KOLDEWEY, ROBERT

(1855–1925)

German archaeologist, architect, and art historian. Like Walter Andrae in Assur, he worked on behalf of the Berlin (later Pergamon) Museum and was given sole responsibility for the excavation of Babylon, conducted from 1899 to 1917. There he put his architectural training and earlier experiences of participating at excavations in Greece, Italy, Turkey, and Iraq to good use and pioneered the methods of tracing the often disintegrated remains of mudbrick walls, the main building material in lower Mesopotamia, and their superimposed layers of habitation. His discoveries include the Processional Way and the Ishtar-Gate. He published his results in two books (Die Tempel von Babylon und Borsippa, 1911; Das wiedererstehende Babylon, 1913).