The Sirrush

Sometime around 575 BCE Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar the Great ordered the construction of the Ishtar Gate in present-day Iraq. This was a gate on the north side of the city of Babylon and part of a processional wall into the city. Citing Iraq’s Babylonian heritage, Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) built a small reproduction of the gate as an entrance to a still unfinished museum. Sadly, the reproduction suffered damage following the American invasion of Iraq.

Ishtar Gate

German archaeologist Robert Koldeway excavated the Ishtar Gate in the early 1900s, introducing the magnificent work of the ancients to the world. The gate was partially reconstructed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. It features blue-glazed brick walls decorated with animals and deities. Among the decorations are lions, oxen, and, as Wikipedia puts it, “a mythological hybrid.” This mythological creature is a dragon, known as the sirrush.

For me, dragons point to dinosaurs. And the sirrush, with its slender, scaly body, looks more like a dinosaur than any other animal. Moreover, being positioned alongside oxen and lions points to it being something real rather than the product of ancient imaginings.

A Living Dinosaur?

Some believe, me included, that an iguanodon is a good fit for the sirrush. And even if one were to feel ancient Babylon is not a place where a remnant dinosaur population thrived, the animal collections of Montezuma, Kublai Kahn, and others might come into play. The ancients kept vast menageries made up of exotic animals. Presumably, Nebuchadnezzar II would have had a zoo of his own. Perhaps he had dinosaurs in his collection brought to him from Africa. Maybe the sirrush—or iguanodon—represents the dragon in the apocryphal text Bel and the Dragon. (For more on that, check out my book.) 

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