What Is the Ishtar Gate of Babylon?

The Ishtar Gate is a monumental city gate of blue glazed brick, built at Babylon, in what is now Iraq, around 575 BC for King Nebuchadnezzar II. Rows of wild bulls and dragons in raised relief cover its walls, and the king dedicated it to Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love and war.

German archaeologists recovered its broken pieces between 1899 and 1917. The smaller front gate was rebuilt in Berlin and unveiled when the Pergamon Museum opened in 1930, though fewer than one brick in five is ancient.

Visitors know it for its deep blue walls and for the corridor of striding lions that leads up to it. The museum wing that holds it has been closed since October 23, 2023, and is due to reopen around 2037.

The Ishtar Gate of Babylon, about 575 BC, molded and glazed fired brick, as rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Photographed in 2014. Image: Radomir Vrbovsky, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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What does the Ishtar Gate look like?

A mušḫuššu dragon, symbol of the god Marduk, from the Ishtar Gate, 6th century BC. Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Image: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The bulls and dragons climb the blue towers in tidy rows, yet no one in Babylon ever saw all of those rows at the same time…

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What You'll Discover

• The three gods behind the bulls, dragons and lions

• What the king wrote about his own gate

• Why archaeologists never found a blue gate standing

• Why 230 wine barrels filled a Berlin museum

• Which museums from Paris to Detroit keep its animals

• What still rises from the ground at Babylon

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