Robert Koldewey

Robert Koldewey (1855–1925) was a German architect and archaeologist who directed the excavation of Babylon for the German Oriental Society from 1899 to 1917, working through summer and winter with two hundred men. He uncovered the Ishtar Gate with its enameled bulls and dragons, the Procession Street, the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar and the foundations of the ziggurat Etemenanki, and he developed methods for tracing walls of unbaked mud brick that transformed Near Eastern archaeology. He had earlier dug at Assos, on Lesbos and in southern Mesopotamia. His account of the work, The Excavations at Babylon, appeared in English in 1914.