Three stairways, one door
Walk up to the front and the design does the talking. One stairway climbs straight up the middle; two more run along the face from either side. All three meet at a gateway between the first and second terraces, and from there a single route went on upwards. Whatever the three flights meant, and nobody knows for sure, they turn a climb into a ceremony: every approach is funnelled to one point.
Most people probably never made that climb. A ziggurat is a solid stepped platform with no rooms inside, built to lift the god’s house, a small temple at the top, above the city. The shrine was for Nanna, his priests and the king. Everyone else watched from the courtyards below. That top temple has gone, and its exact form is unknown.
A mountain for the moon
Southern Mesopotamia is pancake-flat, so the people of Ur built their mountain out of brick. Around 2100 BCE, Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, began the platform, and his son Shulgi probably finished it. It rose at the heart of the city’s sacred precinct, among temples, courtyards and storerooms, and could be seen far across the plain.
Nanna, also called Sin, ruled the moon and with it the calendar, so his temple sat at the centre of the city’s year. The idea of raising a temple on a platform was already more than a thousand years old, as Uruk’s raised temples show; at Ur it reached a new scale and a regular, stepped shape.
How it was built to last
Mudbrick is cheap, quick and a good insulator, but rain turns it back into mud. The builders answered with layers. The core is sun-dried mudbrick; the thick outer skin is fired brick laid in bitumen, a natural tar that works as waterproof mortar. Narrow slots called weeper holes run through the casing so that water soaking into the core could drain out instead of swelling it. It works like a raincoat with vents.
The walls also hide a subtler trick. Leonard Woolley, who excavated Ur, noticed that no line on the ziggurat is truly straight: the faces bulge very slightly, so that a long wall doesn’t look as if it sags. Greek architects did the same on the Parthenon more than 1,500 years later, under the name entasis. Shallow buttresses run up the walls, and bricks stamped with Ur-Nammu’s name sign the work.
Four thousand years of repairs
About 1,500 years after Ur-Nammu, the Babylonian king Nabonidus restored the ziggurat in the sixth century BCE and left inscriptions naming its first builder. Afterwards wind and rain wore down the upper stages and sand buried the base. Woolley worked out its plan in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the later twentieth century the façade of the lower stage and the stairways were rebuilt to stabilise and display it.
So what you see is a mix. The core and much of the lower stage are ancient; the crisp outer face and the stairs are largely modern. The original height, about 30 m, is an estimate, because only the bottom of the building survives. The same city also gave us the treasures of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, buried a few centuries earlier. For the bigger picture of Mesopotamian building, Ur is the place to start.
Visiting Ur
The ziggurat stands at Tell el-Muqayyar, near Nasiriyah in Dhi Qar province, southern Iraq. Since 2016 it has been part of the UNESCO site “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq”, together with Uruk and Eridu. Travel conditions in the region change, so check current official advice before planning a trip.
Sources
- C. L. Woolley, Ur Excavations V: The Ziggurat and its Surroundings (1939).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, “Ur: The Ziggurat” (2002).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq: Refuge of Biodiversity and the Relict Landscape of the Mesopotamian Cities” (2016).
