The Ishtar Gate: Babylon's Blue Door of Dragons

Each spring, at the New Year festival (Akitu), the statues of Babylon's gods were carried in procession along a broad road lined with walls of blue glazed brick, where lions strode in yellow and white relief. The road ran through a double gate faced with the same shining blue, set with row after row of bulls and dragons. The king who built it, Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BCE), set a plaque in it:

> I placed wild bulls and ferocious dragons in the gateways and thus adorned them with luxurious splendour so that people might gaze on them in wonder.

This was the Babylon of the Judean exile. Many of the exiles taken there after 597 and 586 BCE will have seen it.

The gate

• The eighth gate of the inner city of Babylon, on its north side, dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. It was built around 575 BCE, in several phases, over earlier gates.
• Faced with glazed bricks in deep blue, with moulded relief animals in yellow, white and brown: rows of aurochs (wild bulls) and mušḫuššu (dragons).
• The Processional Way leading to it was lined with about 120 lions, animals of Ishtar.

From Babylon to Berlin

A German expedition under Robert Koldewey excavated Babylon from 1899 to 1917 and uncovered the gate's foundations and tens of thousands of glazed brick fragments. The fragments were shipped to Berlin, sorted and reassembled over years, and the front gate and part of the Processional Way were rebuilt in the Pergamonmuseum in the 1930s. The much larger rear gate was not rebuilt. Lions and other panels are also in museums in Istanbul, Paris, New York, Chicago and elsewhere. Iraq has called for the return of Babylonian antiquities, and parts of the gate's foundations still stand at the site of Babylon, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2019.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Beasts as gods. Each animal stands for a god: the dragon (mušḫuššu) for Marduk, Babylon's supreme god, and his son Nabu; the bull for the storm god Adad; the lion for Ishtar. A worshipper walking the Processional Way passed between the gods' own emblems.

Blue as the sacred. The deep blue glaze imitated lapis lazuli, the precious stone of the gods, brought from Afghanistan. The gate announced the city as a dwelling of gods.

The procession. At the Akitu festival Marduk's statue left his temple, the Esagila, and the king "took the hand of Bel [Marduk]", renewing his right to rule. The gate framed that renewal.

Connections

Mesopotamia (ch03) and Second Temple Judaism (ch10), whose exiles lived in this city. Compare the Cyrus Cylinder (V35), found in the ruins of the Esagila, and the Behistun Inscription (V54).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/ishtar-gate.html