The religious center, devoted to the cult of Nanna, the moon god and patron deity of Ur, and his wife, Ningal, was a focus of Woolley’s excavations; as a result, much is known about it (Figure 3.4). This temenos, or sacred area, lay in the north-west, the traditional site of the important buildings of a Sumerian city. The propitious north-west sector had the healthiest air, it was believed.
Such an attitude may lie behind the frequent orientation of buildings throughout the site toward the cardinal points: one side would normally face the north-west and its soothing breezes.
Its corners oriented toward the cardinal points of the compass, the entire temenos measured some 400m X 200m. Buildings were preserved in foundations only, the upper parts having been destroyed during the Elamite invasion at the end of the Ur III period. The precinct contained temples, courtyards, and rooms to house the religious personnel and store offerings and cult paraphernalia, and an enormous ziggurat (see below). In ground plan, the area looks quite forbidding, with its many thick and reduplicated walls protecting courts and labyrinthine buildings such as the Giparu, a complex of shrines dedicated principally to Ningal and a residence for high priestesses.
Closely linked to the sacred compound and probably in greater need of the security provided by the walls was the royal center. The king held audience in the small rooms of the gateway into the compound for the ziggurat. His palace, the Ehursag, stood close by, just to the east, and immediately beyond that lay the Royal Cemetery. The tombs of the kings of the Third Dynasty were not as well hidden as the earlier ED Royal Tombs. Looted in antiquity, only their architecture has survived, mortuary chapels at ground level with stairs down to vaulted tombs below — construction on a scale much grander than in the ED tombs.
The best-known building of the temenos is the ziggurat, the best-preserved example in Mesopotamia (Figure 3.5). Erected under Ur-Nammu and his son Shulgi, the ziggurat was restored by successive generations of kings in Mesopotamia for 1500 years after its initial construction, and again in modern times by the Iraqi government.
A ziggurat is a tower built of successively smaller platforms one on top of the other, with a small shrine on the summit. The name may come from Akkadian words for “summit” or “mountain top” (ziqquratu) and “to be high” (ziqaru). It serves as an artificial mountain in flat land, reaching up to heaven and the gods, an elaboration of the tall platform which had held up the Mesopotamian “high temple” ever since the fifth millennium BC.
The ziggurat at Ur consists of three platforms. The temple on top did not survive, so its appearance is conjectural. The lowest platform measures 61m X 45.7m X 15m. A majestic triple staircase leads up to it and then on to the upper two stages and the shrine on top. Sun-dried mud bricks and periodic layers of woven reeds make up the solid core of the structure. The exterior was faced with a thick (2.4m) layer of more durable baked bricks, set in bitumen. Drainage holes pierced the facade of the lowest platform, a detail that has intrigued observers. Noting finds of carbonized tree-trunks,
Woolley proposed that the tops of the terraces were planted with trees. The holes would have helped drain the specially watered garden. This appealing vision of the ziggurat as a forested mountain peak has not been confirmed elsewhere.
Figure 3.6 Stele of Ur-Nammu, Ur. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia
World History
