Temples and Ziggurats
Facts about southern Iraq and Ancient Sumer
by James W. Bell © 2002-3
Ziggurats possibly owe their existence to early Sumerian temples being built on platforms. The land of Sumer was very flat and platforms would have raised the temples above the level of flood waters, keeping the temples dry when the rivers overflowed in the spring. For the picture of a temple built on a mud brick platform, click here.
One of the more famous temples on a platform was the ‘White Temple’ in the city of Uruk, dated to 3000 - 3200 BCE. For a photo of the excavated ruin of this temple, click here. For a picture of how the White Temple originally looked, click here.
As a mud brick temple aged, its walls would begin to crumble and, eventually, it would have to be rebuilt. When that happened, the old mud brick walls were pilled down and piled on top of the old foundation to form a higher platform for the new temple. As the platforms grew higher and higher, they became stepped.
Although ziggurats look like the ancient stepped pyramids of the Egyptians, they were never used as funerary structures. Instead, these monuments, crowned with temples or shrines, were intended to serve as stairways for gods ascending to or descending from heaven.
Architecturally, ziggurats measured about 60 meters long (200 feet) x 40 meters wide (130 feet), an area that would occupy about one third of a modern city block. In height, they varied, ranging as high as 21 meters (70 feet).
To see a photo of an unrestored ziggurat, click here.
To see a spectacular photo of the ruin of a ziggurat at Borsippa, click here.
To see a photo of the partially restored ziggurat at Ur, click here. To see a drawing depicting how the ziggurat at Ur might have originally looked, click here.
Sumerian ziggurats had four stages but later Babylonian and Assyrian ziggurats often had seven. For the picture of a seven-stepped ziggurat, as in the Biblical Tower of Babel, click here.
Go Back to the Fact Menu
| |
