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With a bit of luck, it can be seen again in spring 2027: the crystal blue Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Due to renovation work, the museum is closed for a longer period of time. This disadvantage has the advantage that the gate can be provided with new explanatory signs at your leisure.
Knowledge about its construction history can then be updated, as a team of Italian, German and American researchers published an article about it in the Scientific Journal last week Plus one. They used the Earth’s magnetic field to map the gate’s construction in more detail.
Love, sex and war
The Ishtar Gate was built in the city of Babylon during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century BC. Built. We know this in part because his name is written on some of the stones. The gate is named after the goddess Ishtar, who represented love, sex, fertility and war. German archaeologists excavated the structure in Iraq at the beginning of the 20th century and shipped it to Berlin.
The authors of the article in Plus one were allowed to take a sample of five bricks from the gate and examine it in the laboratory. These were tiny fired clay shards measuring 2 to 10 millimeters. The excavation revealed that the gate had been built in three different phases. The aim of the study was to find out how close these phases were to each other – all during Nebuchadnezzar’s lifetime, right?
The researchers used the earth’s magnetic field to do this. This changes constantly and leaves traces in magnetically sensitive materials such as clay. When clay is fired, the magnetic field is fixed at that moment. This creates a “signature” that makes it possible to date when the clay entered the kiln.
Chronological gaps
This is possible because in recent years a database has been built with magnetic values from the western part of the Middle East (the Levant) over the last three millennia. If you enter the measured value of the Ishtar Gate on this curve, it is in the year 569 BC. BC, at the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. The statistical analysis of the data also shows that there are “no significant temporal gaps” between the stones from the different construction phases. Therefore, the authors conclude that the second and third phases of construction were part of the original design of the gate and not later additions.
Because the fluctuations of the Levant’s magnetic field are known, researchers can link the construction of the Ishtar Gate to an important historical event: the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C.E. When the Babylonians burned the capital of the Kingdom of Judah, the heat trapped the archaeomagnetic signature in refired bricks. The signal from Jerusalem is clearly different from that of the Babylonian bricks. Therefore, the authors argue that there must be “some chronological gap” between the fall of Jerusalem and the construction of the gate.
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The researchers are pleased that they have now expanded the database of archaeomagnetic values to include an important point. This collection is well-stocked with figures from the Levant, but those from Mesopotamia are much rarer. In addition, dating using the earth’s magnetic field makes sense because traditional dating using the carbon-14 method did not work correctly at exactly this time – around 2,500 years ago – and had an error rate of plus or minus two hundred years.
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