How does a culture interact with its gods?
This is a deceptively simple question that has sparked thousands of philosophies, firestorms,
and a fair few holy wars over the millennia.
The answer is not consistent between or even within cultures, but everybody has their own
idea for what role a god or gods should play in the mortal world – whether that’s on
an imperceptibly-vast scale or deeply ingrained in day to day life, whether that god has a
wide theological purview or is focused on being the singular patron for a select group
of people – There’s an uncountably infinite variety to the experiences people have with
the concept of divinity.
But surely there must have been a time when this question had a simple answer, right?
Before the global exchange of culture presented us with hundreds of misaligned or outright
incompatible concepts for our place in the world and potential worlds beyond?
Maybe if we wind the clock back to the earliest days of organized civilization, when the first
cities rose above the floodplains of Mesopotamia, we might find a simpler time with a clearer
answer.
But that, dear viewer, is also a deceptively simple notion, because if you’ve poked your
head around the beautiful mess of a tapestry that is human history, you’ll know that
is not at all how these things go.
So bearing in mind that we can never find
the answer to how cultures facetime their gods, we can look into the Sumerian Bronze
Age to perhaps arrive at an answer.
And that line of questioning takes us to the grandest physical remnant of their religion,
the Ziggurat: a massive temple composed of layered terraces rising to a single point
and towering over everything else in the city.
The name comes from the Akkadian word for Pinnacle or High Place, and looks like a man-made
mountain sprung right out of a dense urban environment.
Now, the historical development of these buildings was a roughly 3,000 year process, reaching
back from the earliest cities in human history and later becoming a key architectural presence
across Mesopotamia, but to keep us focused, we’re going to zoom into the greatest surviving
Ziggurat, at the city of Ur.
So, to investigate the question of how Mesopotamian Ziggurats brought them closer to their gods
and see what that tells us about their society at large, Let’s do some History.
The OG Ziggurat in Mesopotamia is likely the
Anu Ziggurat in one of the earliest cities, Uruk.
How old it is may depend on which chronology system you subscribe to, because historical
dates before the 1500s BC lack solid timepoints we can definitively anchor to, so scholars
operate on one of 5 distinct timescales with a spread of 150 years between the ultra-low
and long chronologies.
So bear in mind that every date I give in this video is wrong, and I’m not sorry because
it’s not my fault.
Now sometime in the high 3000s BC, Uruk built a raised platform out of mud-bricks in the
city to hold a shrine, and by the late 3000s BC they had added the White Temple on top
as a more permanent fixture.
Each work would have taken a thousand laborers several years to build, but the effect is
striking as the Ziggurat raises the temple above the sightline of the city walls – making
this admittedly modest two-story religious site into the defining landmark of the city,
announcing not just their majesty and skill but also their piety.
And this mound structure became the go-to for near-eastern architecture, later appearing
in other Mesopotamian cities over the next several centuries, as well as seeing use as
burial grounds over in Egypt.
These trapezoid-y lookin’ Mastaba tombs served as personal funerary ziggurats for
the very first Egyptian kings from the turn of the 3rd millennium into the 2000s BC.
King Djoser stacked them up in a step pyramid, and later kings smoothed the sides into the
pyramids we recognize today, but that key idea of stacking up the platforms will be
a big deal a little later on.
Back in Mesopotamia, these ziggurats weren’t
reserved for dead royals, but instead served as a sanctuary for a patron deity’s statue,
and thus was their earthly dwelling.
And not just anybody could roll up to a divine residence, so the shrine atop a ziggurat was
largely reserved for royalty and the high priesthood.
These were not spaces of public worship that people gathered on, rather, people conglomerated
below, in the area and courtyards surrounding the ziggurat for big festivals or holy days.
No randos on the big bricky trapezoid.
Now, after a millennium of early ziggurat-building in Mesopotamia, the architecture gets serious
during the Third Dynasty of Ur, with far more and far bigger structures.
For the absolute bare-minimum amount of context I can give without diverting completely from
my stated goal of gushing about pretty buildings, early Sumerian history was a game of city
states, with independent cities interacting via the network of waterways between the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers.
Around 2300 BC, the king Sargon swept in from the north to conquer the whole of Mesopotamia
and establish the Akkadian empire.
A century later, that dynasty collapsed from a mix of factors, but the historical record
pins the blame on the Gutian people from the mountains in the east.
Whomstsoever the exact culprit may have been, the land was loosely ruled by the Gutians
until the Sumerian restoration of 2112 – according to the middle chronology, so give or take
50 years.
After a final victory of Utu-Hegal against the Gutian king as recounted in later Sumerian
poetry, king Ur-Nammu re-established a royal dynasty in Ur, now with imperial control of
lower Mesopotamia – and all of it later on.
Politically, this threw back to the days of
the Akkadian empire, but culturally, it was a return to the Sumerian language’s primacy
in this multilingual civilization, and socially, this Third Dynasty of Ur innovated in their
own right by going absolutely insane-o mode in coordinating the state and the economy.
The Ur III period, as it’s known by historians, came onto the scene with the most robust system
of social organization the world had ever seen, on a scale and thoroughness that few
pre-modern civilizations could match.
Every worker’s production and payment was tracked and logged by an army of scribes,
with records collated every month into a master list of input and output, and everyone’s
surplus or deficits carried year to year.
They had to build an entire treasury city at Puzrish-Dagan just to manage all the inflows
and outflows of goods.
The Kings in Ur delegated authority to provincial governors, so each city still had autonomy,
but everyone operated on the same economic system, and the whole bureaucracy was trained
to the same scribal standard.
Likewise, the weight of currencies was standardized across the empire, so everyone’s Shekels
and Mina matched up, and every city followed the same legal framework, three centuries
before Hammurabi’s famous law code showed up.
Ur-Nammu and his son Shulgi presided over one of the most dramatic leaps in human organization
in ancient history, so compared against all that, the otherwise astonishing effort of
raising massive Ziggurats in every major city almost seems casual.
Of course, casual this was not, because the
Great Ziggurat of Ur is Mesopotamia’s architectural masterwork.
Innovating from earlier one-layer designs, this ziggurat rises in three stacked terraces
with a shrine for the moon god Nanna at the top, and was built entirely of mud-brick with
an outer layer of sturdy fired bricks, likely painted and possibly glazed.
Three processional staircases rise to the first terrace, meeting in the middle and continuing
up to the shrine.
The play of straight lines and diagonals let the structure feel massive while also conveying
a clear upward movement with a literal arrow pointing up.
The builders also used an optical trick called entasis, where every surface on the ziggurat
is slightly curved outward to sell the image of sturdiness – this was most famously used
1500 years later in the Athenian Parthenon, but Sumer got to it first.
And finally, there’s a pleasing balance between the rigid geometric buttressing in
the brickwork and the natural greenery adorning each terrace.
The combined effect is a structure that unifies the divine scale with the human scale – It’s
a full-on mountain inside of a city that elevates the sacred space above the rest of the world,
but it’s perfectly traversable, bringing a king or high priest up to a convergence
point with divinity.
The terraces taper toward the very top where the priesthood and royals ascend, making their
interaction with the gods the focal point of the whole structure, and, by extension,
the whole city.
Now, various theories abound for what exactly happened in the shrine, but one especially
saucy notion recounted by Herodotus claims it held a sacred bedchamber for a divine marriage
ceremony between the deity and the city, enthusiastically LARPed by their metaphorical stand-ins, the
high priestess and the king.
Is that true?
Well, it IS Herodotus, but there is also a basis for it, and if we clean that image up
a little, it points us toward a very personal relationship between the living semi-divine
king and the deities above, facilitated by a monumental building effort and a powerful
theocratic administration.
Rising above the flat floodplains of Mesopotamia,
a ziggurat like the one at Ur announces the city’s presence and the living greatness
of the king across vast distances.
It’s a truly spectacular feat, and a testament to the organizational power of Ur III in addition
to their artistic chops.
Though the dynasty of Ur-Nammu and his son Shulgi wouldn’t stay in charge of Mesopotamia
for more than a century, this architecture so emblematic of their reign continued to
shape the Sumerian religious experience.
So, how did the kings of Ur interact with their gods? – with an absolute ass-load
of bricks, and maybe a mop.
Thank you for watching.
That last line is going into the rare but esteemed bank of “I should probably gargle
some acetone to clean that joke out of my mouth”.
But I hope you enjoyed the architecture stuff because I sure did.
We’ve got more Mesopotamian videos coming at you this month, so I’ll see you in the
next one.