The Ishtar Gate was one of the ceremonial entrances of Babylon as rebuilt under Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BCE). One of eight major gates in the city wall, it opened inside onto a roughly 250-metre Processional Way, itself lined with glazed-brick reliefs of striding lions.

The technical breakthrough lies in the mass production of glazed brick: each brick was individually moulded, fired, and assembled into a single large composition. Across the gate's surface, the dragon mušḫuššu (snake-lion hybrid, sacred to the god Marduk) and the bull (sacred to the storm god Adad) alternate in regular rows. The palette is built from lapis-blue glaze, orange-yellow relief, and white outline.

A German archaeological team excavated and removed the gate between 1899 and 1917, and it was reassembled in Berlin. At the Pergamon Museum the smaller inner gate is reconstructed at full scale; the larger outer gate remains in storage. The structure is the last great monumental flowering of Mesopotamian art — within half a century Babylon would lose its status as a political centre to the Persian conquest.