Published : December 2021

Highlights

• German excavator Robert Koldewey thought Babylon’s dragon was related to dinosaurs.

• Babylon’s dragon appeared in foundational cryptozoology work about living dinosaurs.

• Koldewey’s Germany was gripped by dinomania; dinosaurs came alive in visual culture.

• The reception of ideas is unpredictable; some ideas become canonised on the fringe.

In 1918, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, excavator of Babylon, Iraq, observed that the depiction of the fantastical “dragon of Babylon” on the sixth century BCE Ishtar Gate must reference a real animal whose closest relatives would be dinosaurs like the iguanodon.

Though ignored within archaeology, Koldewey’s comments were taken up in German-American popular science writer Willy Ley’s “romantic zoology” (1941), then by Bernard Heuvelmans (1955), founding figure in the fringe field of cryptozoology.

Their interpretations would ultimately inspire expeditions by the International Society of Cryptozoologists in Central Africa to find the Mokele-Mbembe, a “living dinosaur,” and migrate into Young Earth Creationist and ancient aliens theories.

An analysis of Koldewey’s marginal academic observation serves as a means of considering the process of knowledge formation and canonization and the unpredictable life of scholarly ideas.