war with Babylon, Sennacherib dedicated his time to improving his new capital at Nineveh rather than embarking on large military campaigns. Nineveh had been an important city in northern Mesopotamia for millennia. The oldest traces of human settlement at its location are from the 7th millennium BC, and from the 4th millennium BC and onward it formed an important administrative center in the north. When Sennacherib made the city his new capital it experienced one of the most ambitious building projects in ancient history, being completely transformed from the somewhat neglected state it had been in before his reign. Whereas his father's new capital, Dur-Sharrukin, was more or less an imitation of the previous capital of Nimrud, Sennacherib intended to make Nineveh into a city whose magnificence and size astonished the civilized world. The earliest inscriptions discussing the building project at Nineveh date to 702 BC and concern the construction of the Southwest Palace, a large residence constructed in the southwestern part of the citadel. Sennacherib called this palace the ekallu ša šānina la išu, the "Palace without Rival". During the construction process, a smaller palace was torn down, a stream of water which had been eroding parts of the palace mound was redirected and a terrace which the new palace was to stand on was erected and raised to the height of 160 layers of brick. Though many of these early inscriptions talk about the palace as if it were already completed, this was the standard way of writing about building projects in ancient Assyria. The Nineveh described in Sennacherib's earliest accounts of its renovation was a city which at that point only existed in his imagination. By 700 BC the walls of the Southwest Palace's throne room were being constructed, followed shortly by the many reliefs to be displayed within it. The final step in the palace's construction was the erection of colossal statues depicting bulls and lions, characteristic of Late Assyrian architecture. Though such stone statues have been excavated at Nineveh, similar colossal statues mentioned in the inscriptions as being made of precious metals remain missing. The roof of the palace was constructed with cypress and cedar recovered from the mountains in the west, and the palace was illuminated through multiple windows and decorated with silver and bronze pegs on the inside and glazed bricks on the outside. The full structure, going by the mound it was