For Purchasing The Lions of Babylon, visit the Osheq website here
This is part of a project by luxury scarf retailer OSHEQ, Dubai, UAE. I was commissioned to produce illustrations for 3different scarves, and I concentrated on the importance of Heritage in the Middle East by attributing a city of endangered heritage to each scarf. The scarf presented here is titled 'The Lions of Babylon', the other two scarves are 'The Guardian of Aleppo' and 'The Lights of Beirut' .
The Babylonians are most famous nowadays for the Tower of Babylon and their Hanging Gardens, both unrealized myths that most probably never existed as imagined nowadays. The jewel of Babylonian architecture, however, is non other than the Ishtar Gates and its processional way. Made of glazed blue bricks and depicting bulls, dragons, and lions, the gate was accounted for by ancient travelers as a shining structure that was seen from miles away. The gate stands tall as one of Ancient Iraq’s iconic representations of one of its most powerful civilizations. The lion, a symbol of the Ancient Near Eastern Goddess Ishtar, represented power, strength, and agility, and is depicted on this scarf as a universal symbol of Iraqi Heritage.