Reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way, Babylon, c. 575 B.C.E., glazed mud brick (Pergamon Museum, Berlin)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and one of the most astonishing objects they have is…well, it’s not an object.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:12] It’s a gate for a city. There were eight double gates that formed part of the walls around the ancient city of Babylon.
Dr. Zucker: [0:19] It’s huge.
Dr. Harris: [0:20] It doesn’t just impress us, it impressed people when it was built. In fact, it was called one of the wonders of the world.
Dr. Zucker: [0:27] Nebuchadnezzar, of biblical fame, ascended to the throne and proceeded to rebuild the already ancient city of Babylon. This is a city that has its roots in the third millennium B.C.[E.], but had become a major political center under King Hammurabi in the 1700s B.C.E. The city had remained populated but regained importance in the 6th century under Nebuchadnezzar II and under his father.
[0:52] What we’re seeing here is part of the enormous building campaign that Nebuchadnezzar II had undertaken.
Dr. Harris: [0:58] We might recognize Nebuchadnezzar from the Bible, from the Book of Daniel. He’s the ruler of Babylon who conquers and destroys the Temple in Jerusalem and who’s responsible for the exile of the Jews.
Dr. Zucker: [1:11] Clearly, he was very powerful. He was able to undertake this enormous building campaign. He fortified and strengthened 11 miles of wall around the city of Babylon. He reconstructed the Great Ziggurat in Babylon, which had the temple of Marduk at its top, and is probably the source of the story of the Tower of Babel.
[1:30] He created palaces, and he created this extraordinary gate.
Dr. Harris: [1:34] And hanging gardens, which were also considered one of the wonders of the world. The city of Babylon had eight double gates. The one we’re looking at is one of those gates, and actually the smaller of the double gate. The other one would have been even larger, if that’s possible to imagine.
Dr. Zucker: [1:51] In fact, so large that the museum can’t actually put it on display, even in this very large space. This gate, which would only be opened for the friendly, is at the end of a long processional way lined with beautiful lions that speak very clearly of pride, of power, and of Nebuchadnezzar’s rule.
Dr. Harris: [2:09] The lions that we see on the Processional Way represent Ishtar, one of the Babylonian goddesses, the goddess of war and wisdom and sexuality.
Dr. Zucker: [2:19] They’re raised up to eye level. They’re a little bit smaller than life-size, but they’re pretty big.
Dr. Harris: [2:25] And they’re frightening. Their mouths are open in these ferocious roars.
Dr. Zucker: [2:29] It’s true. They’re snarling, aren’t they?
Dr. Harris: [2:31] They are, but the fact that they’re placed in this very regular way makes them seem as though they’re almost trained, or controlled, by King Nebuchadnezzar himself.
Dr. Zucker: [2:41] It makes us fear not only the lions, but it makes us fear the king. The image of the lion is beautiful, this faience raised to create a kind of relief sculpture.
[2:50] In addition to the lions there are two other animal forms that decorate the gate, and they’re both meant to be as ferocious as the lions. A kind of ancient bull known as an aurochs. These were supposed to be terribly fierce.
[3:02] Then alternating with the rows of aurochs is a Mesopotamian dragon, which is really a composite beast. The front paws are those of lions. The head and neck come from a snake or serpent. The hind legs come from an eagle, perhaps.
Dr. Harris: [3:18] And their tails have a stinger like a scorpion.
Dr. Zucker: [3:21] Those dragons are associated with Marduk, the patron god of the city. Nebuchadnezzar associated himself directly with Marduk. The aurochs — that is, these bulls — are associated with the god Adad, a god associated with storms, with the fertility of the land, with the harvest. All of these animals speak to protecting the city, but also providing for the city.
Dr. Harris: [3:42] They’re ferocious animals, but they’re also represented in a very regular way along the procession, and on the tower and archway of the gate, so that there’s symmetry, a sense of order, in the way that they’re represented.
Dr. Zucker: [3:58] One of the most extraordinary aspects of these towers, of the gate as a whole, is the color. This is an arid place, where the sun is bright, where it gets really hot. You can imagine how brilliant the blues and the greens of the surface would have originally been, not in the context of the museum, but in the context of the edge of a desert.
[4:17] In Mesopotamia there was a real problem. The Egyptians were able to build their great pyramids and other monuments out of the native stone that surrounded them, but in Mesopotamia, they didn’t have that. This was a river valley. Babylon is on the banks of the Euphrates. In fact, the Euphrates cuts right through the city.
[4:32] When the Mesopotamians wanted to build, they created buildings out of brick, created from the clay of the river valley. The brilliant blue that we see on the surface of the gate is faience. This is a technique that was known to the ancient Egyptians and other parts of the ancient world, and it uses copper to create this brilliant blue. This is a beautiful example.
Dr. Harris: [4:52] So the gate is massive, it’s frightening, it’s decorative, and it’s brilliantly colored. No wonder Nebuchadnezzar was so proud of it and wrote an inscription on the side.
Dr. Zucker: [5:04] Let’s go read that.
[5:07] We’re not sure where the inscription was originally placed on the wall, but in this reconstruction, it’s on the left side of the left tower. Here’s an excerpt: “I, Nebuchadnezzar, laid the foundation of the gates down to the groundwater level, and had them built out of pure blue stone. Upon the walls in the inner room of the gate are bulls and dragons, and thus I magnificently adorn them with luxurious splendor for all mankind to behold in awe.”
Dr. Harris: [5:34] And we are in awe two-and-a-half millennia later.
Dr. Zucker: [5:38] Nebuchadnezzar understood his place in history. He actually wrote inscriptions in his new buildings that not only identified them and identified their purpose and him as their patron, but also asked future rulers to rebuild them for him.
Dr. Harris: [5:53] It’s as though he knew that empires come and go.
Dr. Zucker: [5:57] And that he could speak across history. And in our time, the ruler of Mesopotamia, which we now call Iraq, seemed to pay attention. Saddam Hussein actually had begun the rebuilding of parts of Babylonia. He built his own palace a few hundred meters away from the Ishtar Gate and began the reconstruction of parts of the city as well.
[6:17] That came to a halt, of course, in the recent military actions against him. Of course, he was ultimately deposed and killed.
Dr. Harris: [6:24] What it meant to rebuild this legendary city.
Dr. Zucker: [6:28] Saddam Hussein was very much rebuilding it, not for Nebuchadnezzar, but for his own political ambition.
Dr. Harris: [6:32] Reclaiming the power of Nebuchadnezzar for himself.
Dr. Zucker: [6:35] That’s right, and the power of ancient Mesopotamia.
[6:37] [music]
I, Nebuchadnezzar . . . magnificently adorned them with luxurious splendor for all mankind to behold in awe.Nebuchadnezzar II, Inscription plaque of the Ishtar Gate
The chronology of Mesopotamia is complicated. Scholars refer to places (Sumer, for example) and peoples (the Babylonians), but also empires (Babylonia), and unfortunately for students of the Ancient Near East, these organizing principles do not always agree. The result is that we might, for example, speak of the very ancient Babylonians starting in the 1800s B.C.E. and then also the Neo-Babylonians more than a thousand years later. What came in between you ask? Well, quite a lot, but mostly the Kassites and the Assyrians.
The Assyrian Empire which had dominated the Near East came to an end at around 600 B.C.E. due to a number of factors including military pressure by the Medes (a pastoral mountain people, again from the Zagros mountain range), the Babylonians, and possibly also civil war.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire (underlying map © Google)
A Neo-Babylonian dynasty
The Babylonians rose to power in the late 7th century and were heirs to the urban traditions which had long existed in southern Mesopotamia. They eventually ruled an empire as dominant in the Near East as that held by the Assyrians before them.
This period is called Neo-Babylonian (or new Babylonia) because Babylon had also risen to power earlier and became an independent city-state, most famously during the reign of King Hammurabi.
In the art of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, we see an effort to invoke the styles and iconography of the 3rd-millennium rulers of Babylonia. In fact, one Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus, found a statue of Sargon of Akkad, set it in a temple and provided it with regular offerings.
Ishtar Gate and Processional Way (Reconstruction), Babylon, c. 575 B.C.E., glazed mud brick (Pergamon Museum, Berlin; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Architecture
The Neo-Babylonians are most famous for their architecture, notably at their capital city, Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar II largely rebuilt this ancient city including its walls and seven gates. It is also during this era that Nebuchadnezzar II purportedly built the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” for his wife because she missed the gardens of her homeland in Media (modern day Iran). Though mentioned by ancient Greek and Roman writers, the “Hanging Gardens” may, in fact, be legendary.
Detail, Ishtar Gate and Processional Way (Reconstruction), Babylon, c. 575 B.C.E., glazed mud brick (Pergamon Museum, Berlin; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The Ishtar Gate (today in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin) was the most elaborate of the inner city gates constructed in Babylon in antiquity. The whole gate was covered in glazed bricks which the inscription tells us are made of lapis lazuli which would have rendered the façade with a jewel-like shine. Alternating rows of lion and cattle march in a relief procession across the gleaming blue surface of the gate.
