Page 35 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

PART ONE: MESOPOTAMIA

Access was by a stair built against the north-eastern face and leading to the summit.13
There, on a terrace without parapet, where sun and wind ruled unchallenged above the
vast expanse of fields and marshes, stood the small whitewashed shrine.14 Its outer wall
shows multiple recesses, strengthened with short round timbers, between the buttresses.15
A step at the south-western side leading to the top of the plinth marked the entrance.
- One passed through a vestibule which was one of a series of small rooms placed along
the long sides of the building, and reached the cella at its centre. In one corner stood a
platform or altar. It was four feet high, and a flight of small narrow steps led up to it. In
front of it, at a little distance, an offering-table of brick was constructed, and a low semi­
circular hearth had been built up against it. The interior of the shrine was decorated with
recesses, and the sloping sides of the artificial mound also show shallow recesses between
buttresses of brick.
The huge communal labour which went into the building of this sanctuary did not
serve a purely architectural purpose. It was an attempt to bridge the chasm which separ­
ates humanity from the gods. The Mesopotamian deeply felt the enormity of the pre­
sumption that man should offer residence to a deity, and the gigantic effort spent on the
erection of a temple tower may well have strengthened his confidence that contact with
the superhuman powers would be achieved, hi any case, the temple tower (or Zig-
gurat)16 was sacred. The names by which some of them were known in later times have
been preserved, and they indicate that they were intended not merely to resemble, but
to be, ‘mountains’. The Ziggurat of the storm god Enlil was, for instance, called ‘House
of the Mountain, Mountain of the Storm, Bond between Heaven and Earth’. But in
Mesopotamia ‘mountain’ was a religious concept of many-sided significance. It stood
for the whole earth, and within it, therefore, were concentrated the mysterious powers of
life which bring forth vegetation in spring and autumn, and carry water to dry river­
beds. The rains, too, come from the mountains, and the Great Mother, source of all life,
is named Ninhursag, Lady of the Mountain. The mountain, then, was the habitual set­
ting in which the superhuman became manifest, and the Sumerians, in erecting their
Ziggurats with an immense common effort, created the conditions under which com­
munication with the divine became possible.
The shrine on the top of the Ziggurat was called Shakhuru, which means ‘ waiting-
room’ or ‘room one passes through’.17 In the temples on ground level this name was
given to the antecella, the room before the Holy of Holies (Figure 19, left bottom),
where the faithful awaited the opening of the cella and the epiphany of the god. It seems,
therefore, that the temple on top of the Ziggurat was thought to be a hall, where the
manifestation of the god was likewise awaited. We do not know whether the Amu Zig­
gurat at Warka possessed a second temple on ground level, as was the usual arrangement
in later times.
However this may be, and although not all sanctuaries included a temple tower or
Ziggurat, all were given a token elevation above the soil. A temple at Al ‘Uqair which
was contemporary with, and of precisely the same dimensions as the temple on the Anu
Ziggurat at Warka, stood on a platform but fifteen feet high.18 It was irregular in ground
plan, like the Ziggurat at Warka, but it rose in two distinct stages. In this respect it

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