Page 36 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

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THE PROTOLITERATE PERIOD
resembled the Ziggurats oflatcr times, which were staged towers with the shrine placed
upon superimposed blocks of masonry, each smaller than the one below. Herodotus,
when he visited Babylon, saw a temple tower with seven stages, each painted a different
colour. Since these later Ziggurats resemble the platform of Al ‘Uqair in possessing dis­
tinct stages, and that of Warka in being of great height, we may conclude that elevation
and staging became conventional characteristics, but that they had at first been optional,
and that the two Pro to literate shrines at Warka and Al ‘Uqair did not differ in essentials.
The significance of the Ziggurat was symbolical, and the symbolism could be expressed
in more than one way. The same idea, which was unequivocally expressed in a high
artificial mountain, could also be rendered by a mere platform a few feet high. One

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Figure 5. Sin Temple II, Khafajc
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might call the platform an abbreviation of the Ziggurat, if that wording did not suggest
that the Ziggurat was the earlier form. That, however, is by no means certain; in fact,
it is more probable that the platform of the earliest temples at Eridu, of the Al ‘Ubaid
Period, already represented the sacred ‘mountain’. We may perhaps assume that it was
only the unprecedented man-power which the foundation of cities put at the disposal of
the leaders of the community which enabled the men of Warka to give to the funda­
mental notion of their sacred architecture such concrete expression.19
< The shrine we have just described was not the only one built at Warka in Protoliterate
times. The sacred precincts of the goddess Inanna, the ‘Lady of Heaven’, called Ishtar
by the Semitic-speaking inhabitants of Mesopotamia, was situated close by the Ziggurat
of Anu. The ruins ofEanna, the precinct of the Great Mother, are too fragmentary to
teach us much beyond certain details of architectural decoration to which we shall re­
turn (Plate 2).™ But at another site, Khafaje, we find modifications of the original plan
as known at Al ‘Uqair and Warka (Figure 4). This plan, open to all sides, was ill suited

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