Mentioned in the sacred texts of all three Abrahamic faiths, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon, in modern-day Iraq, is today undergoing a revival. Two World Monuments Fund (WMF) projects are nearing completion and much-needed cultural tourism is returning.
One project mitigates groundwater damage to the north retaining wall of the Ishtar Gate. The second is a restoration of the Temple of Ninmakh, dedicated to the Sumerian mother goddess. The team hopes there will be an official reopening for the temple this autumn, after which it will be available for gatherings such as weddings and concerts, as well as for the Babylon Festival, a celebration of international cultures that takes place every spring.
Largely funded by the US embassy in Baghdad, the restoration of the temple and the north retaining wall are part of the Future of Babylon Project, initiated 15 years ago, which aims to document, waterproof and stabilise structures throughout the 2,500-acre site. (The US embassy cancelled funding for a planned walkway spanning the site of the Ishtar Gate in July due to budget cuts.)
Visitor boom
The completion of these two projects coincides with a boom in tourism. Even in the midday heat, when tour guides refuse to emerge from their office, visitors from Romania, Russia and Iran enthusiastically explore attractions including the largely intact Lion of Babylon, the processional way and the museum next to a reconstructed Ishtar Gate.
The return of heritage tourism is one of Iraq’s few recent success stories. Even as sectarian tensions simmer and the electrical grid has yet to be restored 22 years after it was destroyed in the US invasion, Babylon is being reborn.
“We’ve had record numbers of visitors this year,” Raad Hamid Abdullah, Babylon’s antiquities and heritage inspector, tells The Art Newspaper. In 2024 Babylon hosted 43,530 Iraqi tourists and 5,370 foreign tourists, an increase from 36,957 Iraqi visitors and 4,109 foreigners in 2023, he says.
“Now even locals from the adjoining city of Babil are coming,” Abdullah says. “It has once more become a popular place for family gatherings and wedding parties,” he says, adding proudly, “Babylon is a symbol of Iraq.”
Babylon, the survivor
Around 80km south of Baghdad, comprising both the ruins of the ancient city as well as surrounding villages and agricultural areas, Babylon is a survivor. From its peak as the Neo-Babylonian capital under King Nebuchadnezzar II through to the Iraq War, when American and Polish troops ran roughshod over its ruins and a decade later, Islamic State (Isis) threatened its very existence, the ancient city has witnessed empires come and go.
Babylon has survived decades of looting and ongoing environmental challenges. Construction, too, has taken a toll over the years. In 1927 the British ran a railway line through the site, and in the 1980s Saddam Hussein built a highway through part of it, along with a palace for himself, complete with helipad. There are still three non-functioning oil pipelines, two built in the 1970s and 1980s and a more recent third one—work on it was blocked after Iraq’s General Authority for Antiquities and Heritage filed a lawsuit in 2012. Babylon was only recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2019.
Now the Egyptian architect Ahmed Abdelgawad, an expert in mud brick buildings, is working with the WMF to train locals in the traditional art that befits the Temple of Ninmakh, named after the mother goddess associated with creation, birth and healing who breathed life into humankind via small clay figures in their likeness.
Years of war-related damage and neglect combined with poorly executed mid-century “reconstruction” methods resulted in serious structural problems at the temple. Corrosion caused by the intrusion of increasingly salty groundwater is the product of prolonged droughts and soil erosion in climate-vulnerable Iraq.
Traditional mud-brick techniques
The archway at the entrance of Ninmakh’s inner sanctum—on the verge of collapse in 2022—was successfully restored at the end of May. “We had to totally dismantle the old arch,” Abdelgawad says. “It was full of cracks and worn by weather. So we took it apart and rebuilt it with mud bricks.”
The traditional art of making special low-salt mud brick begins with sourcing soil with low salt levels, which is then mixed with sand, grit and straw.
“This is the first arch in Iraq restored totally from mud bricks,” says Osama Hisham, the Future of Babylon project manager.
A similar but saltier mix of mud brick and bitumen was used to repair the wooden roof of the temple, which was being eroded by termites.
Hisham says the temple now comprises poplar timber from the forests of Mosul in northern Iraq, mud from Babylon and reeds from the marshes in the south. A place that has symbolised the heart of Iraq has now been restored with materials from across the nation.
Groundwater zapping
Meanwhile, the north retaining walls at the Ishtar Gate, reconstructed in the past century with cement that damaged the remains of the historical monument, were demolished and replaced with new retaining walls providing better water management. These new walls—essentially boxes filled with stones, based on an ancient Egyptian construction technique, Hisham says—absorb sunlight from the southern side and effectively vaporise groundwater coming from the northern side.
The Babylonians, he says, dealt with groundwater intrusion by creating an elevation by“cutting the arch of the gate and burying it, then using it as a foundation for a new gate”. As a result of this technique, the Ishtar Gate built by Nebuchadnezzar II, where the WMF is currently finishing work on the north retaining wall, is seven metres below the ancient city, with only two metres remaining above.
Disintegration
A subsequent spectacular blue-glazed gate Nebuchadnezzar II built on top of that gate gradually disintegrated in the aftermath of the fall of the Babylonian Empire in the sixth century BC. A replica installed in the 1950s now greets visitors to Babylon.
Many Iraqis would like to see the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate returned from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The gate is made of brick fragments from excavations carried out by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) from 1899 to 1917.
But Hisham says that even the Ishtar Gate in Berlin is only 20% original. The gate in Babylon, he points out, is 80% original.
