Temple of Inanna at Uruk: What Remains and What We Know

The house of heaven

Inanna was the Sumerian goddess of love and war, later merged with the Akkadian Ishtar. Her precinct at Uruk was called E-anna, “House of Heaven”, and for the people of southern Mesopotamia it was one of the holiest places on earth. Uruk itself, today the ruin field of Warka, grew in the fourth millennium BCE into one of the first true cities, home to tens of thousands of people.

Its fame lasted. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written down more than a thousand years later, opens by inviting the reader to climb Uruk’s walls and look at the Eanna, Ishtar’s dwelling, as proof of the city’s greatness.

Temples stacked like pages

Mesopotamian builders rarely cleared a sacred site. When a temple grew old, they filled it in, levelled it and built the next one on top, so the Eanna is a stack of buildings, with the oldest at the bottom. Archaeologists number the layers from the top down, which is why the most famous phase, Eanna IV, is older than Eanna III.

Some of those buildings were enormous for their time. The so-called Limestone Temple, from the later fourth millennium BCE, stood on a foundation of limestone, rare in a land of clay, and covered an area of about 30 by 80 m. Nearby rose courtyards, halls and a hall of columns, laid out on the same tripartite plan as many later temples: a long central room flanked by smaller rooms on both sides.

Walls studded with painted cones

Stone was scarce, so Uruk’s builders found another way to make walls hard and colourful. They made thousands of small cones of baked clay or stone, coloured their flat heads red, black or white, and pushed them point first into wet plaster, like nails into a wall. Seen from a distance, the heads form zigzags, lozenges and triangles. The cone mosaics covered walls and the round columns of a great hall, and they also shielded the mudbrick from rain and wear.

Accounts before poetry

The Eanna was more than a place of worship. Inanna’s temple owned fields, herds and workshops, and someone had to keep track of what came in and what went out. Thousands of clay tablets from the precinct, from the end of the fourth millennium BCE, record rations of grain, beer, animals and workers. They are among the earliest writing anywhere, and they are mostly accounts; literature was written down centuries later.

The precinct also shows what the goddess received. The Warka Vase, an alabaster vessel about 1 m high from around 3200 to 3000 BCE, was found there in 1933 to 1934. Its bands of relief climb from water and crops to animals, to a line of naked men carrying baskets and jars, up to a figure facing the goddess at the top. It was stolen from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad during the looting of April 2003 and handed back, damaged, on 12 June 2003. Worshippers also left statues of themselves with wide, staring eyes, and the precinct produced one of the earliest life-size faces in art, the Mask of Warka.

A façade of gods in moulded brick

The best-preserved piece of Inanna’s temples is much later and stands in Berlin. Around 1413 BCE the Kassite king Karaindash, a ruler of a dynasty from outside Mesopotamia that had taken over Babylonia, built a new temple to Inanna in the Eanna. Its outer wall was made of moulded fired bricks, about 500 of them, which together form gods and goddesses standing in niches. Each holds a vessel from which streams of water pour down, a sign of the fertility the goddess guaranteed. Reassembled in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, the façade is just over 2 m high.

Where to see it

German teams began excavating Uruk in 1912 and returned in 1928; work has continued, with breaks, ever since. Uruk is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq” (2016), together with Ur and Eridu. On site you can trace walls, platforms and scattered cones among low mounds of mudbrick. The Warka Vase is in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The Karaindash façade and cone mosaic columns are in Berlin, in the part of the Pergamonmuseum closed for renovation, so check before you plan a visit.

Sources

• Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum, “Façade of the Inanna temple of Karaindash” and “Uruk: 5000 Years of the Megacity” (2013).
• Uruk Visualisation Project (artefacts-berlin.de), “Eanna”.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Cone mosaic”; Heilbrunn Timeline, “Uruk: The First City”.
• A. R. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin, 1999), Tablet I.
• German Archaeological Institute (DAI), “Uruk-Warka”.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq” (2016).