The ziggurats
Stepped temple platforms rise over Mesopotamian cities as artificial mountains.
- When
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
The great ziggurat of Ur, built under Ur-Nammu around 2100 BCE, is a solid mass of mudbrick faced in baked brick set in bitumen, rising in terraces to a shrine at the top. Ziggurats are not temples that people enter but platforms that lift the god's house above the flat alluvium. The form persists for nearly two thousand years, and the ziggurat of Babylon is the likely origin of the Tower of Babel story.