"Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach against it, for their wickedness has come up before me."
The wickedness of Nineveh was a scandal in the whole ancient world. "The city was widely known as a center of fertility cult worship, and for its cruelty to the victims of warfare."[15]  For twenty years, New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited friezes from the palaces of Ashurnasapal and Ashur-banipal, (later than Jonah) in which the numerous human figures were depicted with all of the muscles and tendons of the body articulating separately and exposed with almost surgical accuracy, indicating that the Assyrian artists were more familiar with the human body without its skin than they were with its normal appearance.  The Assyrians normally flayed all their victims, and frequently while they were still alive.