Holy Rooms and Gates of Ezida

Ezida

First-millennium-BC cuneiform sources, including late Neo-Assyrian (721–612 BC) and Neo-Babylonian (625–539 BC) royal inscriptions, provide the names of some of Ezida's holy rooms and principal gateways. The most important rooms were:

The "Dais of Destinies" (Akkadian parak šīmāti), a seat of Nabû that was used during New Year's festivals (Akkadian akītu), when he travelled to and from Babylon, is also attested in cuneiform sources.

Ezida's main gateways were:

An entrance gate of the god Nabû (Akkadian bāb nēreb nabû) also appears in texts, but its Sumerian ceremonial name is not presently known. The bāb ezida ("Gate of Ezida"; Sumerian Ka-Ezida) mentioned in several inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (r. 668–ca. 631 BC), Assyria's last great king, might be the name of another gate of Ezida. However, it is unclear if the "gate of Ezida" in those texts was actually the proper name of a gateway or if its mention was meant to explain that the Luguduene Gate, Gate of the Rising Sun, and Gate of Lamma-RA.BI were entrances of Ezida in which Ashurbanipal had statues of wild bulls (Akkadian rīmu) set up. Assuming that this Assyrian king had pairs of protective figures set up in each of the three aforementioned gateways, rather than two in some and one in others, then it might be more plausible to understand the terse language of the inscriptions in question as specifying that the three named gateways were entrances in the Ezida temple at Borsippa, rather than as the name of a specific gate. The purposeful inclusion of the mention of the god Nabû's temple in Ashurbanipal's texts was necessary as the proceeding passages in those inscriptions all recorded that king's building activities in Esagil at Babylon, a temple that also had gates called Ka-Utu-ea and Ka-Lamma-RA.BI. Had Ezida not been specifically mentioned, the intended audiences of those inscriptions would have been under the impression that Ashurbanipal had stationed statues of wild bulls in the god Marduk's temple, rather than Nabû's. Thus, BTMAo does not regard Ka-Ezida (bāb ezida) as the name of a gate in Borsippa's principal temple.

Further Reading

Banner image: photograph of the remains of Ezida and Eurmeiminanki taken ca. 2002 (left); woodcut from "Pleasant Hours: A Monthly Journal of Home Reading and Sunday Teaching; Volume III" published by the Church of England's National Society's Depository, London, in 1863 (center); areal photograph of the ruins of Ezida and Eurmeiminanki taken in 1928 (right). Images from Getty Images.

Jamie Novotny

Jamie Novotny, 'Holy Rooms and Gates of Ezida', Babylonian Temples and Monumental Architecture online (BTMAo), The BTMAo Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, [http://oracc.org/btmao/Borsippa/TemplesandZiggurat/Ezida/RoomsandGates/]

 
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BTMAo 2019-. BTMAo is based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department) - Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East. BTMAo is part of the four-year project Living Among Ruins: The Experience of Urban Abandonment in Babylonia (September 2019 to October 2023), which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung as part of the program "Lost Cities. Wahrnehmung von und Leben mit verlassenen Städten in den Kulturen der Welt," coordinated by Martin Zimmermann and Andreas Beyer. Content released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license, 2007-.
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