A tower with nothing inside
About 25 ziggurats are known, spread fairly evenly across Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, in what is now Iraq. They all follow the same recipe. A core of mudbrick, that is, clay dried in the sun, rises in stages, each one smaller than the one below, and the whole mass is wrapped in a casing of fired brick. The base is usually square or rectangular, on average about 50 metres a side. Inside there is nothing at all: no chambers, no passages, just brick.
That is the main difference from the Egyptian pyramid, with which the ziggurat is always compared. A pyramid hides a burial chamber. A ziggurat was built to be climbed, at least by a few, and everything that mattered happened on the outside and at the top.
How did you get to the top?
By stairs or ramps on the outside. Some ziggurats had a triple stairway at the front, others a ramp that wound round the tower in a spiral; for almost half of the known ones, no way up has been found. At Ur, the best-known example, three long flights, one straight up the front and two along the façade, met at a gateway between the first and second terraces, and further stairs led higher.
At the summit stood the temple, small and closed. No summit temple survives on any ziggurat, so for what it looked like we depend on texts. In the fifth century BCE the Greek historian Herodotus described Babylon’s tower as eight towers built one on another, with a path spiralling round the outside and a resting place with seats halfway up. In the last one, he wrote, was a great shrine with a large, richly covered couch and a golden table beside it, and no statue at all.
Mud, fire and tar
Why build a holy mountain out of mud? Because southern Mesopotamia is a river delta, and clay was the material it had in abundance. Mudbrick is cheap and quick to make, but rain softens it, so the builders wrapped the core in fired brick, often laid in bitumen, a natural tar that seeps out of the ground in the region and works as a waterproof mortar.
Clay also brings problems that the builders learned to solve. At Ur, rows of narrow “weeper holes” pass through the fired-brick casing, so that rainwater soaking into the core can drain out instead of swelling the mud and bursting the skin. At Aqar Quf, west of Baghdad, a layer of reed matting runs through the mudbrick every seven courses to bind the mass together, like the steel mesh in a modern concrete slab.
Who went up, and why so high?
Not the crowd. The stairs led to a sanctuary for priests and officials, while the people of the city stayed below, in the courtyards of the temple precinct. The height did the rest. In a land without hills, a brick tower a few dozen metres high could be seen from far away, and it told everyone where the god lived.
The names say the same. Babylon’s ziggurat, Etemenanki, means “the house of the foundation of heaven and earth”, and a cuneiform tablet gives it a base about 91 metres a side and a height of about 91 metres. It stood beside the temple of Marduk, and it is the building most often linked with the Tower of Babel; UNESCO calls it the probable inspiration for the story.
Three ziggurats to know
Ur, in southern Iraq, was built around 2100 BCE by King Ur-Nammu and finished by his son Shulgi, for Nanna, the moon god of the city. Its base measures about 64 by 45 metres, and it may have stood around 30 metres high, though only the lower part survives. Leonard Woolley excavated it for the British Museum and the Penn Museum between 1922 and 1934; the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus had already rebuilt it in the sixth century BCE, some 1,500 years after it was raised.
Chogha Zanbil, in south-western Iran, was built around 1250 BCE by the Elamite king Untash-Napirisha as the heart of a new religious city, and dedicated to the gods Inshushinak and Napirisha. It is the largest ziggurat outside Mesopotamia: 105.2 metres a side, originally about 53 metres high in five levels, with a temple on top. Many of its fired bricks carry cuneiform inscriptions naming the gods. The city was never finished, and the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal destroyed it around 640 BCE.
The so-called White Temple at Uruk shows the idea before the classic ziggurat existed. Around 3500 BCE (dated c. 3517-3358 BCE), Uruk set a temple coated in white gypsum plaster on a terrace that was raised again and again until it stood about 12 metres high. The principle was already there: lift the god’s house above the first cities.
So, what is a ziggurat?
A platform, built solid, for a temple that only a few could reach. It was the tallest thing in a flat country, kept standing by constant repairs to its brick skin, and in Mesopotamia building one for the gods was also how a king showed his power. No ziggurat survives to its original height, but Ur and Chogha Zanbil still show the shape clearly.
Where to see it
The ziggurats are in Iraq and Iran. Ur, near Nasiriyah, is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Ahwar of Southern Iraq (2016), with Uruk and Eridu. Chogha Zanbil, on the UNESCO list since 1979, lies in Khuzestan, about 38 kilometres from Susa. Aqar Quf is on the western edge of Baghdad. Check your government’s travel advice before planning a visit. Objects from Woolley’s excavations at Ur are in the British Museum in London and the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ziggurat”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Tchogha Zanbil” (113); “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq” (1481); “Babylon” (278).
- Herodotus, Histories 1.181 (trans. Godley, Perseus).
- C. Leonard Woolley, “The Ziggurat of Ur” (1924); Ur Online (Penn Museum and British Museum).
- Uruk Visualisation Project (artefacts-berlin.de), “The White Temple”.
- The Esagila tablet (copy of 229 BCE), Paris, Louvre.
