He had no affection for gods who had inspired their populace to attack him and Sennacherib decided to destroy the city. Sennacherib's own account of the destruction reads as follows:  Although Sennacherib destroyed the city, he was still somewhat fearful of Babylon's ancient gods. Earlier in his account of the campaign he specifically mentions that the sanctuaries of the Babylonian deities had provided financial support to his enemies and the passage in which the seizure of the property of the gods and the destruction of some of their statues is described is one of the few in which Sennacherib uses "my people" rather than "I". This leaves the blame of the fate of the temples not on Sennacherib himself, but on the decisions made by the temple personnel and the actions of the Assyrian people rather than the king in particular. During the destruction of the city, Sennacherib destroyed the temples and the images of the gods, except for that of Marduk, which he took to Assyria. This caused consternation in Assyria itself, where Babylon and its gods were held in high esteem. Sennacherib attempted to justify his actions to his own countrymen through a campaign of religious propaganda. Among the elements of this campaign he commissioned a myth in which Marduk was put on trial before Ashur, the god of Assyria. This text is fragmentary but it seems Marduk is found guilty of some grave offense; he described his defeat of the Babylonian rebels in the language of the Babylonian creation myth, identifying Babylon with the evil demon-goddess Tiamat and himself with Marduk; Ashur replaced Marduk in the New Year's festival; and in the temple of the festival he placed a symbolic pile of rubble from Babylon. In Babylonia, Sennacherib's policy spawned a deep-seated hatred amongst much of the populace. Sennacherib's goal was the complete eradication of the Babylonia as a political entity. Though some northern Babylonian territories were turned into Assyrian provinces, the Assyrians made no effort to rebuild Babylon itself and southern chronicles from the time refer to the era as the "kingless" period when there was no king in the land. After the final war with Babylon, Sennacherib seemingly spent the rest of his reign in peace, dedicating 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.