Crimson & Indigo & Beige

Crimson is the Babylonian brick — the deep vivid crimson of the most ancient kiln-fired Mesopotamian construction. Babylonian brick: the kiln-fired brick (the most immediately important and the most comprehensively used construction material in the ancient Mesopotamian world — fired in the most specifically designed kiln at temperatures of approximately 900-1000°C — producing the most immediately durable and the most architecturally specific construction unit of the most important Babylonian building projects — the specific deep vivid orange-to-crimson of the most perfectly fired Babylonian brick being simultaneously the most immediately visually striking and the most comprehensively architecturally important color element of the ancient Mesopotamian city) is the most specifically and the most immediately archaeologically recoverable of all the ancient Babylonian construction materials — the most perfectly preserved kiln-fired bricks from the most important Babylonian building projects — particularly the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way of ancient Babylon — bearing the most specifically stamped and the most immediately individually identifiable royal inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BCE — the most immediately famous and the most comprehensively powerful of all the Neo-Babylonian rulers — who rebuilt the most important portions of ancient Babylon into the most impressive ancient Near Eastern city of the 6th century BCE). Indigo is the Ishtar Gate — the very deep indigo of the most famous Babylonian lapis-glazed monument. The Ishtar Gate: the Ishtar Gate (the most immediately internationally famous ancient Mesopotamian architectural monument — one of the most immediately impressive surviving examples of ancient Near Eastern public architecture — constructed by Nebuchadnezzar II — approximately 575 BCE — as the most dramatically ceremonial entrance to the ancient city of Babylon — decorated with the most elaborately molded and the most immediately impressively colored glazed brick reliefs of: the most characteristic dragon — mušḫuššu — the most specifically Babylonian mythological animal — associated with the most important Babylonian deity Marduk; the most immediately dramatically modeled aurochs — the sacred animal of the storm deity Adad; and the most elaborately designed lion — the symbol of Ishtar herself — the most immediately famous and the most comprehensively powerful goddess of the most important Babylonian pantheon — simultaneously the goddess of love, beauty, sex, desire, fertility, war, combat, and death) is now partially reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum Berlin — the most immediately impressive and the most comprehensively archaeological-monument-housing of any European museum — with the most important glazed brick wall sections displaying the most beautifully preserved and the most immediately internationally famous example of lapis-lazuli-frit-glazed ancient Near Eastern ceramic art. Beige is the clay tablet — the warm pale beige of the most ancient writing surface. The cuneiform tablet: the clay tablet (the most immediately available and the most comprehensively practically useful of all the ancient Near Eastern writing materials — the most specifically Mesopotamian and the most immediately archaeologically abundant of all the ancient Near Eastern material culture artifacts — the sun-dried or kiln-fired clay tablet inscribed with the most specifically wedge-shaped cuneiform script — from Latin: cuneus — 'wedge' — the most comprehensively and the most immediately practically useful writing system of the ancient Near East — used from approximately 3400 BCE through approximately 100 CE — a period of more than 3,500 years of continuous use — the most immediately widely adopted and the most comprehensively geographically distributed writing system of the ancient Near East — used for the most important Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, and Ugaritic languages) is the most immediately archaeologically abundant and the most comprehensively informationally dense of all the surviving ancient Near Eastern material culture objects — with the most important archives: the Ebla archive (Syria — approximately 17,000 tablets — approximately 2300 BCE), the Nippur archive (Iraq — approximately 30,000 tablets), and the Tell el-Amarna archive (Egypt — approximately 380 tablets — the Amarna letters — the most immediately internationally famous collection of ancient Near Eastern diplomatic correspondence — approximately 1360-1332 BCE — the most specifically fascinating and the most immediately diplomatically important letters in ancient Near Eastern history).