I had the sanctuaries of the land Elam utterly destroyed and I counted its gods and its goddesses as ghosts. I destroyed and devastated the tombs of their earlier and later kings. I took their bones to Assyria. I prevented their ghosts from sleeping and deprived them of funerary-offerings and libations of on a march of one month and twenty-five days. I devastated the districts of the land Elam and scattered salt and cress over them. As for the rest of the people, those still alive I myself now laid flat those people there as a funerary-offering. I fed their dismembered flesh to dogs, pigs, vultures, eagles, birds of the heavens and fish the apsû. What was left of the feast of the dogs and swine, of their members which blocked the streets and filled the squares, I ordered them to remove from Babylon, Kutha and Sippar, and to cast them upon heaps. The nobles and elders of the city came out to me to save their lives they seized my feet and said, “If it pleases you, kill. If it pleases you, spare. If it pleases you, do what you will in strife and conflict.” I besieged and conquered the city. I felled three thousands of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive. I cut off some their arms and hands. I cut off of others their noses earth and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of so many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of heads I hung their heads on trees around the city I felled fifty of their fighting men with the sword, burnt two hundred captives from them and defeated in a battle on the plain three hundred and thirty-two troops. With their blood I dyed the mountain red like red wool and the rest of them, the ravines and torrents of the mountain swallowed. I carried off captives and possessions from them. I cut off the heads of their fighters and built there with a tower before their city, I burned their young men, women, and children to death. I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me and draped their skins over the pile of corpses. Some I spread out within the pile; some I erected on stakes upon the pile. I flayed many right through my land and draped their skins over the walls. I cut their throats like lambs. I cut off their precious lives as one guts a string. Like the many waters of the storm, I made the contents of their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed from the riding, plunged into the streams of their blood as into a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings low the wicked and evil, where bespattered with blood and filth. With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass. Their testicles I cut off and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers. Their blood, like a broken dam, I caused to flow down the mountain gullies. I hung the heads of Sanduarri and Abdi-Milkutti on the shoulders of their nobles and, with singing and music, I paraded through the public square of Nineveh.
— Ashurbanipal, King of the Neo-Assyrian Empire's account of his destruction of the Elamites
The Assyrian conquest of Elam took place in 639 BCE. Elam was destroyed completely, but the Neo-Assyrian Empire itself did not long survive them and was conquered thirty-four years later by the Neo-Babylonian king, Nabopolassar, and Cyaxares, King of Media.
