By GEIR MOULSON
The Associated Press
Monday, February 27, 2006; 6:47 PM

BERLIN -- The road is now clear for a long-awaited restoration of the Pergamon Museum, after the government approved a budget for the project.

The neoclassical museum, home to such treasures as the Pergamon Altar and Babylon's Ishtar Gate, will gain a new wing during the overhaul, which will cost about $417 million and be financed by the federal government, Berlin officials said Monday.

With federal and state budgets tight, approval for the financing has been years in coming.

The new fourth wing, to be built across the entrance to the museum's massive courtyard, "will allow us to show all major cultures on a single level," said Klaus Dieter Lehmann, the head of Berlin's Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

"You will then have, on one level, everything from Mesopotamia, through Egypt, Greece, Rome and classical antiquity up to the Islamic era," Lehmann said at a news conference.

The Pergamon Museum drew nearly a million visitors last year, making it one of Berlin's most popular attractions. It remains unclear how long the restoration will take.

Opened in 1930, the museum was damaged during World War II, and bullet holes still pockmark its facades.

It is the best-known of the five museums on Berlin's Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The renovation is part of an ongoing $1.8 billion project to revamp the entire complex.

Pending approval of the plan, emergency work has been carried out in recent years to shore up the roof. Restorers also have tackled some of the museum's major art works.

The restored marble frieze of the second century B.C. Pergamon Altar was unveiled in 2004. More recently, officials have embarked on a plan to dismantle and remove much of the towering Roman Market Gate of Miletus for restoration.