Search results for ""Author Helen Gries""

Glazed bricks applied as a new form of colourful and glossy architectural decor first started to appear in the early Iron Age on monumental buildings of the Ancient Near East. It surely impressed the spectators then as it does the museum visitors today. Glazed Brick Decoration in the Ancient Near East comprises the proceedings of a workshop held at the 11th International Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE) at Munich in April 2018, organised by the editors. Over the last decade excavations have supplied new evidence from glazed bricks that once decorated the facades of the Ancient Near East’s public buildings during the Iron Age (1000–539 BC) and especially significant progress has been achieved from revived work on glazed bricks excavated more than a century ago which today are kept in various museum collections worldwide. Since the latest summarising works on Ancient Near Eastern glazed architectural décors have been published several decades ago and in the meantime considerable insight into the subject has been gained, this volume aims to provide an updated overview of the development of glazed bricks and of the scientific research on the Iron Age glazes. Furthermore, it presents the on-going research on this topic and new insights into glazed bricks from Ashur, Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Babylon.

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The lavishly decorated Ishtar Gate was one of ancient Babylon’s city gates. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II built it in the 6th century BCE. During the annual New Year festival, the processions of the gods passed through this gate as they entered the city centre. But how did the Babylonians make the glazed bricks used in the gate’s construction? What was the significance of the lions, dragons, and bulls that adorned the gate? How and why did pieces of the gate end up in Berlin, where the Ishtar Gate was reconstructed from thousands of fragments in the 1920s? And how authentic is this reconstruction?

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