The city was enclosed by a brick wall and the royal palace and the temples, including the ziggurat, were enclosed by yet another wall.
Ziggurats were monumental architecture for the people of Mesoptomaia. Architect Edwin Kado describes the building as follows: "I originally designed a building that cantilevered toward the river, so it was like a pyramid upside down. The ziggurats began as a platform (usually oval, rectangular or square), the ziggurat was a mastaba-like structure with a flat top. 2112-2095 BC). The precursors of the ziggurat were raised platforms that date from the Ubaid period during the sixth millennium. Unfortunately, there is no known extant text that explains precisely what ziggurats were intended to symbolize, but based on references to the structures in Sumerian and Akkadian language texts, modern scholars have determined that the ancient Mesopotamians believed they were the earthly homes of their many deities. As noted above, the earliest ziggurats were built by the Sumerians in the southern region of Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Among the numerous different peoples to engage in ziggurat building in ancient Mesopotamia, the Elamites may have been the most interesting. The people of ancient Mesopotamia practiced a religion that modern scholars are only just now beginning to understand and the physical focal point of their religion were the monumental, triangular structures known as ziggurats. After the decline of the Sumerians, the cultural focus of Mesopotamia shifted northward to the region around the city of Babylon, which was known as Babylonia. A centralized monitoring facility allows video security surveillance throughout the interior and exterior of the building.
Mesopotamians took the knowledge they learned at ziggurat temple complexes to create bigger and more intricate ziggurats. Etemenanki is translated from ancient Akkadian as the “House of the Frontier between Heaven and Earth,”Although nothing remains of the Etemenanki Ziggurat, its greatness inspired awe in people from far outside Mesopotamia. The Sumerians were the first ethnic group to bring civilization to Mesopotamia and they were also the first people to build ziggurats in the southern portion of that land, which is generally known as Sumer. The development of ziggurats, like most monumental building in the ancient world, was a long process that took hundreds of years to reach its maturity. The communications center has a dual fiber feed from two local fiber communication companies (four separate fiber connections). One of the first proto-ziggurats was known as the “White Temple,” which towered forty feet above the city of Uruk. These ancient stepped buildings were created to be home to the patron god or goddess of the city. The fifth century BC Greek historian, Herodotus, wrote of it stating, “on the summit of the topmost tower stands a great temple with a fine large couch in it”Ziggurats enjoyed a long history and an important place in ancient Mesopotamian religion and culture. It was also during this early period when the secular, along with the religious importance of ziggurats was first solidified. What is a ziggurat and why is it important? Perhaps just as important as the religious aspects, and possibly even more so, was the political legitimacy and gravitas a king or a dynasty could gain by building a ziggurat. Nebuchadnezar II is known to many as a “bad guy” from the Old Testament book of Daniel, but he was actually a very active king who led a new dynasty, referred to as the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, to prominence in the Near East. What were Ziggurats built for? Unlike the pyramids, which were made of stone, ziggurats were made primarily of mud brick and clay with some stone. The first ziggurat dated back to around 3000 BCE to 2200 BCE, and the latest dates from around 500 BCE.
One of the more impressive ziggurats was built by a Kassite king named Kurigalzu I (reigned sometime in the early fourteenth century BC) in a newly founded city. When the Assyrians were not busy conquering the rest of the Near East, they were building new cities such as Nineveh, Assur, and Nimrud.