numerous temples and a royal garden. His most famous work in the city is the Southwest Palace, which Sennacherib named his "Palace without Rival". After the death of his eldest son and crown prince, Ashur-nadin-shumi, Sennacherib originally designated his second son Arda-Mulissu heir. He later replaced him with a younger son, Esarhaddon, in 684BC, for unknown reasons. Sennacherib ignored Arda-Mulissu's repeated appeals to be reinstated as heir, and in 681BC, Arda-Mulissu and his brother Nabu-shar-usur murdered Sennacherib, hoping to seize power for themselves. Babylonia and the Levant welcomed his death as divine punishment, while the Assyrian heartland probably reacted with resentment and horror. Arda-Mulissu's coronation was postponed, and Esarhaddon raised an army and seized Nineveh, installing himself as king as intended by Sennacherib. Background Ancestry and early life Sennacherib was the son and successor of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II, who had reigned as king of Assyria from 722 to 705 BC and as king of Babylon from 710 to 705 BC. The identity of Sennacherib's mother is uncertain. Historically, the most popular view has been that Sennacherib was the son of Sargon's wife Ataliya, although this is now considered unlikely. To have been Sennacherib's mother, Ataliya would have had to have been born around the year 760 BC, at the latest, and lived to at least 692 BC, as a "queen mother" is attested in that year, but Ataliya's grave at Nimrud, which was discovered in the 1980s, indicates she was 35 years old at most when she died. The Assyriologist Josette Elayi considers it more plausible Sennacherib's mother was another of Sargon's wives, Ra'īmâ; a stele from Assur (once the capital of Assyria), discovered in 1913, specifically refers to her as the "mother of Sennacherib". Ra'īmâ's existence is a recent discovery, based on a 2014 reading of the inscription on the stele. Sargon claimed he was himself the son of the earlier king Tiglath-Pileser III, but this is uncertain as Sargon usurped the throne from Tiglath-Pileser's other son Shalmaneser V. Sennacherib was probably born 745 BC in Nimrud. If Sargon was the son of Tiglath-Pileser and not a non-dynastic usurper, Sennacherib would have grown up in the royal palace at Nimrud and spent most of his youth there. Sargon continued to live in Nimrud long after he had become king, leaving the city in 710 BC to reside at Babylon, and later at his new capital, Dur-Sharrukin, in