria not long after 700 b.c., a type of structure unknown elsewhere before Roman times. The canal to which the aqueduct belonged has been traced by the Expedition from the gorge of the Gomel River, where stand the well-known “Bavian inscriptions,” to the Khosr River above Nineveh. Seton Lloyd gives architectural descriptions of both the aqueduct at Jerwan and the canal head in the Gomel gorge, and Thorkild Jacobsen deals with the cuneiform records found at Jerwan.