It was possible to reconstruct ancient Babylon’s Processional Way and the connected Ishtar Gate from the blue glazed tile walls and fragments found in the sands of Iraq. By agreement with government authorities, sufficient artifacts were allowed to leave the country for the massive reconstruction effort. The exhibit that visitors marvel at today came into being in the 1930s, after years of painstaking work.

Along the Processional Way, used annually by the Babylonians in their springtime New Year Festival, fierce-looking lions decorated the walls. Symbols of the goddess Ishtar, the lions were a constant reminder to the Babylonians of the deity they worshiped as mistress of heaven, goddess of love and protectress of the army. The New Year Festival celebrated among others the chief god, Marduk (also known as Bel), and Nabu, the god of scribes and writing. Marduk was central as god of the city and of fertility, and provider of eternal life.

The Ishtar Gate guarded the approach to a 90-meter stepped tower, or ziggurat, crowned by a temple to Marduk. As was the case with the earlier biblical Tower of Babel (Greek, Babylon), its builders had the idea of challenging heaven itself.

Still speaking to us today, Nebuchadnezzar’s father, Nabopolassar, founder of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, states in an inscription at the site of the ziggurat: “Once . . . I had subdued Assyria at the behest of [the gods] Nabu and Marduk, who love my kingship, . . . Marduk, my Lord, ordered me to secure the foundation of Etemenanki, the Ziggurat of Babylon which before my time had gone into disrepair, on the bottom of the construction pit [literally “breast of the netherworld”] and to let its summit vie with the heavens.”

On the walls of the Ishtar Gate were serpentlike dragons representing Marduk, and wild bulls symbolizing Adad, the weather god. A cuneiform inscription from Nebuchadnezzar, also found at the excavation site, reads in part: “Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, the pious prince appointed by the will of Marduk, the highest priestly prince, beloved of Nabu, of prudent deliberation, who has learned to embrace wisdom, who fathomed Their [Marduk and Nabu’s] godly being and pays reverence to Their Majesty . . . the firstborn son of Nabopolassar, the King of Babylon, am I. . . .

“I pulled down these gates and laid their foundations at the water table with asphalt and bricks and had them made of bricks with blue stone on which wonderful bulls and dragons were depicted. I covered their roofs by laying majestic cedars lengthwise over them. I fixed doors of cedar wood adorned with bronze at all the gate openings. I placed wild bulls and ferocious dragons in the gateways and thus adorned them with luxurious splendor so that mankind might gaze on them in wonder.”

Милица