The building inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar II

The king’s own accounts, on clay cylinders, stone tablets and bricks, of rebuilding Babylon: the double city wall and moat, the Ishtar Gate of glazed brick with its bulls and dragons, the raised Processional Way, the palace, and the completion of the temple tower Etemenanki.

Mesopotamian kings buried written accounts of their building works in the foundations and stamped their names on the bricks, addressing the gods and the future rulers who would one day repair the work. Nebuchadnezzar II left more of these than any other king of Babylon. The longest, the so-called East India House Inscription (now in the British Museum), runs to some six hundred lines; the dedication set up at the Ishtar Gate repeats its account of the gate.

He says that he found the gates of the city too low, because the street had been raised, so he pulled them down, laid their foundations at the level of the ground water in bitumen and baked brick, and rebuilt them of blue glazed brick on which wild bulls and dragons were figured; he roofed them with cedar, hung doors of cedar sheathed in bronze, and set bronze bulls and fierce dragons at the thresholds. He raised and paved the Processional Way from the gate to the temple of Marduk so that the god could go along it at the New Year festival. He also tells how he completed the double wall his father had begun, dug the moat, and finished Etemenanki, making its top rival the heavens.

The inscriptions are propaganda (every work is the greatest ever made), but they agree closely with what Robert Koldewey’s excavations of 1899–1917 found in the ground, down to the bricks stamped with the king’s name.

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