Robert Koldewey

Robert Koldewey: The Man Who Learned to See Mud

Babylon had been dug before. British Museum teams had worked it in 1879–82 and left it damaged; European antiquarians had picked over it for a century. What none of them could do was read it. Babylon was built of sun-dried mud brick, which weathers into earth that looks exactly like the earth around it, and the standard excavation technique — trench until you hit stone — found nothing because there was no stone to hit. In 1899 a German architect with no doctorate arrived, and over the next decade and a half he recovered the ground plan of the greatest city of the ancient Near East by learning to distinguish one kind of dirt from another.

No Degree, and No Great Loss

Robert Johann Koldewey was born on 10 September 1855 in Blankenburg am Harz. He attended gymnasium in Braunschweig, moved to Altona in 1869 and took his abitur at the Christianeum in 1875. He then studied architecture and art history in Berlin and Vienna — and left both universities without completing a degree.

For an archaeologist of his generation this was less of a handicap than it sounds, because the field was not yet fully academic and because what Babylon would eventually require was precisely an architect's eye rather than a philologist's. Koldewey could draw a building, understand how it had been put together, and reason from a fragment of wall to the structure it belonged to. That turned out to matter more than a doctorate.

An Apprenticeship in the Field

In 1882 the American archaeologist Francis H. Bacon brought him onto the excavation at Assos in Turkey. It was the beginning of everything: there Koldewey learned excavation method and, crucially, how to draw ancient remains accurately. Drawing is not incidental to archaeology. Excavation destroys the thing it examines, and the record left behind is the only evidence that survives; an excavator who draws badly has destroyed a site for nothing.

Work for the German Archaeological Institute followed across a wide range of periods and cultures — Lesbos in 1885–86, Lagash in Mesopotamia in 1887, Sicilian sites with Felix von Luschan in the early 1890s. By the end of that decade Koldewey had done Hellenic and Mesopotamian, Greek and Near Eastern archaeology, and had accumulated exactly the mixed experience that Babylon would demand.

Fifteen Years at Babylon

Backed by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, Koldewey began at Babylon in 1899 and directed the excavation until 1914, with work continuing to 1917 as the First World War closed in. More than two hundred workers were employed continuously. It was one of the largest and longest single archaeological operations ever mounted, and it was run with what were, for the period, notably modern methods.

The results reshaped what was known about the ancient world. He uncovered the great north–south Processional Way, faced with glazed tiles bearing lions, bulls and dragons in relief. He found the Ishtar Gate, later reconstructed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, where it stands 30.5 metres across and over nine metres high — the single most recognisable object of Mesopotamian architecture in existence. He identified Etemenanki, the ziggurat that is the most plausible original of the Tower of Babel, down to its foundations. He excavated Nebuchadnezzar's palaces and established the basic ground plan of the city.

The Hanging Gardens

In the Southern Citadel he found a vaulted basement structure of fourteen stone-arched rooms, and identified it as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon — one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the one that had never been located. It was the most famous claim of his career.

Modern scholarship rejects it. The structure sits too far from the Euphrates for the irrigation the gardens would have required, and it was most probably a storeroom. Current archaeological assessment states plainly that Koldewey's identification is likely to be wrong.

Method

His real innovation was technical and unglamorous. Koldewey developed the techniques for identifying and excavating mud-brick architecture — for distinguishing decayed brick from the surrounding soil, for tracing wall lines that were, to an untrained eye, invisible. He belonged, as one assessment puts it, to the new generation of scientific excavators, working with stratigraphy and systematically recording layers so that objects could be dated by their context rather than merely collected.

That combination — the ability to see mud-brick walls, plus the discipline to record what he saw in sequence — is why Babylon yielded a city plan rather than a pile of finds.

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

The claim is for a perceptual and technical skill rather than a theoretical one, and that distinction is worth being exact about. Koldewey did not produce a new theory of history or a decipherment. What he did was solve a problem of perception that had defeated every previous excavator: how to see architecture that has dissolved into the ground it stands on. The techniques he developed for mud brick were, by general agreement, essential to the investigation of Babylonia, and without them the sites of southern Mesopotamia would have remained largely illegible. That is a genuine intellectual achievement, but its medium is the trained eye of an architect rather than the abstraction of a scholar.

The counter-arguments are real. He never completed a university degree and produced no body of theory. His most celebrated single identification — the Hanging Gardens — is now judged to be wrong, and wrong for reasons a more sceptical excavator might have caught. The excavation was also an imperial enterprise: the Ishtar Gate is in Berlin, not in Iraq, and the ethics of that removal are argued about continuously. And earlier chronological periods at Babylon remain largely unknown, partly because the water table defeated him and partly because his interest lay with the Neo-Babylonian city of Nebuchadnezzar. The fair verdict is a technician of exceptional ability who opened a civilisation to study, and who over-read his own evidence in the one instance where fame was on offer.

Legacy

Koldewey died in Berlin on 4 February 1925, aged 69. The Koldewey-Gesellschaft, the German society for architectural-historical research, carries his name. The Ishtar Gate stands in the Pergamon Museum, seen by millions who have never heard of the man who found it. And the fundamental achievement is the one that photographs badly: because of Koldewey, the plan of Babylon exists — streets, walls, palaces, temple precincts — where before there had been only a name from scripture and a mound of dirt.

Achievements

• Held posts at Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin
• Educated at Christianeum
• Fields of research: Near Eastern archaeology, architecture, buildings archaeology and classical archaeology