MessageToEagle.com – The Ishtar Gate was constructed by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II circa 575 BC.
This enormous burnt-brick entryway was located over the main thoroughfare in the ancient city of Babylon (now in Iraq). Built about 575 BC, it became the eighth fortified gate in the city.
A replica of the Ishtar Gate in the ancient city of Babylon. (The original portal is currently in the Pergamonmuseum, Germany.) Image credit: Hamody al-iraqi – CC BY-SA 4.0
The Ishtar Gate was more than 38 feet (12 meters) high and was decorated with glazed brick reliefs, in tiers, of dragons and young bulls.
The gate itself was a double one, and on its south side was a vast antechamber. Through the gatehouse ran a stone- and brick-paved avenue, called the Processional Way, a major road in which burned bricks and carefully shaped stones were laid in bituminous mortar.
It has been traced over a length of more than half a mile. The sides of the street were decorated with brick lions passant. It has been estimated that there were 120 lions along the street and 575 dragons and bulls, in 13 rows, on the gate.
Not all of these reliefs were visible at the same time, however, for the level of the street was raised more than once; even the lowest rows, which were irregularly laid, may have been treated as foundation deposits.
The site was unearthed by the prominent German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, whose excavation of Babylon lasted from 1899 until 1917.
The remnants of the original gate and Processional Way have been housed in Berlin’s Pergamon’s Museum since that institution’s founding in 1930.
Iraq reconstructed a road between two places but since the 1990s has actively sought the return of the original gate and associated artifacts.
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