Ishtar Gate of Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar's Glazed Brick Gateway

The Ishtar Gate was the monumental northern entrance to the inner city of Babylon, built by King Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BC and faced with brilliant blue glazed bricks bearing images of bulls and dragons. Through it ran the Processional Way, lined with glazed lions, along which the statues of the gods were carried at the New Year festival. Excavated by German archaeologists in the early twentieth century, its front section was rebuilt in Berlin, where it became one of the most famous sights of the ancient world.

Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar

Nebuchadnezzar II reigned from 605 to 562 BC, after defeating Egypt at the Battle of Carchemish. He used the wealth of his empire to rebuild Babylon on a grand scale. His inscriptions boast of new city walls, palaces, canals and temples, including the great ziggurat known as Etemenanki.

The inner city of Babylon was enclosed by a double wall pierced by eight gates, each named after a god. The Ishtar Gate, in the north, was the most important, because the Processional Way passed through it on the way to the main temple of Marduk, the Esagila. Its Babylonian name meant roughly “Ishtar is the one who defeats her enemies”.

The gate was part of a broader programme that turned Babylon into the largest and most splendid city of its time. Nebuchadnezzar’s Southern Palace stood just west of the gate, and later Greek writers placed the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon nearby, although no trace of them has been securely identified.

Building the gate

The gate was rebuilt several times during Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, partly because the ground level of the area was being raised. Excavators found at least three main building phases. The earlier phases were decorated with animals moulded in relief on plain, unglazed baked brick. The final, visible phase, usually dated to around 575 BC, was covered with coloured glazed bricks.

In fact the Ishtar Gate was a double gateway: a smaller outer gate in the outer wall and a much larger inner gate in the main wall, joined by a passage. Both were flanked by towers. The gate was roofed with cedar, and its doors, according to Nebuchadnezzar’s dedication inscription, were of cedar covered with bronze.

The inscription, written in cuneiform on glazed bricks, says the king rebuilt the gate with blue glazed bricks bearing images of wild bulls and dragons and dedicated it to the gods. The text, reconstructed in Berlin, is one of the key sources for the gate’s history.

Bulls, dragons and lions

The decoration was carefully planned. The walls of the gate show rows of two animals that alternate: the aurochs, a wild bull associated with the storm god Adad, and the mushhushshu, a dragon with a snake’s head, a scaly body, the front legs of a lion and the hind legs of an eagle, sacred to Marduk and his son Nabu. Hundreds of these figures covered the gate’s surfaces.

The images were more than decoration. Babylonians believed that representations of divine animals could protect a building and those who passed through it. A gate was a vulnerable point in a city’s defences, both military and spiritual, so it was natural to fill it with symbols of the gods who guarded Babylon.

The animals were made from bricks moulded in relief, so that each figure stood out from the wall. Craftsmen used moulds, which allowed the same design to be repeated many times. After firing, the bricks were coated with coloured glazes, mainly deep blue for the background with yellow, brown, white and black for the animals and borders, and fired again.

Along the Processional Way, the walls carried a frieze of striding lions, the symbol of Ishtar, goddess of love and war. About 120 lions lined the route, in white and yellow on a blue ground, with rosettes running above and below.

The New Year festival

The gate’s main ceremonial role was during the Akitu, the Babylonian New Year festival held in the spring month of Nisannu. During the festival the statue of Marduk was carried out of the city along the Processional Way and through the Ishtar Gate to a festival house outside the walls, accompanied by the statues of other gods and by the king.

The festival affirmed the king’s right to rule and the god’s protection of the city. When the king was absent, the festival could not be properly held, a point later used against King Nabonidus by his critics.

Excavation by Robert Koldewey

After Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, as told in the Fall of Babylon to Cyrus, the city declined slowly. By the Middle Ages it was a field of mounds, mined for bricks by local builders.

In 1899 the German Oriental Society began excavations at Babylon under Robert Koldewey, an architect and archaeologist. Work continued until 1917, when British forces advanced on Baghdad during the First World War. From 1902 the team uncovered the Ishtar Gate. They found the lower parts of the earlier relief phases still standing to a considerable height, because they had been buried when the ground was raised in antiquity, while the glazed upper phase had collapsed into many thousands of fragments.

Koldewey’s team worked with unusual care for the period. Trained as architects, they recorded walls brick by brick and learned to trace mud-brick structures that earlier treasure hunters had simply dug through. Walter Andrae, who later led the excavations at the Assyrian city of Ashur, began his career on this project.

Reconstruction in Berlin

After the First World War the fragments were divided between the excavators and the new authorities in Iraq, and from 1926 large quantities of glazed brick fragments were shipped to Berlin. There they were desalinated, sorted and pieced together, a task that took years.

Under the direction of Walter Andrae, the front gate was rebuilt inside the new Pergamon Museum, which opened in 1930. The reconstruction is about 14 metres high and combines original glazed bricks with new bricks made to fill the gaps. A section of the Processional Way with its lions was rebuilt in a long hall leading up to the gate. The larger rear gate was far too big for the museum and was never reconstructed.

The Pergamon Museum closed in October 2023 for an extensive renovation expected to last many years, so the gate is currently not on view. For almost a century it had been one of the most visited exhibits in Germany, and for many Europeans it was their first encounter with ancient Mesopotamian art. Lions and other animal panels from Babylon can also be seen in museums in Istanbul, Paris, New York, Chicago, Detroit and other cities.

The gate today in Iraq

At Babylon, the foundations of the gate and the lower parts of the earlier phases, with their unglazed bulls and dragons in relief, remain in place. A smaller modern replica stands at the entrance to the archaeological site.

Babylon suffered from modern interventions, including a large-scale reconstruction of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in the 1980s and the use of the site as a military base in 2003–2004, which caused damage documented by the British Museum and UNESCO. Babylon was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019. Some voices in Iraq have called for the return of the gate from Berlin, while the Berlin museums point to the division of finds agreed in the 1920s. The debate is part of a wider discussion about objects removed from the Middle East during the colonial era.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the gate in Berlin is the complete original. It is a reconstruction of the smaller front gate only, combining original and modern bricks.
• Myth: the blue colour comes from crushed lapis lazuli. The blue is a coloured glaze applied to the bricks. Lapis lazuli was used for jewellery and inlays, not for brick glazes.
• Myth: it was the gate through which Alexander the Great entered Babylon. No ancient source says which gate Alexander used in 331 BC.
• Fact: earlier phases survive in Iraq. The relief-decorated lower walls that remain at Babylon are original structures, not copies.

Timeline

• 605 BC: Nebuchadnezzar II becomes king of Babylon.
• c. 600–575 BC: The Ishtar Gate is rebuilt in several phases, ending with the glazed brick gate around 575 BC.
• 562 BC: Death of Nebuchadnezzar II.
• 539 BC: Babylon is taken by Cyrus the Great of Persia.
• 1899: Robert Koldewey begins excavations at Babylon.
• 1902: Excavators begin uncovering the Ishtar Gate.
• 1917: The German excavations end during the First World War.
• 1930: The reconstructed gate is unveiled in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
• 2019: Babylon is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
• 2023, October: The Pergamon Museum closes for renovation.

Why it matters

The Ishtar Gate is the most vivid surviving image of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. It shows the skill of Babylonian brickmakers, the religious life of the city, and the ambitions of its greatest king, while its journey to Berlin raises lasting questions about how the world’s heritage is shared.