Dynastic History|Pergamonmuseum, Berlin — Babylon's Gate, Boxed In Until 2037

The gate that visitors to Berlin have queued for since 1930 is a reassembly. Koldewey's excavation at Babylon between 1899 and 1917 packed glazed brick into barrels, sent it down the Euphrates and on to Germany, and there the fragments were sorted and rebuilt inside the Vorderasiatisches Museum. What stands is the smaller front gate, about 14 metres high and 30 metres wide. The larger inner gate was too big for the hall and has never come out of storage. Other fragments went to Istanbul, Copenhagen, Detroit, the Louvre and a dozen further collections.

The same department holds clay tablets that Koldewey's team lifted from vaulted rooms at the north-east corner of Babylon's Southern Palace. They are ration lists. One, dated to Nebuchadnezzar's thirteenth year, about 592 BCE, allots oil to "Ya'u-kīnu, king of the land of Yahudu" and his five sons, and to craftsmen from Arvad, Byblos and the Ionian coast. That is Jehoiachin of Judah, deported after Babylon took Jerusalem, drawing a monthly allowance from the palace stores. The tablets are the accounting record of the deportations, kept by the treasury that also paid for the glaze.

The Pergamonmuseum's south wing closed on 23 October 2023. The Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate were too large to move and have been boxed in where they stand. The north wing is due to reopen on 4 June 2027; the Museum of the Ancient Near East, and the gate with it, is not expected back until 2037.

📸 Cover: the reassembled Ishtar Gate in the Pergamonmuseum, the Berlin reconstruction rather than the structure at Babylon, Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons