The Shamash Gate is one of the most impressive of Nineveh's reconstructed city gates, located on the eastern wall of the ancient city. Shamash, the sun god, was one of the most important deities in the Assyrian pantheon, and his gate was one of the principal entrances to the inner city.
The reconstruction, carried out in the 1960s and later, gives a tangible sense of the monumentality of ancient Nineveh's defences. The walls themselves, some sections of which survive as earthen ramparts several metres high, once stretched for twelve kilometres around the city. Walking along the surviving wall sections near the Shamash Gate, with the Tigris plains stretching out to the west, provides one of the better opportunities to appreciate the scale of what Sennacherib built here.