Fall of Nineveh

In 612 BCE, a coalition of Babylonians under Nabopolassar and Medes under Cyaxares besieged and destroyed Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. The empire that had terrorized the Near East for centuries — that had destroyed Israel and nearly taken Jerusalem — was suddenly done. The prophet Nahum had predicted exactly this, and the Babylonian Chronicle independently confirms the date and details. The fall was so complete that Nineveh's location was literally forgotten until archaeologists rediscovered it in the 1840s.