The first agricultural settlements in Mesopotamia appeared in the XVIII-XV centuries. Initially, the inhabitants of these places built small rectangular houses and sanctuaries from raw bricks. This building material became the main material for the cities of Mesopotamia for many centuries. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia also built their temples from clay. The temple, built of raw brick, towered in the center of any Sumerian city. The huts of the inhabitants were located around it, and the whole settlement was fenced off by a fortress wall.
Sumerian temples were erected on stone platforms, which later turned into high stepped temple towers - ziggurats. The ziggurat is a tall tower encircled by protruding terraces and gives the impression of several towers shrinking in volume, ledge by ledge. Ziggurats were built in three or four ledges, or even more - up to seven. This alternation was often emphasized by the coloring: for example, a ledge painted black was followed by another, natural brick color, and then a whitewashed one. The landscaping of the terraces, along with the coloring, made the whole structure bright and picturesque. The upper tower, to which a wide staircase led, was sometimes crowned with a gilded dome sparkling in the sun.
The ziggurats look like a staircase leading to the sky. Moreover, their ascent is gradual, measured. In this they differ sharply from the Egyptian pyramids that are rapidly flying up into the heavenly heights.
In the upper part of the ziggurat, the outer walls of which were sometimes covered with blue glazed bricks, there was a sanctuary. The people were not allowed there, and there was nothing but a bed and sometimes a gilded table: the sanctuary was the "dwelling of God" who rested in it at night, sometimes in the company of a chaste woman. At night, the priests climbed to the top of the ziggurat for astronomical observations, often associated with the calendar dates of agricultural work. It is believed that the signs of the zodiac, astrology, the names of many constellations - all this originates from here, from the peaks of the Sumerian ziggurats.
One of the most famous and largest ziggurats of Mesopotamia that have survived to this day is the ziggurat in Ur, an ancient city known as "Ur of the Chaldeans" or "Ur of the Chaldees". According to legend, the legendary biblical forefather Abraham was a native of Ur. This Sumerian city began to play an important role in the 3rd millennium BC.
The peak of Ur's power falls on 2112-2015 BC, when the city was ruled by the kings of the III dynasty. The founder of this dynasty, King Urnamu, became famous as a great builder. He did his best to make palaces and temples look like the might and grandeur of the city.
The patron saint of Ur was the moon god Nanna (the Babylonians called him Sin). In his honor, King Urnamu at the turn of the XXII-XXI centuries BC. built the famous ziggurat, which was not much different in size from the famous Tower of Babel.
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The three-stage ziggurat in Ur has survived to this day better than other similar structures in Mesopotamia. Its huge hill was first explored in the middle of the 19th century by the English consul in Basra D. E. Taylor. In the brickwork at the corners of the tower site, Taylor found cylinders of fired clay with cuneiform inscriptions telling about the history of the structure. These texts date back to the reign of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon (550 BC). They narrated that the tower, founded by King Urnamu and his son Shulga, remained unfinished. None of the subsequent kings completed the matter, and only Nabonidus restored the ziggurat and completed its construction.
By 1933, archaeologists managed to create the final version of the reconstruction of the ziggurat. In shape, it was a three-stage pyramid. Its base was made of raw bricks (inside the masonry, apparently, there remained the ruins of an older ziggurat of the 1st dynasty of the kings of Ur). Outside, the building was faced with fired bricks fastened with bituminous mortar. The surviving cladding reaches a thickness of 2.5 m. The lower tier is 60x45 m at the base and reaches 15 m in height. The upper tiers rested on it, each of which was smaller than the lower, so that they stood, as it were, on vast terraces with wider passages along the longitudinal walls and narrower along the transverse ones. On the upper tier was a small temple with the altar of the moon god Nann, in whose name this huge structure was erected.
Three wide and long staircases of one hundred steps each led to the top of the ziggurat on the east side, along which ritual processions moved during religious festivals. One staircase was located at right angles to the building, while the other two ran along the walls. Side stairs allowed access to all terraces on either side of the main one. The terraces of the ziggurat were of different colors: the lower one was black, the middle one was red, and the upper one was white. In the corners formed by the stairs, there were massive towers with flat roofs.
When archaeologists began to plan and measure the walls of the ziggurat, it suddenly turned out that the measurements for some reason did not match. It was only later discovered that there was not a single straight line in the whole building! What scientists initially took for straight lines were actually carefully calculated curves. The walls weren't just tilted inward: the entire line from the top to the ground was slightly curved. And the line from corner to corner in the plan also protrudes noticeably forward, so if you look along the wall, you can see no further than its middle. The ancient architect used the law of optical illusion, which many centuries later brilliantly applied the Greek builders of the Athenian Parthenon. The distortions are very slight, almost imperceptible, but at the same time they are quite enough to give the impression of power there,where a straight line, in contrast to the mass of the entire building, would appear weak and even uneven. Knowledge of such subtleties testifies to the high art of the Sumerian builders.
Indeed, the ziggurat in Ur is a true architectural masterpiece! How much easier it would be to stack brick rectangles on top of each other, but then the building would look ugly and unstable. Instead, the builders carefully calculated the height of the various floors and tilted the walls so that the gaze immediately turned up and towards the center of the structure. The sharper lines of the triple staircase emphasize the slope of the walls and, crossing the horizontal planes of the terraces, draw attention to the temple located at the top - the focal point of the entire building.
High and narrow slots are made in the brickwork of the walls. They are arranged in several rows at equal distances from each other. The slots go deep into the thickness of the walls made of raw bricks. Outside, where they go through the cladding of fired bricks, the slots are not filled with anything, but are deeper covered with clay shards. These are drainage holes designed to drain the interior of the structure. But how did the moisture penetrate the base of the building? During its construction? Of course, there was enough moisture in the clay mortar on which the raw brick was laid, but during the work, due to the huge construction area, it had to evaporate: by the time the builders began to lay the next layer of bricks, the previous one had completely dried out. Besides,the terraces were paved in several layers with fired bricks on bitumen mortar. There was no way water could seep through it and damage the lower masonry. So drainage holes were clearly redundant. Why were they needed?
Studying the ruins of the ziggurat, archaeologists noticed that at each edge of the tower in the brickwork of one of the buttresses there was a deep groove starting at the top and ending at the very ground with a special device called an apron in construction equipment. It is a brick slope covered with bitumen for waterproofing and calculated in such a way that the water falling from above flows down silently and without splashing. Hence, there was water on the terrace! But from where?
At the entrance to one of the rooms located at the rear wall of the tower, scientists found a large diorite slab with an inscription from the time of King Nabonidus. It reported that the king had restored the building and cleared the "Gigparka" from the blockage of branches. "Gigparku" was part of the temple ensemble dedicated to the goddess of the moon. It was located at the southeastern wall of the ziggurat. How did this building turn out to be littered with branches? Trees could have grown in the Gigparku itself, but since most of the building was covered, this is unlikely. The only place from which branches could fall here is the ziggurat.
This explains the need for drainage holes. The terraces of the stepped tower of King Urnamu were not covered with brickwork - on them lay the ground on which the trees grew. This is where the idea of Babylon's famous Hanging Gardens came from! Long gutters in the buttresses were intended to drain rain streams, but at the same time they could also serve to irrigate terraces. It was precisely due to the need for irrigation that moisture penetrated into the base of the building, and it was removed through the drainage holes. The water that was poured over the trees seeped through the soil, moistened the adobe bricks, and if the moisture were not removed, it could seriously threaten the entire building.
If we imagine these terraces, all overgrown with trees, these green hanging gardens, then we will clearly understand where the original idea of the ziggurat as the mountain of God comes from. The sloping walls of the terraces rose like the slopes of a forested rock.
The total height of the "Mountain of God", on the top of which the temple of Nann stood, exceeded 53 m. During the reign of King Nabonidus, the ziggurat was rebuilt, instead of three, it became seven-tiered and was very similar to the Babel Tower of the same period described by Herodotus. However, it has not survived to this day, so today, to present it, it is enough to recall the appearance of the ziggurat in Ur. Despite the fact that the ziggurat was crumbling and damaged from time to time, its high hill still makes a huge impression on tourists.