Balawat Gate
“Be still, O inhabitants of the coast; the merchants of Sidon, who cross the sea, have filled you…..Who has purposed this against Tyre, the bestower of crowns, whose merchants were princes, whose traders were the honored of the earth?”
Isaiah 23:2-8
We spent this week in Baltimore and were excited to visit the Walter’s Museum of Art. (We’ll skip the part where I drove the wrong way down a one way street in front of the museum). One of the many galleries here holds items from the ancient Near East. We especially wanted to see their pieces of the bronze bands of the Assyrian Balawat Gates.
The Balawat Gates were massive wooden doors with engraved bronze bands at a temple near Ninevah. They date from around 860 BC, at the time of Ashirnasirpal and Shalmanezzer III. The pieces at the Walter’s depict merchants from Tyre and Sidon carrying tributes to Assyrian military camps. The Bible speaks of the merchants of Tyre and Sidon and their renown for dealing in goods from all over the known world.
Generations of Assyrian Kings harassed the Levant, including Judea and the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Assyria often took heavy tribute from the rich Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon rather than conquering and deporting them as they did to the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the late 700s BC.
The gate bands held in other museums around the world even show Phoenician harbor service ships bringing goods for the Assyrian Kings. The bands at the Walter’s have an inscription in cuneiform Akkadian labeling the goods as from Tyre and Sidon.
The Balawat gate bands are one example, of many hundreds, where archeological studies demonstrate the accuracy of the Bible and its account of life in the levant in the Old Testament era.
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The Walter’s Art Museum, Baltimore Maryland
