The Mountain Built by Human Hands · The Bridge Between Earth and Heaven
The great stepped temple towers of Mesopotamia — at Ur, at Babylon, at Nippur — were artificial mountains, built because the Mesopotamian plain is flat and the gods lived on mountains, and the Sumerians were practical enough to build what the landscape did not provide.
The ziggurat was a ladder. At its base: the city, ordinary life, commerce and labor. At its top: the god's chamber, the place where the divine descended to meet the human.
The ritual ascent of the ziggurat — performed by priests, and on certain occasions by the king and a sacred companion — was a reenactment of the cosmic axis. Heaven and earth meeting at the point of the highest human effort.
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