Assyriology is a discipline of granular studies. From the receipts and rosters produced by Ur III bureaucrats to the loans and title deeds held by the members of the Murašû family firm, Assyriologists are accustomed to working with archives reconstructed from thousands of seemingly insignificant tablets that, when combined into their whole, reveal the complex workings of empires, institutions and private entrepreneurs over the millennia of Mesopotamian history. It is therefore fitting that the Ishtar Gate, easily the most significant edifice to be recovered from Babylon, was excavated by Robert Koldeway and Walter Andrae not intact, but rather painstakingly restored from the thousands of bricks and glazed fragments that they found between 1899 and 1917 and shipped to Berlin. Like a reconstructed archive, the Ishtar Gate was a composite. The studies collected in this volume emphasise that the gate was simultaneously a collection of mundane objects fashioned out of simple materials, bricks fired from clay and glazed with silicates, and a creation of the complex organisation of labour, materials and expertise that became something greater than the sum of its parts.
The thirteen essays in this volume were published to accompany the eponymous exhibition at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. While the reconstructed Gate and Processional Way remained in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, the contents of both the exhibit and the volume were intended to present ‘craftsmanship as a transformative power in the ancient Near East’ (p. 9). Visually, the volume is impressive, with excellent maps, charts, images of objects that were and were not featured in the exhibition, and a comprehensive exhibition checklist organised by lending institution. The quality of the essays is equal to the beauty of the book; each one is succinct and both engaging and accessible to an informed general audience and also a fully cited academic contribution.
The introductory and concluding chapters written by Amrhein and Knott, two of the book's editors, lay out the scope of its contents, opening with a discussion of the materials and skills that were employed in the creation of the Gate and closing with a discussion of the visual impression the Gate would have made in antiquity. The intervening chapters are organised along a loose progression that follows the construction of the Gate by focusing on labour, technology, expertise and ideology.
Chapters 2–6 emphasise the role of labour in the Gate's construction. H.D. Baker presents the Gate as an imperial project that drew upon subject populations through corvée obligations. It also required dependent labourers as well as hired men on generous wages, the latter indicating a shortage of labour. Brickmaking was contracted, and scribes utilised coefficients to estimate the number of bricks needed. The technical and logistical challenges of brickmaking, glazing and bricklaying are taken up in the other chapters. The chapters by A. Fügert and H. Gries and by J.-F. de Lapérouse provide informative context on the making of moulded and glazed bricks throughout Mesopotamia and specifically in the context of the Gate. S.B. Graff surveys the use of horizontal registers in Mesopotamian art and introduces the reader to the compositional challenges of composing the estimated 575 almost symmetrical right- and left-facing relief figures of lions, bulls and mušḫuššu-dragons on a grid of individually moulded bricks. Interestingly, M.-S. Zeßin's comparative study of fitters’ marks from first-millennium sites reveals the existence of conceptually similar systems throughout Mesopotamia that differed in their specifics, the one exception being marks used at Susa and Persepolis, which indicates craftspeople with a shared origin.
Chapters 7–10, which focus on glass, glassmaking and imitation stones, are especially welcome contributions to a specialised field for which Oppenheim et al.'s Glass and Glassmaking in Ancient Mesopotamia, now fifty years old, remains an important work (A.L. Oppenheim, R.H. Brill, D. Barag and A. von Saldern, Glass and Glassmaking in Ancient Mesopotamia: an Edition of the Cuneiform Texts which Contain Instructions for Glassmakers with a Catalogue of Surviving Objects [1970]). A critical and recurring argument appearing in these essays is that no differentiation was made in antiquity between precious stones and the artificial stones and glazes that were manufactured as imitations; the Ishtar Gate was not a piece of costume jewellery. K.A. Larson provides a succinct survey of the manufacture of vitreous materials in the ancient Near East. Amrhein examines the Babylonian categorisation of materials, pointing out that the cuneiform sign NA4 had a more varied application than simply as a determinative for types of stones. Amrhein argues persuasively that the preference for lustrous surfaces in the latter part of the first millennium was an aesthetic turn and that artificial gemstones and glazes were equal in value aesthetically to natural stones and perhaps had greater symbolic value because they underwent a transformative process from common materials that imbued them with a liminal quality. Knott and E.A. Escobar, in their respective chapters, elaborate on Amrhein's thesis. Knott specifically examines eyestones, both polished agates and imitation stones, arguing that both held equal value in the Babylonian mind. Escobar reminds the reader that cuneiform glassmaking texts were not scientific manuals or lab notes in the modern sense, but rather possessed a ritual component that made use of the multivalent qualities of cuneiform writing and presented knowledge of glassmaking processes as rooted in tradition and not innovation. In this regard, Escobar's chapter ties glassmaking technology into the intellectual world view of Babylonian scholars described recently in works by both M. Van De Mieroop (Philosophy Before the Greeks: the Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia [2016]) and J.-J. Glassner (Le Devin historien en Mésopotamie [2019]).
To understand the visual effect of the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way, it is necessary to grasp the Babylonian conceptualisation of colour. S. Thavapalan examines the minimal palette of the Gate, arguing that brightness was more relevant than shade and hue to the Babylonian eye and that the raised reliefs with their differentiation in colour had a profound aesthetic impact. As Amrhein and Knott stress in their conclusion, the Gate was intended to dazzle both visually and tactilely with its glossy and varied surface. The repetitive patterns of 575 divinely-associated beasts in their registers implied dynamic movement evoking eternity. According to B. Pongratz-Leisten, this was a fitting motif. The Ishtar Gate and the walls of Babylon that it breached possessed both physical as well as magical and ideological power. Pongratz-Leisten points to the opening and the closing of the epic of Gilgamesh, in which the apkallus, the antediluvian sages, were said to have laid the foundations of the walls of Uruk, and reminds us that Babylon, which was created by Marduk at the formation of the cosmos according to Enuma Elish, possessed similar origins in mythological time. The processions of the akītu-festival, which marked the Babylonian New Year and renewed kingship, passed through the Gate, binding the gods to the city and the king for eternity.
The success of A Wonder to Behold is the coherence of its contents. Individually interesting, the contributions combine to communicate the richness of Babylonian civilisation over millennia from the mundane to the elevated by taking as their subject the Ishtar Gate at Babylon, constructed at the pinnacle of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The volume is a laudable example of what an exhibition publication should be.
