What is a ziggurat? The Ziggurat of Ur, the Tower of Babel and how Mesopotamia built mountains of brick

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A ziggurat is a stepped tower of mud brick with a temple on its summit, built in the cities of Mesopotamia, today's Iraq and western Iran, from about 2200 BC to the 6th century BC: a solid mound of two to seven receding terraces, faced with baked brick set in bitumen, climbed by great stairways, with the god's high temple at the top where only priests went. The word is from Akkadian ziqquratu, "to build high" or "rising", and the building was an artificial mountain raised in a land without hills, a stair for the god to descend and a platform to lift the temple above the floods. About 25 are known; the best preserved is the Ziggurat of Ur, built by King Ur-Nammu around 2100 BC and partly rebuilt in the 1980s, and the most famous is Etemenanki in Babylon, 300 feet high, the original of the Tower of Babel. Below: what ziggurats were for, how they were built, Ur, Babylon and Chogha Zanbil, how they differ from pyramids, and what survives, with the contemporary pyramids of Egypt in the Ancient temples of the world collection for comparison.

What a ziggurat was for

Every Sumerian city belonged to a god, and the god lived in a temple; the ziggurat was a platform to raise that temple toward the sky and above the mud and floods of the plain. The Sumerians came, according to their own tradition, from a mountainous land, and their earliest temples at Eridu and Uruk stood on low platforms that were rebuilt higher with each generation, the old temple buried inside the new one, until the platform became the building. The high temple on the summit held the god's bed and table; a lower temple at the base held the daily cult and the offerings; the king climbed the stairs at New Year to renew his kingship. Herodotus, describing Babylon's ziggurat in the 5th century BC, was told that a priestess slept in the summit chamber where the god came down at night. The ziggurat was not a tomb, had no interior rooms, and was not for the public: it was the god's mountain, seen by all and entered by few. Ziggurat overview.

How ziggurats were built

• Mud brick. Mesopotamia has no stone and little timber, so the core is millions of sun-dried mud bricks laid in mud mortar, with layers of reed matting and ropes between courses to bind the mass and spread the load; at Ur the core is about 30 million bricks.
• Baked-brick facing. The outer skin, about 8 feet (2.5 m) thick, is kiln-fired brick set in bitumen, the natural asphalt of the region, which made it waterproof; the bricks of Ur are stamped with Ur-Nammu's name.
• Drainage. Weep holes through the facing let moisture out of the core, so the mound did not swell and burst; the terraces sloped to shed rain.
• Stairs. Three stairways at Ur converge on a gate tower at the first terrace, one straight up the front and two along the sides; from there a single stair climbed to the top.
• Shape. The walls lean inward and are subtly curved, like the Parthenon's, so that they look straight from below; the corners point to the cardinal directions.
• Colour. Terraces were painted or glazed in different colours; the ziggurat of Babylon, by a Babylonian text, had seven stages, and later writers gave each a planet's colour.
• Time. Ur's ziggurat was built in one reign, about twenty years; Babylon's was rebuilt over a century by Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II with labour from the whole empire.

The Ziggurat of Ur

Built about 2100 BC by Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, for the moon god Nanna, and finished by his son Shulgi. The base is 210 by 150 feet (64 by 46 m) and the first terrace stands 50 feet (15 m); the original probably had three terraces and a temple, to a total of perhaps 100 feet (30 m), although only the first survives. It was restored by Nabonidus of Babylon in the 6th century BC, who wrote that he found it in ruins and rebuilt it, and it was excavated by Leonard Woolley between 1922 and 1934, who also found the royal tombs of Ur nearby. In the 1980s Saddam Hussein's government rebuilt the facade and the three stairways in new brick over the ancient core, which is what visitors see; the site sits beside the former Ali Air Base and was reopened after 2009. It is the most complete ziggurat standing and the image every textbook uses. Ziggurat of Ur.

Etemenanki: the Tower of Babel

Etemenanki, "house of the foundation of heaven and earth", was the ziggurat of Marduk in Babylon, first built perhaps in the 2nd millennium BC, destroyed by the Assyrians, and rebuilt by Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II around 600 BC as a tower of seven stages, 300 feet (91 m) square at the base and, by the cuneiform "Esagila tablet", 300 feet high, with a temple of blue-glazed brick on top. Herodotus saw it a century later; Alexander the Great began to clear its ruins in 323 BC and died before rebuilding it. The Book of Genesis was written or edited during the Babylonian exile, and the story of a tower built to reach heaven in the land of Shinar, left unfinished when the builders' language was confused, is universally understood to be Etemenanki; "Babel" is Babylon. The tower's foundations were excavated by Robert Koldewey between 1899 and 1917 and today are a square of brick in a marsh; a stele in a private collection shows Nebuchadnezzar beside a drawing of the seven-stage tower. Pieter Bruegel's painting of 1563 gave it the spiral shape it never had, borrowed from the Colosseum. Etemenanki.

Chogha Zanbil and the rest

Chogha Zanbil in Iran, built about 1250 BC by the Elamite king Untash-Napirisha, is the largest ziggurat surviving, 344 feet (105 m) square and originally 174 feet (53 m) high in five stages, of which two and a half remain, in a walled sacred city; it was found in 1935 by an oil company's aerial survey and is a World Heritage Site. Dur-Kurigalzu near Baghdad keeps a core 170 feet high, a landmark since the 14th century BC. The ziggurats of Nippur, Uruk, Eridu, Kish, Borsippa, whose ruin was long mistaken for Babel, and Nimrud and Khorsabad in Assyria are mounds. Sialk in Iran, about 3000 BC, may be the oldest. The Sumerian temple towers were the model for the stepped platforms of the whole ancient Near East, and, through no direct contact, the same idea appears in the stepped pyramids of the Americas.

Ziggurat vs pyramid

• Purpose. A ziggurat is a platform for a temple, climbed daily by priests; an Egyptian pyramid is a sealed tomb. The stepped pyramids of Mexico are closer to ziggurats in use.
• Material. Mud brick with a baked-brick skin vs quarried stone.
• Shape. Stepped terraces with stairs and a flat top vs smooth sides to a point, except for the earliest Egyptian pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Djoser (about 2650 BC), which looks like a ziggurat and may have shared an ancestor in the idea of the stepped mound.
• Interior. Solid vs chambers and passages.
• Dates. The great ziggurats of 2100–600 BC overlap the Egyptian pyramid age (2650–1700 BC) and the Mesoamerican one (1000 BC–AD 1500); the Great Pyramid is four centuries older than the Ziggurat of Ur.
• Survival. Stone lasts; mud brick melts in rain unless maintained, which is why the pyramids stand and the ziggurats are mounds.

The two pyramid traditions are compared in Mayan vs Egyptian pyramids; the oldest sanctuaries of all in the oldest temples in the world.

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