Ishtar Gate

The Ishtar Gate was the north gate of the inner city wall of Babylon, near present-day Hillah in Iraq. It was built in the sixth century BC by order of Nebuchadnezzar II, who dedicated it to the goddess Ishtar. It was a double gate — a smaller frontal building ahead of a larger, more elaborate rear section — 15 metres high on foundations reaching another 14 metres underground. Its walls were faced in brick glazed deep blue in imitation of lapis lazuli, with alternating rows of low-relief dragons, aurochs and lions for the gods Marduk, Adad and Ishtar. The roof and doors were of cedar, according to the dedication plaque.

That dedication, sixty lines of Akkadian cuneiform in glazed brick, records that the gates of Imgur-Ellil and Nemetti-Ellil had sunk as the street level rose, that Nebuchadnezzar refounded them at the water table in asphalt and brick, and that he set “wild bulls and ferocious dragons in the gateways” so that mankind might gaze on them in wonder. Beyond it ran the Processional Way, traced for more than 800 metres and up to 20 metres wide, lined with about 120 lions, bulls, dragons and flowers on yellow and black glaze. Once a year, at the vernal equinox and immediately after the barley harvest, statues of the deities were carried through the gate and down that street in New Year rituals lasting twelve days.

In 1897 the architect Robert Koldewey and the orientalist Eduard Sachau visited the ruin mound for the Royal Museums of Berlin and recognised what the coloured glazed bricks lying there were. Koldewey persuaded his patrons in Berlin to fund a full campaign, and the first spade went into the ground on 26 March 1899. Work at the temple of the goddess Ninmach turned up fragments of bull and serpent reliefs, and from July to December 1902 the team set out deliberately to clear the gate building, finding a foundation deposit whose inscription confirmed Koldewey's identification of it as the Ishtar Gate.

Fourteen metres of foundation were uncovered, unglazed relief courses running nine deep on the north side; Koldewey read the sequence as three building phases, the last giving the gate its final form. Excavation ran until 1914.

Friedrich Rathgen, head of the Berlin museums' chemical laboratory, judged in 1903 that the brick fragments held too much salt; leaching them in vats of water took a year and a half. Three hundred and ninety-nine crates, each with roughly 250 fragments, went by sea from Basra to Hamburg and on by river to the museum quay. How the material left Iraq is told two ways. The Berlin museums recorded an agreement with the Ottoman antiquities administration in Constantinople that the finds might be brought to Berlin for proper treatment and assembly; other accounts describe smuggling to justify the German Oriental Society's outlay on the dig, the pieces taken apart under a numbering system and packed in straw inside coal barrels to disguise them, organised by Koldewey's assistant Walter Andrae through his links with German intelligence officers and local tribal sheikhs. Of the 120 lion friezes from the Processional Way, 118 went to Germany.

The First World War brought the digging to a halt. In 1926 the Berlin museums opened negotiations with the newly founded Iraq Museum in Baghdad over dividing the finds, arguing that the gate could only be reconstructed if the new material joined what was already in Berlin; an estimated 400 further crates reached Hamburg in March 1927. Assembly had begun in 1906 from Andrae's reconstruction drawings, with bricks cut to fit and breaks painted over. Appointed director of the Near Eastern department in 1928, Andrae tied the work more closely to the excavated evidence, leaving bricks as found and making up only badly damaged places in coloured plaster. The rebuilt frontal gate and a stretch of the Processional Way opened to the public in 1930.

Only the smaller frontal gate stands in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, housed in the Pergamon Museum: 14 metres high and 30 metres wide, reduced from the true dimensions, which the building could not take. The larger rear gate is in storage, and the gate in the gallery was damaged by bombs in the Second World War. Panels went to other museums as well, among them Istanbul, Copenhagen, Detroit, the Louvre, Vienna, New York and Chicago.

The Iraqi government has petitioned Germany for the gate's return, in 2002 and again in 2009, and the case recurs in the argument over repatriating cultural material to countries affected by war.