The gate of Ishtar amazes with the scale and beauty of those who see them today, in an age of accessible technologies. It is difficult to imagine how great this creation looked like when the construction was completed.
The Ishtar Gate was built in Babylon, in 575 BC, under King Nebuchadnezzar and represent a huge arch of bricks covered with bright blue enamel. The walls of the arch are decorated with sacred animals, dragons and bulls, which the Babylonians considered companions of the gods. It is enough to imagine a few weeks of wandering in the desert, where the glance slides over the burned sand surface, the dusty streets of cities made of stones of the same sand color, and one can understand how colorful the huge bright blue gates of the Goddess Ishtar in Babylon in the middle of the kingdom of drought looked.
Through the Ishtar Gate, magnificent sacred processions passed. "May the gods rejoice when they pass this road," wrote Nebuchadnezzar.
The Riddle of Ishtar's Gate
The grandeur of this architectural creation is not so much in size as in enamel. To create it, components are required, which simply did not exist in Babylon. They were brought from such countries, which at that time were considered outskirts of the world. The temperature required for the manufacture of enamel must be constantly maintained at a level of at least 900 ° C.
To obtain a uniform blue color on all bricks, the amount of dye for each portion of the enamel must be calculated with high accuracy. After the bricks were covered with enamel, they were burned for 12 hours at temperatures above 1000 ° C.
Today, such a high temperature in the furnace is supported by electronics, and the required amount of dye is measured on an electronic balance. How to measure the amount of dye and maintain the temperature in the furnaces for 500 years BC. - It is not known.
Reconstruction
The first were found bricks covered with bright blue enamel. The find of Robert Koledeweya was accidental, and it was only 10 years later to raise funds for excavations. You can look at the famous architectural structure at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, where the reconstruction of Ishtar Gate, created in the 1930s, is located.
Fragments of the gate today are in various museums in the world: in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul, in the Louvre, in New York, Chicago, in Boston, there are bas-reliefs of lions, dragons and bulls, in Detroit, in the Museum of Arts, the bas-relief of the syrrush is kept. A copy of Ishtar Gate in Iraq is located at the entrance to the museum.