Template:Ziggurat

Ziggurat: a multi-storied temple tower from ancient Mesopotamia.

Ziggurats are, architecturally, the Mesopotamian equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids: large artificial square mountains of stone. They are equally ancient. But there are two differences: a ziggurat was not a tomb but a temple, and ziggurats were built well into the Seleucid age, whereas the building of pyramids came to an end after c.1640 BCE. Ziggurats are, briefly, temple towers.

Our word ziggurat is derived from ziqqurratu, which can be translated as "rising building" (Akkadian zaqâru, "to rise high"). Some of them rose very high indeed. The temple tower known as Etemenanki (the House of the foundation of heaven on earth) in Babylon was 92 meters high. Even larger was the shrine of the god Anu at Uruk, built in the third or second century BCE. The best preserved temple tower is at Choga Zanbil in Elam, modern Khuzestan in Iran.

Ziggurats played a role in the cults of many cities in ancient Mesopotamia. Archaeologists have discovered nineteen of these buildings in sixteen cities; the existence of another ten is known from literary sources.

They were always built by kings. In third millennium BCE Mesopotamia, there was a conflict between the two great organizations, the temple and the palace. By building ziggurats, the king showed that he could perform more impressive religious deeds than the priesthood.

The most famous ziggurat is, of course, the "tower of Babel" mentioned in the Biblical book Genesis: a description of the Etemenanki of Babylon. According to the Babylonian creation epic Enûma êliš the god Marduk defended the other gods against the diabolical monster Tiamat. After he had killed her, he brought order to the cosmos, built the Esagila sanctuary, which was the center of the new world, and created humankind. The Etemenanki was next to the Esagila, and this means that the temple tower was erected at the center of the world, as the axis of the universe. Here, a straight line connected earth and heaven. This aspect of Babylonian cosmology is echoed in the Biblical story, where the builders say "let us build a tower whose top may reach unto heaven". [2]

• Rawlinson states, the ziggurat was likely built during the same time period as the Tower Of Babel, and while the tower had 8 stages, the ziggurat was in 7 stages where each stage was dedicated to a planet and had a different color thusly:
  • Stage 1: Height: 26feet Color: Black Planet: Saturn
  • Stage 2: Height: 26feet Color: Red-Brown Planet: Jupiter
  • Stage 3: Height: 26feet Color: Red Planet: Mars
  • Stage 4: Height: 26feet Color: Gold Planet: Sun
  • Stage 5: Height: 15feet Color: Yellow Planet: Venus
  • Stage 6: Height: 15feet Color: Blue Planet: Mercury
  • Stage 7: Height: 15feet Color: Silver Planet: Moon
  • Total height: ~150 feet
• Budge estimates the existance of Babylon as approximately fifth or fourth millennium before Christ and it's final decay in the time of the persian king, 538-331 BC. Excluding references in religious text, no one seems to know who built or named Babylon, or exactly who initiated or when the ziggurat was erected. Babylonian Life and History, E.A. Wallis Budge [3]

• Planetary Spheres

At Borsippa, close to Babylon, there was a very ancient terraced temple or Ziggurat; it was restored by Nebuchadnezzar, and an inscription of his is preserved, which says: 'I have repaired and perfected the marvel of Borsippa, the temple of the seven spheres of the world. I have erected it in bricks which I have covered with copper. I have covered with zones, alternately of marble and other precious stones, the sanctuary of God.' Rawlinson writes: 'The ornamentation of the edifice was chiefly by means of colour. The seven stages represented the seven spheres, in which moved, according to ancient Chaldean astronomy, the seven planets. To each planet fancy, partly grounding itself upon fact, had from of old assigned a peculiar tint or hue. The sun was golden; the moon, silver; the distant Saturn, almost beyond the region of light, was black; Jupiter was orange (the foundation for this colour, as for that of Mars and Venus, was probably the actual hue of the planet); the fiery Mars was red; Venus was a pale Naples yellow; Mercury, a deep blue. The seven stages of the tower-like walls of Ecbatana gave a visible embodiment to these fancies. The basement stage, assigned to Saturn, was blackened by means of a coating of bitumen spread over the face of the masonry; the second stage, assigned to Jupiter, obtained the appropriate orange colour by means of a facing of burned bricks of that hue; the third stage, that of Mars, was made blood-red by the use of half-burned bricks formed of a red clay; the fourth stage, assigned to the Sun, appears to have been actually covered with thin plates of gold; the fifth, the stage of Venus, received a pale yellow tint from the employment of bricks of that colour; the sixth, the sphere of Mercury, was given an azure tint by vitrifaction, the whole stage having been subjected to an intense heat after it was erected, whereby the bricks composing it were converted into a mass of blue slag; the seventh stage, that of the Moon, was probably, like the fourth, coated with actual plates of metal. Thus the building rose up in stripes of varied colour, arranged almost as Nature's cunning arranges the hues of the rainbow—tones of red coming first, succeeded by a broad stripe of yellow, the yellow being followed by blue. Above this the glowing silvery summit melted into the bright sheen of the sky' (Ancient Monarchies). The order in which the stages encircled one another spreading outwards to the base, represented in correct sequence the orbits of the planets, as was supposed, around the earth ( or did they also knew/assumed that we live in a geocentric world opposed to the heliocentric model theory ). The small orbit of the moon at the top; the sun taking the place of the earth, as it appears to journey through the twelve signs of the year; and Saturn last of all. Generally, however, as in the walls of Ecbatana, the sun and moon lead the planets in the order of the days of the week. The order in which the days of the week are named after the planets, Mr Proctor says, is obtained in the following manner. If all the hours throughout the week are dedicated to the planets in the sequence of their observed distances—Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon—then beginning with Saturday the planet which rules the first hour of the next day will be the Sun, and of the next the Moon, and so on for all the days of the week. This explanation takes for granted that the days were divided into twenty-four parts before the seven days were named after the planets. - Planetary Spheres CHAPTER VI, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, by W.R. Lethaby, [1892]

• List all 48?
  • Notable ziggurats include the Great Ziggurat of Ur near Nasiriyah, Iraq; the Ziggurat of Aqar Quf near Baghdad, Iraq; Chogha Zanbil in Khūzestān, Iran; Sialk near Kashan, Iran.
  • The Sialk Ziggurat [4]
  • list of ziggurats [][][][5][6]
  • Function of the Ziggurats

• 

  Ziggurat of Ur

• 

  Ziggurat of Ur before reconstruction

• 

  Ziggurat Ur reconstructed

• 

  Ziggurat detail of staircase

• 

  Ancient ziggurat at Ali Air Base Iraq

• 

  Marduk's Temple in Babylon: Also called the Esagila, the temple of Marduk was, after the Ziggurat and the royal Palace, the greatest of the architectural complexes of Babylon. [1]