Bulls and dragons on the gate
The Ishtar Gate was the eighth fortified gate of Babylon, built around 575 BCE under King Nebuchadnezzar II, over the main street of the city. It was a double gate, more than 12 metres high, with a large antechamber on its south side, and its walls were faced with glazed brick in deep blue. On that blue, in tiers, walked two animals only: young bulls and dragons.
How many? Britannica gives an estimate of 575, arranged in 13 rows. Not all were visible at the same time, though, because the level of the street was raised more than once during the gate’s life: the lower rows ended up underground, and the lowest, laid irregularly, may even have been buried on purpose as foundation deposits.
Three animals, three gods
The aurochs was a wild bull, now extinct, large and long-horned. On the gate it is Adad’s animal, the god of storms, who brought both thunder and the rain that crops depended on.
The mušḫuššu is stranger, a composite creature: a scaly body, a head with horns and a snake’s forked tongue, the forelegs of a lion and the hind legs of an eagle. It was the animal of Marduk, the god of Babylon. Seen on the gate, it announced whose city you were entering.
The third animal is the lion, and it is not on the gate. About 120 lions walked along the walls of the Processional Way, the stone- and brick-paved avenue that ran through the gate and has been traced for more than 800 metres. The lion was the animal of Ishtar, goddess of love and war, after whom the gate was named. All three animals had the same job: to protect.
Why put animals on a gate?
Because this gate was a stage. Every year, at the festival of the New Year, the statues of Babylon’s gods were carried along the Processional Way and through the Ishtar Gate to the temple where the festival was celebrated. The animals of the gods escorted them, and the walls made clear to every spectator that the city, its king and its festival stood under divine protection.
The animals are in low relief, each one built up from many bricks pressed in moulds, so the same figure could be repeated row after row. The blue around them is glaze coloured with cobalt, fired onto the brick; the bodies stand out in yellow, brown, white and black.
From Babylon to Berlin
The German archaeologist Robert Koldewey excavated Babylon from 1899 to 1917 and recovered the glazed fragments of the gate and the street. They went to Berlin, where the front, smaller part of the double gate was rebuilt, together with a stretch of the Processional Way, and they have been in the Pergamonmuseum since it opened in 1930. Since the 1990s Iraq has asked for the gate to be returned. In Babylon itself, the earliest phase of the gate, with bulls and dragons in plain, unglazed brick relief, still stands.
The festival road did not end at the gate. It led on into the city, past the temple of Marduk and his ziggurat, Etemenanki.
Where to see it
The Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way are in the south wing of the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, which is closed for renovation: according to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, that wing reopens in 2037. The north wing and central building reopen on 4 June 2027, and from then the Vorderasiatisches Museum will show a selection of objects there while the gate stays closed. Single lion panels are in several museums, including two at the Met in New York, which were not on view when checked in October 2026. Babylon has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2019; check your government’s travel advice before planning a visit.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ishtar Gate”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Panel with striding lion”, 31.13.1 and 31.13.2.
- Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, news “Meilenstein auf der Museumsinsel: Erster Bauabschnitt im Pergamonmuseum fertiggestellt” (4 December 2025) and Vorderasiatisches Museum pages.
- A. S. Rodler, S. Klein, G. Artioli and C. Brøns, “Probing the provenance of archaeological glaze colorants”, Archaeometry 61.4 (2019), 837-855.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Babylon” (278).
