{"it":{"id":"MES-002","kind":"site","sub":"Mesopotamia and Iran","name":"Chogha Zanbil","place":"Iran","lat":32.008,"lon":48.521,"date":"The construction date of the city is unclear due to uncertainty in the chronology of…","nfacts":9,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"The ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil in Iran was built around 1250 BCE with a base about 105.2 m on a side. It is estimated to have stood about 53 m tall, and it still rises about 24.75 m (UNESCO).","src":[299,607],"nsrc":3,"why":"It is the largest ziggurat outside Mesopotamia and a rare look at Elam, Mesopotamia's eastern neighbour.","yt":"What did it take to stack mud brick about 53 m high, and who did the work?","rel":["MES-001","MES-003"],"hook":"Bricks in an Iranian ziggurat still carry cuneiform in Elamite and Akkadian naming the gods it served."},"S":{"299":["Wikipedia: Chogha Zanbil","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chogha_Zanbil"],"607":["UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Tchogha Zanbil","https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/113"]},"rec":{"id":"MES-002","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"It lies approximately","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"30","u":"km","o":"It lies approximately 30 km southeast of Susa and 80 km north of Ahvaz.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1968"},{"f":"lies approximately 30 km southeast of Susa and","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"80","u":"km","o":"It lies approximately 30 km southeast of Susa and 80 km north of Ahvaz.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1969"},{"f":"REF2 Most of the innermost","a":"area","v":"2.5","u":"ha","o":"REF2 Most of the innermost 2.5 ha area is wholly taken up with a great ziggurat dedicated to the main god, which was built over an earlier square temple with storage rooms also built by Untash-Napirisha.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1970"},{"f":"The ziggurat originally measured","a":"base length/width","v":"105.2","u":"m","o":"The ziggurat originally measured 105.2 m on each side and about 53 m in height, in five levels, and was crowned with a temple.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1971"},{"f":"105 2 m on each side and about","a":"height","v":"53","u":"m","o":"The ziggurat originally measured 105.2 m on each side and about 53 m in height, in five levels, and was crowned with a temple.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1972"},{"f":"Though the ziggurat now stands only","a":"height","v":"24.75","u":"m","o":"Though the ziggurat now stands only 24.75 m high, less than half its estimated original height, its state of preservation is unsurpassed. [https://web.archive.org/web/20181005030841/http://untoldpersia.com/ContentView/Pid/40226/title/Tchogha-Zanbil---Susa-Iran]","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1973"},{"f":"The site measuring","a":"area","v":"96","u":"ha","o":"The site, measuring 96 ha in area, was originally discovered by a geologist doing oil exploration in the area.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1974"},{"f":"This included a","a":"area","v":"35","u":"ha","o":"This included a 35 ha magnetometer survey by Kiel University REF16 REF17 REF18","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1975"},{"f":"for oil has been undertaken as close as","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"300","u":"m","o":"Digging for oil has been undertaken as close as 300 m away from the ziggurat.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1379436325 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1976"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"The construction date of the city is unclear due to uncertainty in the chronology of the reign of Untash-Napirisha, but is clearly sometime in the 14th or 13th century BC.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/113","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"32.00833333","lon":"48.52083333","src":"Wikidata P625 + UNESCO WHC list XML (agree ≤0.05°)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0008 deg (~0.09 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/378521367"},"src":[{"id":"S0283","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chogha_Zanbil&oldid=1379436325"},{"id":"S0459","t":"Wikipedia: Chogha Zanbil","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chogha_Zanbil"},{"id":"S2608","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Tchogha Zanbil","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/113"},{"id":"VMES-002-4","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Tchogha Zanbil","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/113/"},{"id":null,"t":"Elizabeth Carter, “Čoḡā Zanbīl”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (1992, updated 2017).","u":"https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/coga-zanbil"},{"id":null,"t":"D. D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), §810. Oriental Institute scan.","u":"https://archive.org/details/ancient_records_assyria2"},{"id":null,"t":"Musée du Louvre, “Statue de la reine Napirasu”, SB 2731 (collections database).","u":"https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010176829"},{"id":null,"t":"Nicolas Assur Corfù, “Die Wasseraufbereitungsanlage von Coga Zanbil, Iran” (2006), University of Basel edoc record and abstract.","u":"https://doi.org/10.5451/unibas-ep48636"},{"id":null,"t":"M. Nakhaei and M. Correia, “Water-risk management in Tchogha Zanbil World Heritage Site in Iran, with a focus on the ancient management system”, ISPRS Archives XLIV-M-1 (2020), 683–690.","u":"https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-xliv-m-1-2020-683-2020"}],"sum":"Under a palace at Chogha Zanbil, in south-western Iran, lie five vaulted burial chambers. Each held a single skeleton. \"The rest of the bodies had been cremated,\" the archaeologist Elizabeth Carter writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. That was not how the Elamites treated their dead. At Susa and at Haft Tepe, their tombs were reused for burial after burial. Cremation turns up only here. \"Why cremation has been attested only in the tombs of Āl Untaš Napiriša is unknown,\" Carter writes. It is a fitting first mystery for a city that a king built for gods and for himself, and that almost no one ever moved into.\n\nChogha Zanbil stands on a plateau above the Dez River, in what was once the kingdom of Elam, the ancient neighbour of Mesopotamia to the east. UNESCO places it 38 kilometres from Susa, Elam's old regional capital; Wikipedia gives about 30 kilometres south-east of Susa and 80 north of Ahvaz. Its Elamite name was Āl Untaš Napiriša; the Assyrians called it Dūr Untaš, which UNESCO renders as \"City of Untash.\" Its founder was the Elamite king Untash-Napirisha, who built it as \"the religious centre of Elam.\" Its fame rests on one building: in UNESCO's words, \"the largest ziggurat outside of Mesopotamia and the best preserved\" of its kind.\n\nA ziggurat is a stepped temple-tower, a man-made mountain with a shrine on top. This one measured 105.2 metres on each side at its base and once rose about 53 metres in five levels, crowned by a temple. It still stands 24.75 metres high, less than half its original height, yet its state of preservation is unsurpassed. Its core is mud brick, faced with a skin of baked brick two metres thick. Every eleventh row of the baked bricks carries an inscription dedicating the tower to Inshushinak, \"lord of Susa\"; the ziggurat served both Inshushinak and the god Napirisha, and bricks across the site carry cuneiform in two languages, Elamite and Akkadian. Elamite was the local tongue, and Akkadian the language of the wider Mesopotamian world. The king was speaking to more than his own people.\n\nThe tower was not planned as a tower. The excavator, Roman Ghirshman, found that it began as a square open courtyard, paved with baked brick and ringed by long rooms. Then the courtyard was filled with terraces, each smaller than the one below, and the building was turned into a ziggurat from the inside. Some of the sealed rooms became storerooms, holding grain, wood, pottery, door leaves, lumps of colour and great numbers of glazed tiles and knobs. Later scholars think the two-phase story may be too simple, and inscribed bricks hint at an even earlier ziggurat nearby.\n\nWhen did all this happen? The dates are not settled. UNESCO gives Untash-Napirisha's reign as 1275 to 1240 BC and the site card puts the ziggurat around 1250, while the Louvre labels objects of his reign 1345 to 1305 BC, a gap of about seventy years between two major institutions. Wikipedia says only that the city was built sometime in the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC. Elamite chronology is still being worked out.\n\nThe city was a political statement. Three walls enclose it. The outer one runs more than four kilometres and takes in about 100 hectares, by Carter's figure, or 96 by Wikipedia's; the innermost 2.5 hectares are almost entirely filled by the ziggurat. Inside are temples and a royal quarter of three large buildings, reached through a gate in the eastern wall. Carter believes the new city \"must have been intended to challenge the long-established position of Susa,\" set on a main road to the highlands. The king's family is still visible in metal: in 1903 Jacques de Morgan found at Susa a bronze and copper statue of his queen, Napir-Asu, 129 centimetres high, its Elamite inscription cursing anyone who would damage it.\n\nBut the people never came. \"The rest of the land inside the city wall was never settled intensively,\" Carter writes. UNESCO says the city \"was never completed and only a few priests lived there.\" When excavators arrived, stockpiles of baked brick, bitumen and plaster still lay inside the temple wall, as if the builders had simply put down their tools. After the king died, the site remained, in Carter's words, \"a place of religious pilgrimage and a burial ground.\"\n\nIts end is disputed too. UNESCO says the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal destroyed it about 640 BC. Carter says a sounding showed the ziggurat and its buildings were abandoned around 1000 BC, \"not in 646 B.C.E., when the Assyrians recorded the destruction of the city.\" Ashurbanipal's own boast, in Luckenbill's 1927 translation, is specific: \"The zikkurat (temple tower) of Susa, which was built of enameled bricks, I destroyed.\" That is the tower of Susa. Whether his armies troubled an empty city some 30 to 38 kilometres away is not clear from the passage.\n\nThe mainstream view is that Chogha Zanbil was a royal and religious project, a new holy city meant to rival Susa, that outlived its founder's ambitions only as a shrine. The site itself was rediscovered by a geologist exploring for oil, and oil digging has since come as close as 300 metres to the ziggurat. Kiel University has since run a magnetometer survey over 35 hectares of it.\n\nThen there is the water. The excavators found a brick structure long called the \"installation hydraulique,\" and UNESCO lists water reservoirs among the site's features. In 2006 Nicolas Assur Corfù, in a University of Basel publication, reinterpreted it as a plant for \"preparing potable water,\" a slow sand filter, he thought, presumably treating water from the Ab-e Dez. A more cautious 2020 study by M. Nakhaei and M. Correia focused instead on drainage: drawing on the Iranian archaeologist Behzad Mofidi-Nasrabadi, it counts 20 gutters on the ziggurat's first level and one on the fifth, shedding rain through stepped gutters and ceramic channels, and nine wells nearby dug \"for disposal or collecting rainwater.\" The filter is possible, not proven.\n\nSo the open questions pile up. Why was this the only Elamite city to burn its dead? When was it really abandoned, when the sources disagree by more than three centuries? What was the water structure for? And why did a king who raised a holy mountain, ringed it with walls and stamped his name into brick after brick fail to bring anyone to live beside it? Untash-Napirisha's dedication still repeats every eleventh row. If he built the city for the gods rather than for people, did he believe the gods had moved in?","qs":["What did it take to stack mud brick about 53 m high, and who did the work?","Why build a sacred city on this scale and never finish it?","Bricks naming gods in two languages: who were they written for?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/%D8%B2%DB%8C%DA%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA_%DA%86%D8%BA%D8%A7_%D8%B2%D9%86%D8%A8%DB%8C%D9%84.jpg/1280px-%D8%B2%DB%8C%DA%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA_%DA%86%D8%BA%D8%A7_%D8%B2%D9%86%D8%A8%DB%8C%D9%84.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D8%B2%DB%8C%DA%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA_%DA%86%D8%BA%D8%A7_%D8%B2%D9%86%D8%A8%DB%8C%D9%84.jpg","title":"زیگورات چغا زنبیل.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Mobina ghanbaryan","cap":"This is a photo of a monument in Iran identified by the ID","alt":"Chogha Zanbil"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Alamut_%283%29.jpg/1280px-Alamut_%283%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alamut_(3).jpg","title":"Alamut (3).jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Elaheabed","cap":"This is a photo of a monument in Iran identified by the ID","alt":"Chogha Zanbil"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7f/Almadoshan.jpg/1280px-Almadoshan.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Almadoshan.jpg","title":"Almadoshan.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Dolphinphoto5d","cap":"This is a photo of a monument in Iran identified by the ID","alt":"Chogha Zanbil"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/Ancient_ziggurat_at_Ali_Air_Base_Iraq_2005.jpg/1280px-Ancient_ziggurat_at_Ali_Air_Base_Iraq_2005.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_ziggurat_at_Ali_Air_Base_Iraq_2005.jpg","title":"Ancient ziggurat at Ali Air Base Iraq 2005.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"en:User:Hardnfast","cap":"Ancient ziggurat at Ali Air Base Iraq"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/Axe_Sb_3973.jpg/1280px-Axe_Sb_3973.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Axe_Sb_3973.jpg","title":"Axe Sb 3973.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.5","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5","by":"Fabienkhan","cap":"","alt":"Chogha Zanbil: Axe Sb"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/MES-002.webp","w":1280,"h":853,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/%D8%B2%DB%8C%DA%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA_%DA%86%D8%BA%D8%A7_%D8%B2%D9%86%D8%A8%DB%8C%D9%84.jpg/1280px-%D8%B2%DB%8C%DA%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA_%DA%86%D8%BA%D8%A7_%D8%B2%D9%86%D8%A8%DB%8C%D9%84.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}