The Ziggurat of Ur

The story

A mountain of bricks on the plain

Anyone arriving at Ur, four thousand years ago, saw from afar something unlike anything else on the flat plain of Mesopotamia: a terraced tower, dark at the base and pale at the top, with three staircases that met halfway up and then climbed together to a small temple at the summit. This was the ziggurat of Ur, which King Ur-Nammu had begun (his son Shulgi completed it) and dedicated to the Moon god Nanna, lord of the city. Its Sumerian name, Etemennigur, is usually translated as “house whose foundation makes the earth tremble”.

The word “ziggurat” comes from the Akkadian ziqqurratu and means “peak, summit”: it was an artificial mountain. The Mesopotamian plain has no mountains, and it is thought that these buildings recalled the mountains where, according to tradition, the gods lived. The higher the temple, the closer the sky.

What it was like

Ur-Nammu reigned from about 2112 to 2095 BC and was the founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, when the cities of the south were united again after the fall of the Akkadian Empire. He had temples built or rebuilt all over the country, and the ziggurat of Ur is the most important of his works. Its core was a block of mud brick, perhaps thirty metres high, with a rectangular base of about 64 by 45 metres. On the outside, to protect it from rain and sun, it was covered with a thick layer of fired bricks joined with bitumen. It is calculated that there were hundreds of thousands of fired bricks, and many carry the stamp with the king's name.

Holes were left in the wall to let out water that seeped in from the wall. Three staircases, each of a hundred steps, started from the base and met at a gateway halfway up, then climbed together to a high terrace. On top, a little shrine housed the god. Scholars think three levels followed one another, but they cannot say for certain what the top was like, because it has been lost.

A house for the god, not a church

Understanding what a ziggurat was for is not easy, because today we think of temples as places where the faithful gather. It was not so. The ziggurat was the god's house, not a place for everyone. Ordinary people were forbidden to climb it. Only priests could reach the top, to bring offerings, look after the statue and perform ceremonies. The faithful stopped at the base, in the courtyard, where there were storehouses, kitchens and workshops. The temple owned fields and flocks, gave work to hundreds of people and handed out rations. It was, at the same time, a religious place and a business.

The surprises of archaeology

The ziggurat of Ur was identified as early as 1853–1854 by an English consul, John Taylor, who found clay cylinders there with cuneiform writing. But it was Leonard Woolley, between 1922 and 1934, who dug it and worked out how it was built. In the courtyard next to it he found the remains of a building that seems to be a small museum: a collection of older objects with labels in three languages, from the time of the princess Ennigaldi-Nanna, daughter of the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus (6th century BC). If Woolley's interpretation is right, it is the oldest known museum. However, some scholars regard it as uncertain.

In the 1980s the Iraqi government rebuilt the lower part and the central staircase, so that today you can see in part what it was like. In 2021 Pope Francis held a meeting there with representatives of the religions, because according to the biblical tradition Ur is the city of Abraham (Ur of the Chaldees). This identification is traditional, not proven.

Ziggurats and the Tower of Babel

Ur was not the only one. More than twenty are known in Mesopotamia and Iran, among them the Etemenanki of Babylon, the tower that some scholars link to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The one at Ur, however, is the best preserved and the best known. After Ur-Nammu it was restored several times, until Nabonidus, in the 6th century BC; then the Euphrates changed course, the city lost its water and trade, and was abandoned.