Ishtar Gate

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The reconstructed front part of the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin

The Ishtar Gate - one of the city gates of Babylon - and the processional street were built in their final form under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BC). Babylon was the capital of Babylonia and was located on the Euphrates in what is now central Iraq .

A replica of the Ishtar Gate has been on view since 1930 in the Vorderasiatisches Museum , which is housed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin . The gate was part of the walls of Babylon , according to older lists the seven wonders of the world of antiquity belonged.

Excavation history

Remains of the gate in Babylon after its excavation

As early as 1851–54, members of a French expedition collected colored glazed bricks in the area of ​​the ruined hill el-kasr , which belonged to the reliefs of the processional street , but could not yet be assigned at this time. In 1897 the architect Robert Koldewey and the orientalist Eduard Sachau finally traveled to Tell as part of an expedition commissioned by the Royal Museums in Berlin and recognized the importance of the glazed bricks. Koldewey recalls in his later excavation report:

“During my first stay in Babylon on June 3rd and 4th, 1897 and on my second visit from December 29th to 31st, 1897, I had seen many fragments of enamelled brick reliefs, some of which I took to Berlin. The peculiar beauty and the art-historical importance of these pieces (...) contributed to the decision to excavate the capital of the Babylonian empire. "

Koldewey succeeded in convincing the patrons in Berlin of the necessity of a large-scale excavation campaign, and finally on March 26, 1899 the first groundbreaking took place. Little by little the most important monumental buildings of Babylon were excavated and during the excavation work on the temple of the goddess Ninmach , the remains of colored glazed brick fragments with reliefs of bulls and snake-like animals, remains of the brick reliefs belonging to the gate were found. Thereupon, from July to December 1902, they began to uncover the gate building and came across a Temennu , whose inscription confirmed Koldewey's thesis that it was the Ishtar Gate:

“ I am Nabu-kudurri-usur II, King of Babylonia, son of Nabopolassar , King of Babylon. I built the gate of the Ištar with blue glazed stones for Marduk , my master (...) I set up huge bronze animals and mighty snakes on its threshold. With slabs of limestone and (...) stone I have the bull mount (...) Marduk, exalted lord, eternal life (...) give as a present. "

After the first wall sections had been found at the beginning of the excavation, in which the animal representations were no longer complete, further, completely preserved representations of a snake creature and a bull were surprisingly found in deeper excavations, which were worked in relief, but not glazed. These rows continued downwards, on the north side of the gate building they reached nine layers down, which suggested that the gate must have gone through different construction phases.

Building history

Model of the entire gate
Building inscription of King Nebuchadnezzar II on the left side of the gate

Like the processional street, the Ishtar Gate went through different construction phases until it had its final appearance. Initially, at the site of the gate building, there was probably a previous building, nothing of which has survived, as it was probably removed during the construction work to expand the royal palace. According to Koldewey, the following construction history was divided into three construction phases: In the first phase, a gate was built that was clad with unglazed reliefs and which probably simply repeated the previous building in its architecture and was therefore located on the ground floor. The lowest components of it were still there. But a short time later, the renovation work on the main castle of Babylon must have taken place: For this purpose, the processional road was raised to seven meters, which is evidenced by the paving stones exposed at this height. There must have been a temporary passage at this height and of course part of the gate building also got under the embankment during this construction project. But only after the embankment had reached a height of 10.85 m was the next well-preserved pavement laid, which is why the second construction phase of the gate can begin here.

During this phase, the floor plan of the gate was also given its final shape and a forecourt was created. All of the unglazed reliefs, which were now still above the level of the processional street, were carefully reworked with rasps and scrapers, which is why the quality of these reliefs clearly stands out from that of the buried ones. In addition, the reliefs were covered with plaster, which was supposed to serve as a protective coat. Koldewey interprets the measure as follows: “That would be in the spirit of the old artists, who seem to have had great respect for their own creations.” The rows of animals above are applied to the wall in flat glaze. Only a row with bulls has survived, but it can be assumed that there was still a row with flat glaze dragons above.

Since there are only two rows of animals, the assumption is that this second construction phase was never completed, but rather disappeared again under a layer of embankment due to the changes requested by Nebuchadnezzar, who was planning to expand the palace to the north. By the time the processional street had reached its final height of 15 m, the art of relief had been further developed, which made a combination of the techniques of unglazed reliefs and flat glaze possible to create glazed reliefs. The third and final construction period finally gave the Ischtartor the shape in which it can be seen today in the Museum of the Near East.

Transport to Berlin and reconstruction in the Vorderasiatisches Museum

The Berlin museums reached an agreement with the Ottoman antiquities administration in Constantinople that the finds could be brought to Berlin for “appropriate treatment and composition”. 399 boxes, each of which contained approx. 250 broken bricks, traveled by sea from Basra to Hamburg and via the Elbe, Havel and Spree to the Kupfergraben in front of the Vorderasiatisches Museum . After the excavation work in Babylon came to a standstill due to the First World War , negotiations between the Berlin museums and the newly founded Iraq Museum in Baghdad about the division of the finds were not started until 1926 and it was possible to convince the Iraqi side that only by the merging of the new finds with those already in Berlin a reconstruction of the gate is possible. And so in March 1927 an estimated 400 more boxes full of enameled bricks arrived in Hamburg, from where they were transported to Berlin.

Friedrich Rathgen , head of the chemical laboratory of the Berlin museums, had already taken a closer look at the broken bricks in 1903 and decided that they had too high a salt content, which led to various methods of leaching being used. Among other things, the fragments were placed in large vats with water to gradually wash away the salt, which took a year and a half due to the large number of fragments.

The parts arriving in 1927 were subjected to the same procedure and finally one could begin to sort the thousands of fragments according to their belonging. As early as 1906, according to the reconstruction drawings by Walter Andrae , attempts were made to assemble the animal reliefs from the fragments, but in this case bricks were partially made to fit by cutting them to size or painting over broken areas. This was not in the spirit of Andraes, who, after being appointed director of the Near Eastern Department in 1928, geared the reconstruction of the reliefs more closely to the actual finds. Basically, the bricks were left in the condition they were found, only if they were badly damaged were some places replaced with colored plaster.

So it was finally possible to start building the Ishtar Gate and part of the processional street in the south wing of the Pergamon Museum, in order to make them accessible to the public for the first time in 1930. But although the gate was housed in the museum's spacious light room, the reconstructed version could only be built in a reduced version; reconstructing the actual dimensions of the gate in Babylon would have clearly exceeded the scope of the possibilities.

Floor plan, dimensions and location in Babylon

Bird's eye view of the gate with the procession street

At the time of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Ishtar Gate was the northern city gate in the inner walls of the eastern part of the city. Although there were a total of five gates (in addition to the Ishtar gate , the Marduk gate , the Zababa gate , the Urasch gate and an unspecified gate in the southern city wall), the Ishtar gate stood out from the others thanks to its particularly magnificent furnishings Gates out. But not only the elaborate decorations testified to its special importance, the dimensions of the gate must have been very impressive to everyone who entered the city through the gate.

The gate structure is double-gate, which means that it consists of two buildings, a slightly smaller north gate, which one went through first and a large south gate, behind which a large square opened, which finally led to the processional street. The former extended with its two flank towers over a width of 28 m and was almost 11 m deep, the latter had enormous dimensions: its goal area alone measured 14.9 × 8.05 m. The door width was 4.5 m, which suggests the mighty door leaves. However, no remains of these were found, probably because, according to the large flagstone inscription, they consisted of perishable cedar wood. The total length covered when passing through both gate areas including the courtyard was 48 m.

Manufacture of the brick and glaze technique

Detailed view of a lion, symbol of the goddess Ishtar, below the row of flowers (Pergamon Museum)
Various animal sculptures that lined the procession road to the gate, the top two animals are the mythical creature Mušḫuššu , the bottom two are bulls (Istanbul Archaeological Museum)

A working model was probably first made for the production of the bricks, under which one probably has to imagine a piece of wall on which the relief could be modeled in plastic clay. Attention was paid to the course of the joints in the bricks, Koldewey notes: "The relief is designed so that the joints never cut across prominent areas." The unfired bricks had to be around 30% larger than those that were ultimately attached to the wall because they lost volume due to the heat during the firing process. While clay was simply pressed into a wooden frame with the appropriate dimensions and later dried and fired for the production of ordinary bricks, the production of relief bricks was more complicated: the wooden frame had to be larger so that the respective shaped piece could still be placed on one side. Only then was the form coated with clay and dried in the sun.

Before the glaze was applied , the clay bricks were first fired, then the contours of the relief animals were applied to the bricks with a viscous glaze paste from a pouring can. The aim was to prevent the colored relief glazes from running during the firing process, and after these outlines, which Koldewey referred to as “dead edges”, the resulting fields could be filled with the corresponding colored glazes.

The Ishtar Gate and the processional street were reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum using the original glazed adobe bricks . The walls of the gate and the street are adorned with representations of lions, bulls and dragons, symbols of the main deities of Babylonia.

The lions depicted are symbols of the goddess Ištar , mistress of heaven, goddess of love and protector of the army. The snake-like hybrid creatures (called Mušḫuššu or Bel) represent Marduk , the god of the city and fertility, who gave eternal life. The wild bulls symbolized the weather god Adad .

“For God Muschku and Nabu I paved the inside of the street and over it I put a mighty padding of shiny dust. May you gods walk happily on this path, ”it says on the approx. 20,000 bricks.

In the Vorderasiatisches Museum - where the Ishtar Gate is located - exhibits from archaeological excavations by German scientists, including the German Orient Society , are shown, which were excavated in the area of ​​the Sumerian , Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations . This includes many monumental monuments, reliefs and also smaller cult, jewelry and everyday objects.

Every 10 to 15 years, signs of decay appear on the glazed surfaces, which can be remedied by regular maintenance work with the help of cotton swabs and small syringes with polyvinyl butyral (PVB).

Others

The German post brought to the Inception November 23, 1966 with the values 10 Pf and Pf 20 two figure motif stamps of the Ishtar Gate, the German Post AG with the initial issue date January 2, 2013 , a 1,45- € postage stamp with the motif of Ishtar -Tores out. The motifs of the two special postage stamps from 1966 were designed by Klaus Hennig , the motif for 2013 by Stefan Klein and Olaf Neumann , Iserlohn .

literature

  • Robert Koldewey : The Ishtar Gate in Babylon. After the excavations by the German Orient Society ( excavations of the German Orient Society in Babylon. Vol. 2 = Scientific publication of the German Orient Society. Vol. 32). Hinrichs, Leipzig 1918.
  • Robert Koldewey: Babylon Rising Again. The previous results of the German excavations (= broadcast of the German Orient Society. Vol. 6, ZDB -ID 516555-6 ). Hinrichs, Leipzig 1913 (5th, revised and expanded edition. Edited by Barthel Hrouda . Beck, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-406-31674-3 ).
  • Walter Andrae : Memories of an Excavator. Stuttgart 1988 (2nd edition, published posthumously).
  • Lutz Martin : The Ishtar Gate of Babylon. In: Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. History and stories for the centenary. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88609-442-1 , pp. 23–24.
  • Uta von Eickstedt: The reconstruction of the Ištar gate and the processional street of Babylon. In: Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. History and stories for the centenary. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88609-442-1 , pp. 25-26.
  • Joachim Marzahn : From excavation to museum: Babylon becomes visible . In: Joachim Marzahn and Günther Schauerte (eds.): Babylon - Myth and Truth (catalog of the special exhibition). Berlin 2008, Vol. 2: Truth, pp. 91–98.
  • Beate Salje : Robert Koldewey and the Vorderasiatisches Museum . In: Ralf-Bernhard Wartke (ed.): On the way to Babylon. Robert Koldewey - an archaeologist's life. Berlin 2008, pp. 124-143.

See also

Web links

Commons : Ishtar Gate  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. See Martin, p. 23 f.
  2. cf. Eickstedt, p. 25 f.
  3. ^ S. Koldewey (1911), p. 45.
  4. S. Koldewey (1912), pp. 347f.
  5. http://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Bilderstrecken/Sondermarken/Programm_2013/Januar13-Bildergalerie.html?docId=285848¬First=true&countIx=4

Coordinates: 32 ° 32 ′ 37 ″  N , 44 ° 25 ′ 21 ″  E