Magical Beasts Of Babylon

How the Ishtar Gate safeguarded the Mesopotamian world

- Jarrett A. Lobell

The residents of Babylon in the first millennium B.C. saw themselves as facing their past and walking back into the future. In the Akkadian language of ancient Mesopotamia, the word panu, or "face," relates to the past, whereas "behind" is a word associated with the future. Reverence for the past was at the heart of the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II's (r. ca. 604-562 B.c.) plan to rebuild Babylon. By his time, the city was already more than 1,500 years old and had been shattered by a recent war with the Assyrian Empire. The king and his advisers, called ummanu, who were considered to be descended from divine sages and were experts in religion, architecture, and magic, wanted to create a capital both earthly and divine for their newly established empire, which covered much of their known world. "Babylon was the religious center of the universe and the place of creation of the world, where the gods came to meet humans," says ancient Near Eastern historian Elizabeth Knott of New York University.

At the heart of the reconstructed city was the three-city-blocks-long processional way to the Temple of Marduk, the city's patron god, which ended at the Ishtar Gate. Knott and her colleague Anastasia Amrhein, an art historian at the University of Pennsylvania, recently explored how the processional way and gate, which stood at the literal and metaphysical junction between humans and the divine, were monuments to the Babylonians' past and to their relationship with the natural, man-made, and spiritual worlds.