Ziggurats in Mesopotamia

Like the pyramids of Egypt,the towers called “ziggurats”built in ancient Mesopotamia were monumental symbols of a great civilization.Ziggurats consisted of several levels or platforms of diminishing sizes with exterior stairways or ramps leading to their summits.New platforms were built on top of older ones over many centuries,leaving earlier stages buried under later enlargements.The Egyptian pyramids,however,were never meant to be climbed,and new pyramids were not built over the remains of older ones.

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Unlike in Egypt,there was no stone for building projects in Mesopotamia,but mud-available everywhere-was used to produce bricks.Despite the availability of this cheap building material, ziggurats were always considerably smaller than pyramids,possibly due to a lack of manpower and wealth.The central core of most ziggurats consisted of unbaked,sun-dried bricks covered with a thick outer shell of baked bricks.Water occasionally leaked into the interior of a ziggurat,causing its unbaked core to expand and crumble.All kings of Mesopotamia had to face the constant task of rebuilding mud-brick structures;ziggurats,as well as other structures,rarely lasted a century without major renovation.

Why,then,were ziggurats not built entirely out of baked bricks instead of just their exterior walls?If they had been,they could have withstood the ravages of time,and their kings would not have been obliged to repair them every few years.As is so often the case, environmental factors may have dictated the quantity of burnt mud bricks used in large structures.There were very few trees in Mesopotamia,and the Mesopotamians lacked the necessary fuel to bake the millions of bricks required for large structures.Most of the wood and straw fuel available was used for cooking fires in private homes and could not be spared for brick-making.Another factor that contributed to the demise of ziggurats was the size of the bricks used to make them.Mud bricks are smaller and lighter than the great stones used in pyramid construction and,long after they were abandoned,peasants in search of easily available building material found ziggurats to be a convenient source of bricks for constructing houses and other domestic buildings.

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The purpose of Egyptian pyramids is clear:they were tombs for their deceased kings.But if ziggurats were not tombs,then what was their purpose?Early explorers naively thought that they were used by Mesopotamian priests to escape the mosquitoes.Some maintain that the first small ziggurats were simply raised platforms where the village grain supply could be kept dry during the annual flood.As early as the fourth millennium B.c.,temples were built on raised earth and mud-brick mounds,and ziggurats may have been a further development of this type of construction.The most widely accepted explanation is that ziggurats were meant to be climbed.Ziggurats always had several stairways leading to their summits,and it seems clear that their primary purpose was to elevate the priests closer to the realm of the gods in the heavens.In the city of Sippar,the ziggurat was called “The Staircase to Holy Heaven,and offerings were made to the gods from a small temple at the summit of the ziggurat.In this way,ziggurats formed an important spiritual link between people on Earth and the sacred realm of the gods in the heavens.

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In the early days of research on Mesopotamia,it was claimed that ziggurats were built as celestial observatories where astronomers could have studied the stars without city buildings obstructing their view.It is likely that on some occasions celestial observers climbed to the top of ziggurats to observe the night sky,recite prayers to the gods of the night,and make offerings to the celestial gods.It should be kept in mind that,since the moon and planets would still appear to be the same size,climbing a few meters to the top of a ziggurat would not give an observer a significantly closer or better view of celestial objects.It is doubtful that ziggurats would have been of much use to astronomers and calendar-makers,but they would have elevated priests and celestial observers into the higher spiritual realm that was such an important element of their religious world.?

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?Like the pyramids of Egypt,the towers called “ziggurats”built in ancient Mesopotamia were monumental symbols of a great civilization.Ziggurats consisted of several levels or platforms of diminishing sizes with exterior stairways or ramps leading to their summits.New platforms were built on top of older ones over many centuries,leaving earlier stages buried under later enlargements.The Egyptian pyramids,however,were never meant to be climbed,and new pyramids were not built over the remains of older ones.

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