... we found ourselves transported to a very different time and place. The decaying marble had given way to walls of glazed bricks which were colored a vivid blue. On the walls were designs which appeared to represent flowers and trees, and everywhere there were animals captured in mid-stride. We had just emerged from an archway covered with these animals, an archway which we discovered to be the reassembled Ishtar Gate of the city of Babylon, named for the Babylonian goddess of love, war and fertility.


Its relatively good condition seemed to indicate that it was newer than the amazing but damaged Roman and Greek era structures we’d just seen, but in fact the Ishtar Gate is much older, having been built in 575 B.C., during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II. The reconstruction is 47 feet high and 100 feet wide. On closer examination, the animals on the gate appeared to be of two types – one looked like some sort of horned livestock animal, and the other looked like a product of someone’s imagination. This creature, from Babylonian mythology, is called a mushussu (also known as a sirrush), and appears to be a scaly assemblage of parts from a lion, an eagle, a snake and a dragon. The livestock animal was a genuine animal known as an aurochs, and was the ancestor of modern-day domestic cattle. They are thought to have become extinct in the 17th Century.

To the left of the archway is an inscription in Sumerian that commemorates the gate’s completion; this inscription is a source of information about the gate which is much more specific than that about most structures of similar age.

As large as this gate is, it was only the outer gate of the Ishtar entrance to the city. There was also an inner gate which was larger (maybe 60-70 feet tall) and more fortified. This gate is actually also in the museum’s collection, but it’s too big to be displayed in the Pergamon Museum and is currently in storage. Back in the day, both gates were approached via a long processional street which was lined with similarly glazed blue bricks featuring a parade of lions. A section of the processional walls is also on display at the Pergamon.


Also on display are panels from the façade of the city’s throne room.


Near one of them is a seven-foot-tall monument which bears a detailed inscription of the complete code of law originated by the Babylonian king Hammurabi. It’s actually a copy (the original is in the Louvre in Paris), and the original is much older than the gate (the law was enacted around 1772 B.C. – Babylonia was a very old kingdom by the time of the Ishtar Gate, having spent most of that time either subjugated by or in conflict with the neighboring kingdom of Assyria; both kingdoms were located in current-day Iraq).

Wandering into side rooms off of Babylon’s processional street, we found many other artifacts from the same region. This is because the act of passing through the Ishtar Gate brought us into a museum within the museum, a museum called the Museum of the Ancient Near East. First we found pieces from the city of Uruk, which was the world’s most populous city in 2900 B.C., with 50,000-80,000 inhabitants. Uruk eventually found itself within the borders of Babylonia, but before that it was part of the region of Sumer. Uruk was established sometime around 4000 B.C., and gave its name to the Uruk Period, which extended from 4000 to 3200 B.C. Some of Uruk’s artifacts are in surprisingly good condition for such an old civilization. Particularly striking are its cone mosaics, which are made up of cone-shaped colored stones.


Moving into other rooms we found trademark stone representations of Assyrian mythology. There were stone reliefs of beings known as genii. A genius is a winged creature with a human-like body and the head of a bearded human or of a bird. They can often be seen tending to trees or brandishing little handbags.


Another Assyrian creature is the lamassu, a large animal with a lion’s body, a bearded human head and wings. Lamassu were considered to be protective deities, and were often found at entrances to cities and palaces.

Continuing through the near eastern collection, we came across numerous other artifacts from cities in the region.




After completing our circuit through the rooms of the Ancient Near East Museum, we found a stairway that took us up to another museum that occupies part of the Pergamon Museum, this being the Museum of Islamic Art. This museum was begun in 1904 with a donation of woven carpets, and grew to include many Islamic art objects from the 8th through the 19th Centuries.








A highlight is the elaborately carved façade of the 8th Century Mshatta Palace. This palace was discovered and excavated in Jordan in the 19th Century, and the façade was a gift from Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II to Kaiser Wilhelm II.


Another highlight is the 17th Century Aleppo Room, an elaborately decorated room that has been transported from Aleppo, Syria. The decorations are a combination of Christian and Islamic imagery, and were commissioned by a Christian citizen of Aleppo, to be used in his home’s entrance room. The room was acquired by the museum in 1912.


From the Pergamon Museum we retraced our steps to the S-Bahn station.

We took the train to Potsdamer Platz, where we found an American-style shopping mall a block to the south of the Platz. They sold food in the mall, and we stopped at an Asian place and had lunch.

We got back on the train and then back off at a station near the KaDeWe department store. We’d earlier seen a market between KaDeWe and our hotel, and we wanted to stop and pick up some groceries.

We continued back to the hotel and rested for awhile, eventually emerging to have dinner at an Indian restaurant just up the street.

We had big plans for the following day, plans that included a trip to the Berlin suburb of Potsdam.