Ziggurat

A ziggurat was built as a solid core of sun dried mudbrick, cheap and abundant in a landscape without ready stone, faced on its exterior with a skin of harder, kiln fired baked brick set in bitumen to protect the softer core from rain and erosion. The core's bulk meant a ziggurat contained no internal rooms or passages of any size, unlike an Egyptian pyramid, which could enclose burial chambers; a ziggurat was solid mass built purely to gain height, with access provided by one or more monumental exterior staircases or ramps climbing its terraced sides to a shrine at the summit.

The best preserved example, the Great Ziggurat of Ur, built under the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late third millennium BCE and restored in antiquity by the Babylonian king Nabonidus, still stands to a considerable height in modern Iraq and shows the triple staircase arrangement converging at a gate partway up the structure.

The Etemenanki, the ziggurat of Babylon dedicated to the god Marduk, was according to ancient description considerably larger still, though its physical remains are far more fragmentary than those at Ur. Because ziggurats were rebuilt, restored and sometimes enlarged by successive rulers over many centuries, the structure visible at any given site typically represents the latest of several superimposed building phases rather than a single original construction.

Mesopotamian religious texts describe the shrine at a ziggurat's summit not as a hall for congregational worship but as the dwelling place of the city's patron deity, a residence the god or goddess occupied within the human city rather than a distant heaven, an idea that made the ziggurat functionally closer to a palace built for a divine ruler than to a temple in the modern sense.

Ordinary residents of the city had no general right of access to the summit shrine; care of the deity's image, including its feeding, clothing and daily attendance, fell to a specialized priesthood attached to the temple complex at the ziggurat's base, and the ziggurat itself typically formed only the most visible element of a much larger temple precinct that handled the practical business of the cult, including substantial landholding, grain storage and craft production. Each major Mesopotamian city maintained its own patron deity and, in principle, its own ziggurat, so that the structure functioned as a marker of civic as well as religious identity, and building or rebuilding a city's ziggurat was among the most significant acts a Mesopotamian king could undertake to demonstrate his piety and legitimacy. The biblical account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, describing a tower built to reach heaven and the confusion of languages that followed its construction, is widely read by scholars as a polemical response to Babylon's Etemenanki, transforming a structure meant to honor Marduk into an emblem of human overreach.