One of about 120
A single lion panel is almost a metre high and well over two metres long: the one in New York measures 97.2 by 227.3 centimetres. It was made under Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BCE), when the king rebuilt Babylon and covered its temple walls, gates and palaces with bright glazed brick showing protective beasts and the animals of the gods. This lion stands for Ishtar, goddess of love and war, and it was one of about 120 that decorated the walls of the Processional Way, the paved avenue that led north from the Ishtar Gate.
Their job was to guard the sacred road, above all during the New Year festival, when the statues of Babylon’s gods were carried along it and through the gate to the temple where the festival was held. The gate itself carried other animals: bulls for the storm god Adad and dragons for Marduk.
A lion that walks with you
Stand in front of a panel and the lion is already moving: a front paw steps forward, a back leg pushes off, the tail curves up, the jaws open. Now multiply it. Lion after lion, at the same height and in the same stride, with a band of rosettes running under their feet, the walls became a procession of their own, keeping pace with the real one.
Not every lion was always on show. The level of the street was raised more than once, so rows of decoration that had been visible were later buried under the new paving. What Koldewey’s excavators found, from 1899 onwards, was a road with several lives.
Built, then glazed
A lion panel is built rather than carved. Craftsmen pressed clay into reusable moulds to shape each brick with its piece of low relief, fired the bricks, coated them with coloured glaze and fired them again, so the surface turned to glass. On the wall the bricks were laid in courses like any other brickwork, and the lion appeared across them. The moulds were the secret of the system: the same mane, the same stride and the same rosettes could be repeated along the whole street, and a broken brick could be replaced by an identical one.
The blue looks like lapis lazuli, but it is glaze coloured with cobalt, the same colour as the blue of the whole gate. Where did the colouring metals come from? A 2019 study measured the lead isotopes in the glazes of three Babylonian reliefs now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and tentatively proposed ore deposits in Turkey as their source. Babylon, in other words, may have imported the raw materials of its famous colours from hundreds of kilometres away.
Lions in clay, lions in stone
Lions guarded the king’s spaces as well as the road: a frieze of glazed lions ran along the façade of the throne room in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, now rebuilt in Berlin. A few generations earlier, the Assyrian kings had filled their palaces with lions carved in stone, hunted and dying. Babylon chose a different technique and a different mood: its lions walk as escorts, glowing in colour.
Why one lion mattered
On its own, a lion panel is a fine piece of glazed brick. On the wall, it was one beat in a long rhythm that turned a street into an escort for gods, king and crowd. That is also the best reason to see the lions in both ways: the reconstruction in Berlin gives back the procession, the scale and the sequence; a single panel in a gallery lets you stand close to the glaze, the joints and the moulded mane.
Where to see it
In Berlin, the rebuilt Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate are in the south wing of the Pergamonmuseum, closed for renovation until 2037 according to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; the rest of the museum reopens on 4 June 2027. Single panels are in other museums: two at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (not on view when checked in October 2026), others at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in Chicago, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Check each museum‘s website before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Panel with striding lion”, 31.13.1 and 31.13.2.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ishtar Gate”.
- A. S. Rodler, S. Klein, G. Artioli and C. Brøns, “Probing the provenance of archaeological glaze colorants: polychrome faunal reliefs of the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way of Babylon”, Archaeometry 61.4 (2019), 837-855.
- Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, news of 4 December 2025 on the Pergamonmuseum; “From Fragment to Monument: The Ishtar Gate in Berlin”.
- Yale University Art Gallery, “Lion Relief from the Processional Way”.
- ISAW, New York University, “Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate” (2019).
