Babylon's bright-blue Ishtar Gate was thought to have been built to celebrate the conquest of Jerusalem — but a new analysis finds that it may have been erected years later.The Live Science article seems to assume, and the Plos One article to hint, that specialists thought that the Ishtar Gate was built to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II. I try to keep up with the archaeology of ancient Babylon, but this question is outside my expertise. Still, I have never seen anyone propose this before and Nebuchadnezzar's dedicatory inscription on the gate (which you can read in translation here) says nothing about the conquest of Jerusalem. But apparently the connection has been suggested.[...]
Be that as it may, the key points of interest from this project are (1) the relatively precise dating this new technique provides and (2) that it can work on architectual elements such as mud brick (and, in the case of Jerusalem, floor tiles).
The conclusions are that the Ishtar Gate was built well after the destruction of Jerusalem and that the whole gate was built more or less at the same time, not in stages over a substantial length of time. These are more fine-grained results than we could get from C-14 dating.
There is a recent book on the Ishtar Gate of Babylon by Helen Gries.
For the use of archaeomagnetic dating to anchor the date of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, see here, here, and here.
Many PaleoJudaica posts on ancient Babylon are collected here.
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