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Ziggurats:
Temple Platforms of Ancient Mesopotamia
By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin
Most religions
have attempted to build their sanctuaries on prominent heights.
Since no such natural heights were available in the flat flood plains
of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), ancient priests and kings determined
to build ziggurats (Akkadian ziqqurratu), square or rectangular
artificial stepped temple platforms. Functionally, temples were
placed on raised platforms to give them prominence over other buildings
in a city, and to allow more people to watch the services performed
at the temple. Symbolically, however, the ziggurat represents the
cosmic mountain on which the gods dwell. The priest’s ascent
up the stairway to the temple at the top of the ziggurat represents
the ascent to heaven. The great ziggurat at Khorsabad, for example,
had seven different stages; each was painted a different color and
represented the five known planets, the moon, and the sun.
Ziggurat
of Ur-nammu
Although
the specific architectural details of ziggurats differ, they all
exhibit a similar overall structure. A courtyard surrounded by a
sacred enclosure wall—as large as 500 yards square—generally
encompassed the ziggurat, creating a ritual plaza for religious
ceremonies. Ziggurat complexes often included storehouses, residences
for priests and kings, and altars for sacrifice. The huge stepped
temple mound—often as long as a football field and generally
oriented to the cardinal directions—occupied a prominent place
in the courtyard. Ascent of the platforms was often restricted to
the priests, and was achieved by climbing vast stairways, some stretching
out perpendicular to the platform, with others attached to the walls
or spiraling around the platform. The top of the ziggurat was crowned
by a temple containing the statue of the god, and representing his
or her home. Ziggurats thus provided the link between heaven and
earth, allowing humans to ascend, ritually, into the presence of
God. (In this regard, Jacob’s vision of the “ladder”
or, better, “stairway” into heaven [Gen. 28:10-22] matches
the symbolism of the ziggurat.) In Babylon, the largest ziggurat
was the Etemenanki (“the house that is the foundation of heaven
and earth”), with a square base almost 100 yards on each side.
Priests and artisans of Mesopotamia provided their temple and ziggurat
complexes with fantastic ornamentation. Twenty-two tons of gold
were said to have been used in the ornamentation of the temple of
Marduk alone.
Although the
building of ziggurats declined following Alexander’s conquest
of Mesopotamia, the significance of these temple complexes lived
on in the religious imagination for the next two thousand years.
Berosus, a Babylonian scholar of the third century B.C., described
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as one of the wonders of the world.
He claimed the Hanging Gardens were a type of pleasure palace and
garden built by king Nebuchadnezzar for his wife Amuita; the gardens
were probably part of a ziggurat complex, intended to represent
the celestial garden of the gods which surrounds the mountain on
which the gods dwell.
Building temples on raised
platforms is a widespread phenomenon in world religious architecture.
Functionally and architecturally, however, the closest parallels
to the Mesopotamian ziggurat come from the stepped temple mounds
of pre-Columbian America. In Mesoamerica, these are most strikingly
preserved at the temples of the Maya and Aztecs, but the phenomenon
dates back at least to the late second millennium B.C. (as found
in Olmec examples at La Venta and San Lorenzo).
When the Arabs
conquered Mesopotamia in the seventh century A.D., the crumbling,
abandoned ruins of the ziggurats may have been the architectural
inspiration for the building of the great minaret of Samarra (near
Baghdad) in the ninth century:
This huge tapering tower is surrounded by an outside spiral corkscrew
staircase to the top. Seeing this minaret, medieval Europeans mistook
it for the biblical Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9), and as such it
lent its form to medieval and Renaissance representations of the
Tower, as in the famous Tower of Babel by Brueghel (1563):
And, indirectly, these depictions may not have been entirely mistaken.
Many scholars believe that the story of the Tower of Babel may describe
the building of a ziggurat, a tower which does not literally ascend
into the physical sky, but which ritually allows the priests to
ascend the heavens to the presence of the gods in the temple at
its top.
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