Abraham, the father of the Jewish religion, was an Iraqi — sort of. According to the Bible, he was born in Ur, one of the world’s first cities, which was located in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. But in those days, that part of Mesopotamia was called Sumer. So Abraham was actually a Sumerian, or more specifically an Urian (a guy from Ur). Historians don’t know when Abraham left Ur, but until about 2334 BC, Ur was an independent city-state.
Sumer was not really a country, but a cluster of city-states, like Ancient Greece. Sumer included Ur, Uruk (Erech in the Bible), Eridu, Larsa, and about eight other cities in southern Mesopotamia. Although linked by culture, religion, and the fact that they shared the world’s first written language, the city-states didn’t unite for over a thousand years. Nevertheless, Sumerians called their patchwork “country” the “land of the civilized lords,” which makes it sound like they had some pretty “uncivilized” neighbors. They also called themselves “the black-headed people.”
Geography was good to Mesopotamia’s farmers, but not to its rulers. Unlike Egypt, which is surrounded by natural defenses — deserts on the east and west and the Mediterranean Sea on the north — Mesopotamia had no mountains, deserts, or oceans to protect it. It was easy to conquer and hard to hold on to. The Sumerians’ “uncivilized” neighbors — desert-tough nomadic tribes — must have been irresistibly attracted to this flowering oasis.
In this chapter, I examine the art and architecture of the Sumerians, the Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and New Babylonians. Although each people had their own style, these styles seemed to grow out of each other like branches on a Mesopotamian family tree. In this chapter, I lay it all out for you.
Climbing toward the Clouds: Sumerian Architecture
Each Sumerian city-state had its local god, who owned and protected the city (a bit like the Greek goddess Athena protected Athens). Priest-kings ran the city-states, acting as the gods’ appointed “shepherds of the people.” They managed everything from the economy and government to religious affairs. They distributed the food, too, because even people’s labor was viewed as the gods’ property.
Zigzagging to Heaven: Ziggurats
And they said, Go to, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven. [Description of the building of the Tower of Babel or Tower of Babylon.]
— Genesis 11:4
The Sumerians tried to get physically close to god with their architecture. Because their gods lived in the sky, they built their temples like high-rises. (The same impulse to soar toward God seems to have motivated the architects of the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages.) Sumerian architects achieved this skyscraper height with ziggurats, which look like tiered wedding cakes up to seven layers high.
Here are some characteristics of ziggurat construction:
The temple sat on top, close to the gods. The biblical Tower of Babel (see the following section) was probably a ziggurat.
They included long staircases, ascending from terrace to terrace, climbing toward heaven and the Sumerian pantheon. But only priests were allowed to use the stairs and enter the temple at the top.
They were built from mud brick because the Sumerians didn’t have access to limestone, like the Egyptians did. Also used for temples, and palaces, mud brick has a much shorter half-life than limestone or granite (the material the Egyptians used to build the pyramids). As Genesis 11:3 says, “And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.”
He built Uruk. He built the keeping place
Of Anu and Ishtar [Sumerian gods]. The outer wall
shines in the sun like brightest copper; the inner
wall is beyond the imagining of kings.
Study the brickwork, study the fortification;
Climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace;
Study how it is made; from the terrace see
The planted and fallow fields, the ponds and orchards.
This is Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh.
[Translated by David Ferry]
All that remains of the ziggurat of King Urnammu of Ur is the first floor, but it’s enough to show the impressive architectural and engineering skills of the ancient Sumerians.
The Tower of Babel
Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon (605 BC–562 BC), gave ziggurats a bad rap by stealing holy objects from the temple in Jerusalem and housing them in the ziggurat of Babylon. He probably wanted to show that his gods had more power than the Hebrew god did. According to Chronicles II 36:7, “Nebuchadnezzar also carried of the vessels of the house of the Lord to Babylon, and put them in his temple at Babylon.”
To the captive Jews, Babylon’s mountain-high ziggurat must have symbolized Nebuchadnezzar’s overweening pride. But in general, the Sumerian and Babylonian peoples built ziggurats to put them in touch with the gods, not to elevate their egos.
The Eyes Have It: Scoping Out Sumerian Sculpture
The Sumerians had oodles of gods — a sun god named Shamash; Enlil, the god of the wind; Anu, the king of gods; and Ishtar, the goddess of desire, to name a few. Each city also had a local god who acted as its spokesperson in the assembly of the gods, kind of a like a senator in the United States. As spokesperson, the local god made sure the leading gods (like the god of the sun and the god of floods) granted special privileges to their town.
Worshipping graven images
Like most gods, Sumerian divinities lived somewhere in the sky or mountains (though of course they didn’t have an exact address). They also resided inside their statues in the temples of each city-state. In Sumer, a statue of a god wasn’t just a representation, as it was later on in Greece — it was the god. Divinities could be in more than one place at a time.
Statues could also be stand-ins for ordinary citizens. That is, if a Sumerian commissioned a statue, part of him or her took up residence in the statue — like a home away from home. For this reason, Sumerians placed statues of themselves in temples where they could interact with the statue of the local god — and ask for favors in a roundabout way.
