{"it":{"id":"MES-008","kind":"site","sub":"Mesopotamia and Iran","name":"Ziggurat of Ur","place":"Iraq","lat":30.963,"lon":46.103,"date":"The structure was built during the Early Bronze Age (21st century BC) by King Ur-Nammu…","nfacts":3,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"The Great Ziggurat of Ur rose in tiers above the plain of southern Iraq more than 4,000 years ago, on a base about 64 by 45 m and over 30 m high.","src":[407],"nsrc":2,"why":"Ur's ziggurat shows early engineers solving water, weight and display at once, and Woolley's report records how they did it.","yt":"What did climbing one mean to the people below?","rel":["MES-002","MES-003"],"hook":"Leonard Woolley cleared Ur's ziggurat in 1923–24 and found holes left so its brick core could drain."},"S":{"407":["Wikipedia: Ziggurat of Ur","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat_of_Ur"]},"rec":{"id":"MES-008","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"The massive step pyramid measured","a":"length","v":"64","u":"m","o":"The massive step pyramid measured 64 m in length, 45 m in width and over 30 m in height.","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=Ziggurat_of_Ur&oldid=1381057428","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381057428 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2064"},{"f":"massive step pyramid measured 64 m in length","a":"width","v":"45","u":"m","o":"The massive step pyramid measured 64 m in length, 45 m in width and over 30 m in height.","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=Ziggurat_of_Ur&oldid=1381057428","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381057428 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2065"},{"f":"in length 45 m in width and over","a":"height","v":"30","u":"m","o":"The massive step pyramid measured 64 m in length, 45 m in width and over 30 m in height.","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=Ziggurat_of_Ur&oldid=1381057428","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381057428 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2066"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"The structure was built during the Early Bronze Age (21st century BC) by King Ur-Nammu of the Third Dynasty of Ur.","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":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"30.96277778","lon":"46.10305556","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0001 deg (~0.01 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1060285722"},"src":[{"id":"S0408","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ziggurat_of_Ur&oldid=1381057428"},{"id":"S0637","t":"Wikipedia: Ziggurat of Ur","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat_of_Ur"},{"id":"VMES-008-3","t":"Penn Museum Journal: The Ziggurat of Ur","u":"https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/1235/"},{"id":null,"t":"J. E. Taylor, “Notes on the Ruins of Muqeyer”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 15 (read 8 July 1854)","u":"https://archive.org/details/jstor-25228658"},{"id":null,"t":"William Kennett Loftus, Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana (1857)","u":"https://archive.org/details/travelsresearche00loftrich"},{"id":null,"t":"William B. Hafford, “A Spectacular Discovery”, Expedition Magazine (Penn Museum), 2018","u":"https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/a-spectacular-discovery/"},{"id":null,"t":"British Museum, cylinder of Nabonidus from Ur, 91128 (K.1692)","u":"https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-1692"},{"id":null,"t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq” (1481)","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1481/"},{"id":null,"t":"Genesis 11, King James Version, Bible Gateway","u":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2011&version=KJV"},{"id":null,"t":"British Museum, “The Standard of Ur”, 121201 (1928,1010.3)","u":"https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1928-1010-3"}],"sum":"Some time in the sixth century BC, workmen of the last king of Babylon drove a hole straight into the heart of an ancient brick tower in southern Iraq. They were not robbers. They were looking for the buried foundation records of kings who had built the tower long before. Their master, Nabonidus, was in the words of the archaeologist Leonard Woolley \"a keen archaeologist, fond of digging up the foundation-records of his predecessors.\" When Woolley cleared the tower in 1923 and 1924, he found that hole, sealed under an unbroken pavement Nabonidus had laid over it. The first person to excavate the great ziggurat of Ur was a Babylonian king.\n\nThe ziggurat stands at Ur, near Nasiriyah in Dhi Qar province, a stepped mass of brick rising from a flat plain. Its Sumerian name, Etemenniguru, means \"house whose foundation creates terror.\" It was the shrine of Nanna, also called Sin, the moon god and patron of the city, and part of a temple complex that also served as an administrative centre. The standard modern account dates it to the 21st century BC: King Ur-Nammu of the Third Dynasty of Ur began it, and his son Shulgi finished it. Shulgi proclaimed himself a god to win the loyalty of other cities, and during his 48-year reign Ur became the capital of a state controlling much of Mesopotamia. A temple tower was the sort of thing a man who called himself divine would want finished.\n\nThe tower's size depends on whose measurements you trust, because so little of the top survives. Current figures give a base of about 64 by 45 metres and a height of over 30 metres, though that height is speculative; only the Sumerian foundations remain. A plan by Woolley's colleague Newton, published with his 1924 report, made the lowest stage 130 by 195 feet and the whole tower about 92 feet high. Woolley himself dated the founders, whom he called Ur-Engur and Dungi, to about 2300 BC, the best estimate of his day; scholars now put them in the 21st century BC.\n\nWhat the builders got right was water. The core is solid mud brick, wrapped in a thick skin of baked brick laid in bitumen, with mats of reed dipped in pitch laid between the courses to bind it. In the 1850s the British Museum's excavator John Taylor (long credited as \"J. E. Taylor\") noted that the local name, Muqeyer, means \"bitumined,\" and that the great mound was \"perforated with numerous air-holes\" running straight through it. Woolley worked out what they were for. They were \"weeper-holes,\" drains that let rain soaking into the filling escape. Without them, he wrote, the wet core would have \"swelled\" and \"burst the casing.\" In Taylor's day the yearly Euphrates flood turned the low country around into marsh, with the ruins standing in the middle, so the engineers who built a solid mountain of brick on this plain also built it to breathe.\n\nThree flights of a hundred steps each climbed the north-east face and met at a gateway. Woolley pictured the tower painted in bands, black below and red above, crowned by a shrine of \"glazed bricks of brilliant sky blue.\" He was honest that this was his reconstruction from scanty remains. No one has seen those colours.\n\nBy the time of Nabonidus, the tower had crumbled. Taylor found his clay cylinders set in niches in the brick casing, one standing on its end where a brick had been left out. They say that Nabonidus repaired and completed a tower begun but left unfinished by earlier kings of Ur. One such cylinder in the British Museum is 9.5 centimetres long, with 26 lines on work at the temple of Sin, and ends with a prayer for the king and his son Belshazzar. Someone pressed a pair of fingernail marks into one end, a small human signature on a royal text. Finding \"little left but the last stage and nothing to guide him as to the monument's original appearance,\" Nabonidus rebuilt it in seven stages rather than three. Here is power in a very pure form: a king reaching back across fifteen centuries to borrow the authority of the founders, and stamping his own name over theirs.\n\nThe cylinders also tied the ruin to a famous name. Genesis says Terah took Abram, Lot and Sarai and \"went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan.\" Henry Rawlinson thought the identification with Muqeyer complete after reading the name \"Hur\" on the cylinders. Not everyone agreed. William Kennett Loftus quoted a tradition from a manuscript he called very ancient, holding that \"Abraham was born at El Warka,\" the ruin of Uruk to the north, and suggested Ur might name a whole district that \"included both.\" But Loftus admitted \"the correctness of the reading\" on the cylinders. The tradition is a story told about the place; the cylinders are the place speaking about itself. Today a tourist city is being developed beside the site for Christian pilgrims, based on later traditions that place Abraham's home nearby.\n\nUr is just as famous for its dead. Of more than 2,000 graves at Ur, William Hafford of the Penn Museum notes, \"only 16\" had the wealth and signs of human sacrifice that convinced Woolley they were royal. In one lay a woman whose lapis seal named her Puabi, Queen, her headdress made with more than 12 metres of gold ribbon. Outside some tombs were \"death-pits\" crowded with dressed bodies and musical instruments. Whether those attendants died willingly, Hafford says plainly, \"is not truly known.\"\n\nThe modern history of the tower has been rough. In the 1980s, under Saddam Hussein, the façade of the lowest level and the monumental staircase were rebuilt, encasing the ancient remains. In the 1991 Gulf War the structure was shaken by explosions. Four bomb craters lie nearby, and the walls carry over 400 bullet holes.\n\nMuch is still unknown. Woolley could find no trace of the upper work of the earliest kings, and nothing tells us what the original summit looked like. His idea that the Sumerians built such towers as artificial mountains because they had once been \"a hill folk\" was a guess from 1924. Why a lowland people should pour so much labour into raising their god's house toward the sky, and engineer it so carefully against the water, is a question the bricks pose but do not answer.\n\nNabonidus dug into the tower to find the names of men who had ruled long before him, and he found them, and believed them worth restoring. If a king of Babylon could already treat this place as a relic of a deeper past, how much further back does the memory he was chasing really go?","qs":["Ur-Engur raised a brick mountain on a flat plain. Why did early cities build toward the sky?","Why would builders bother with drainage holes inside solid brick?","Nabonidus rebuilt a tower already ancient to him. Why restore the past?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6b/Ziggarat_of_Ur_001.jpg/1280px-Ziggarat_of_Ur_001.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ziggarat_of_Ur_001.jpg","title":"Ziggarat of Ur 001.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Tla2006 at English Wikipedia","cap":"Original photo taken 1 July 2006."},{"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/8/8a/Discovery_of_the_Ziggurat_of_Ur_%28The_Great_Temple_at_Mugeyer_from_the_west%29.jpg/1280px-Discovery_of_the_Ziggurat_of_Ur_%28The_Great_Temple_at_Mugeyer_from_the_west%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discovery_of_the_Ziggurat_of_Ur_(The_Great_Temple_at_Mugeyer_from_the_west).jpg","title":"Discovery of the Ziggurat of Ur (The Great Temple at Mugeyer from the west).jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"William Loftus","cap":"Discovery of the Ziggurat of Ur (The Great Temple at Mugeyer from the west)"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Zig_close.JPG/1280px-Zig_close.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zig_close.JPG","title":"Zig close.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Kaufingdude","cap":"ziggurat of ur"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Zig_from_side.JPG/1280px-Zig_from_side.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zig_from_side.JPG","title":"Zig from side.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Kaufingdude","cap":"Ziggurat of Ur, side"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"21st century BC","h":"Date from its main source","s":[143]}],"hs":{"143":["Wikipedia: Ziggurat of Ur (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat_of_Ur"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/MES-008.webp","w":1280,"h":558,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6b/Ziggarat_of_Ur_001.jpg/1280px-Ziggarat_of_Ur_001.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}