Babylon

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The animals went to Berlin. Lions for Ishtar, wild bulls for the weather-god Adad, and the mušḫuššu-dragon of Marduk, molded in relief and glazed against fields of deep blue, once rose tier upon tier over the most splendid of the inner city’s gates, the gate Nebuchadnezzar II built for Ishtar. Recovered as thousands of glazed fragments, they were pieced back together for the Pergamonmuseum, which unveiled its reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate and a stretch of the Processional Way in 1930. At Babylon itself — beside the Euphrates in central Iraq, some eighty-five kilometers south of Baghdad — the gate’s earliest building phase still stands where it always stood, the same animals raised in unglazed molded brick, walking out of the wall they belong to. They were never ornament. Each beast is the emblem of a god: the lion of Ishtar, the bull of Adad, the dragon of Marduk, lord of the city. The threshold was a theological statement, and the city’s own name made the same claim — Bāb-ili, “gate of the gods,” the meaning Akkadian speakers heard inside an older name whose sense is lost. Babylon took itself for the door through which divinity entered the world, and said so in glazed brick.

The city rose to power after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, under an Amorite dynasty conventionally dated from 1894 BCE; Hammurabi (r. c. 1792–1750 BCE) made it the imperial capital of Babylonia and the permanent seat of Marduk’s cult. Of that first Babylon nothing can be seen: its levels lie below the groundwater table and have never been excavated. The fabric that defines the site belongs to a second ascendancy. Sennacherib of Assyria sacked the city in 689 BCE and Esarhaddon allowed its rebuilding; then, under Nabopolassar (626–605 BCE) and above all Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605/604–562 BCE), Babylon was rebuilt as the most deliberate monumental city of its age — a double inner wall and a vast outer wall, the Southern Palace with its glazed throne-room façade, the North and Summer palaces, the Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way, the temple Esagila, the ziggurat Etemenanki. Of the Hanging Gardens that classical authors described, the ruins yield nothing securely identified, and Stephanie Dalley has argued that the gardens in question were Sennacherib’s, at Nineveh. What is certain is how much remains to find: the World Heritage property runs to the outer walls on every side, and roughly 85 percent of it has never been excavated.

What the rebuilt city decorated most richly was a route. From the Ishtar Gate the Processional Way ran south toward Esagila and north to the festival house outside the walls; its ceremonial name was Ay-ibūr-šabû, “May the arrogant not flourish,” and it was paved with stone slabs set in bitumen, between walls lined with striding lions in glazed brick. This was the road of the akītu, the New Year festival of the month of Nisannu, and the akītu was the rite that made Babylon what it was. The statues of the gods traveled the street in procession; the gods of other cities came as guests to Marduk’s court; and before Marduk the king’s rule over the land was renewed for the year. In the course of the festival the priests recited Enūma eliš, the epic of Marduk’s kingship, which ends with the gods themselves building Babylon and Esagila as the center of the ordered world. The procession thus moved through the plot of its own scripture: gate, street, and temple were cosmology made walkable, and the year turned because the god went down this pavement and came home.

At the southern end stood the sanctuary the poem promises. Esagila, “House whose head is raised,” was Marduk’s temple and housed his cult statue; it lies still largely unexcavated beneath the mound of Amran ibn Ali. Near it rose Etemenanki, “House, foundation-platform of heaven and underworld,” the ziggurat of Marduk. The best ancient description is the Esagil tablet — a copy made in 229 BCE from an older original, found at Uruk and now in the Louvre — which gives seven terraces and a height of ninety-one meters on a base ninety-one meters square, figures the excavators confirmed on the ground. Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt it, their inscriptions describing a tower “reaching unto heaven”; Herodotus describes eight towers set one upon another (1.181). By the time Alexander held the city the ziggurat was ruinous; he had the debris cleared for a rebuilding that his death in Babylon in 323 BCE cut short. Today only the waterlogged imprint of its foundation marks the spot.

The city’s most patient construction, though, was on clay. In the scholarly milieu of Esagila, temple astronomers kept the diaries: night-by-night registers of the moon and the planets, eclipses, solstices, the phenomena of Sirius — followed, on the same tablets, by the level of the Euphrates, the market prices of staple commodities, and the events of the year. Systematic observation probably began under Nabu-nasir (r. 747–734 BCE); the oldest surviving diary tablet covers 652/651 BCE and the youngest 61/60 BCE — nearly six centuries of unbroken watching, the longest continuous observational archive to survive from the ancient world, the bulk of it now in the British Museum. History passed through the diaries’ columns: one tablet records the battle of Gaugamela in 331 BCE, another the death of Alexander in 323. The empires turned over around the observers — Cyrus took the city for the Achaemenid empire in 539 BCE, Seleucids and Parthians followed — and Esagila kept writing. The last datable cuneiform text from Babylon is an astronomical almanac for the year 74/75 CE: the final entry of a city that had kept its ledger of heaven for longer than most civilizations last.

Afterward the city became a quarry. Baked brick was wealth on a plain without stone, and the ruins were mined for it from antiquity onward — which is also why the site was never lost, since generations of brick-robbers had to know exactly where Babylon was. In the 1980s the Iraqi state took up the builder’s role: Saddam Hussein’s “Revival of Babylon Project” rebuilt the Southern Palace directly on top of the ruins, its new bricks stamped, in imitation of Nebuchadnezzar’s, with an inscription dating the rebuilding of the great city of Babylon to 1987 in his reign, while a presidential palace rose in 1986 on a hill built over the razed village of Qawarish. UNESCO’s assessment of the property is blunt: the project “negatively affected the integrity” of the site. Worse came after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the ruins served as a coalition military base, Camp Alpha: pavements of the sixth-century streets were crushed under vehicles, soil full of archaeology was bagged for defenses, and some 300,000 square meters were graveled over. Since 2009 the World Monuments Fund and Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage have run the “Future of Babylon” project, stabilizing the Lion of Babylon, the Ishtar Temple, and the inner walls and, from 2016, conserving the Ishtar Gate where it stands; in July 2019 Babylon was inscribed on the World Heritage List under criteria (iii) and (vi), the latter acknowledging, among much else, the Babylon of the Bible in all three Abrahamic traditions.

From Koldewey’s trench to the Berlin gate and the damage report

Modern knowledge of the fabric begins with Robert Koldewey, who excavated for the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft from 1899 to 1917 — digging continuously, straight through the World War — in the first large-scale German campaign in the Ottoman East. His trenches recovered the phases of the Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way, the palaces, and the ground plan of Etemenanki, and his own narrative, The Excavations at Babylon (Macmillan, 1914), remains the foundational account of the site, readable at the Internet Archive. The glazed fragments went to Berlin under division-of-finds agreements of 1903 and 1926; there they were desalinated in 230 wine barrels, seventy-two animal reliefs were reassembled, and the gaps were filled with purpose-made modern glazed brick under Walter Andrae for the Pergamonmuseum’s 1930 opening. Helen Gries, curator at the Vorderasiatisches Museum, reckons that less than twenty percent of the Berlin gate is original Babylonian brick — a “visionary reconstruction,” in her phrase, an impression of the sixth-century monument rather than the monument itself (“The Ishtar Gate of Babylon: One Monument, Multiple Narratives,” The Ancient Near East Today 11.4, 2023). For the ziggurat and its biblical afterlife, the standard study is A. R. George, “The Tower of Babel: Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts,” Archiv für Orientforschung 51 (2005/2006): 75–95; for the city as a whole, Olof Pedersén’s open-access Babylon: The Great City (Zaphon, 2021) synthesizes the German and Iraqi excavations street by street against a digital model. The diaries are edited in Abraham J. Sachs and Hermann Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia (Vienna, 1988–1996), with a digital edition at Oracc. And the site’s worst modern decade has its own literature: the Final Report on Damage Assessment in Babylon, edited by Margarete van Ess and John Curtis (UNESCO, Paris, 2009), documents what the military occupation of 2003–2004 cost the ruins; Curtis, of the British Museum, judged the basing of troops there “tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid.”

Etemenanki itself was quarried nearly out of existence; ninety-one meters of temple-tower survive as a square depression holding groundwater. Yet no ruin in Mesopotamia is better remembered. The tower “in the land of Shinar” whose builders Genesis scatters into mutually strange tongues is, by long scholarly consensus, this ziggurat, carried into scripture as the image of human overreach. The pun that named the city closed over it in the process: Bāb-ili, gate of the gods, came down to later ears as Babel, confusion. Nebuchadnezzar’s inscriptions had aimed the tower at heaven. The terraces are gone, the head of the house is gone — and the boast, retold for some twenty-five centuries as a warning, is the one structure raised at Babylon that has never needed conservation.

→ Related: Babylonia · Marduk · Ishtar · Mesopotamia · Uruk