Compendium of the Emerald Tablets — The Great Ziggurat of Ur is a stepped temple platform of mud brick and baked brick at Tell el-Muqayyar, near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, built around 2100 BCE by King Ur-Nammu and completed by his son Shulgi. It raised the shrine of Nanna, the moon god and patron of Ur, high above the city, and it is the best-preserved ziggurat in Mesopotamia.
The ziggurat matters because it is the clearest surviving picture of a building type that shaped ancient religion and, through the Tower of Babel story, the imagination of the Bible's readers. The site around it also produced some of the most famous finds in archaeology: the Royal Cemetery of Ur, excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. Separating what the brickwork, the tombs and the texts actually show from what has been layered on top of them is the purpose of this guide.
What is the Ziggurat of Ur and where is it?
The Ziggurat of Ur is the surviving core of the temple precinct of Nanna at the ancient city of Ur, now the mound of Tell el-Muqayyar in Dhi Qar province, about 16 km southwest of Nasiriyah. In antiquity Ur sat near the Euphrates and close to the marshes and the Gulf shoreline; today the river has shifted and the site stands in open desert.
Its Sumerian name was Etemenniguru, usually translated “house whose foundation creates terror,” where terror carries the sense of awe or radiance surrounding a god. The temple on its summit belonged to Nanna, called Sin in Akkadian, the moon god who was the divine patron of Ur. His consort was the goddess Ningal, who had her own temple in the same sacred precinct. For how Nanna fits among Anu, Enlil, Enki and Inanna, see the guide to the Sumerian gods and goddesses.
Who built it, and when?
Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, began the ziggurat around 2100 BCE, and his son Shulgi finished it. The Third Dynasty, often shortened to Ur III, was the last great Sumerian state. Ur-Nammu is also known for the law code that bears his name, one of the oldest surviving legal texts, and for an ambitious building programme across southern Mesopotamia that included ziggurats at several cities.
Ziggurats were not new in his day. Stepped temple platforms grew out of a much older tradition of raising temples on ever-higher terraces, a pattern that excavators traced back through the layered temples of Eridu, the city Sumerians remembered as the first. What Ur-Nammu's builders added was scale, symmetry and a permanent baked-brick skin.
How was it built?
The ziggurat is a solid mass of mud brick faced with a thick casing of baked bricks set in bitumen, the natural tar of southern Iraq. The base measures roughly 64 by 45 metres. The original height is usually estimated at around 30 metres, but only the lower stages survive, so any figure for the top is a reconstruction rather than a measurement.
Mud brick is cheap and strong in compression but dissolves in rain, so the baked-brick facing acted as armour. Many of those bricks carry Ur-Nammu's stamped inscription, which helps date the building. The walls lean slightly inward and are broken by shallow buttresses, and narrow channels through the brickwork are generally interpreted as drainage and ventilation for the damp core.
Three monumental stairways, one projecting straight out from the main face and two climbing along the walls, converged at a gateway on the first terrace. From there further stairs led upward to the shrine of Nanna at the summit. That shrine has not survived, and its appearance is known only from fragments and comparison with other temples.
What was a ziggurat for?
A ziggurat was a stepped platform that lifted the god's house toward the sky; it was not a tomb and had no interior rooms. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids, which enclosed burial chambers, the ziggurat's core is solid brick. Its job was visual and ritual: to mark the temple precinct from far across the flat plain and to place the god's dwelling at the point where earth and heaven were thought to meet.
At Ur the ziggurat was the centrepiece of a walled sacred quarter that also held storehouses, courts, the temple of Ningal and administrative buildings. Temples in Sumer were economic institutions as well as religious ones, managing land, herds, textiles and labour. The ziggurat was the most visible statement of that institution's power and of the king's role as the god's builder.
What happened to the ziggurat after Ur III?
The Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus restored the ziggurat in the 6th century BCE, more than 1,500 years after Ur-Nammu. By his time the upper stages had largely collapsed, and his workmen rebuilt the superstructure. Four clay cylinders bearing his building inscription were laid in the foundations. They record his repair of the ziggurat of Sin at Ur and include a prayer for his eldest son Belshazzar, the same name that appears in the Book of Daniel.
Those cylinders brought the site back into history. William Loftus visited the ruins in 1850 and collected inscribed bricks, and John George Taylor, the British vice-consul at Basra, dug at the ziggurat for the British Museum in the 1850s. Taylor recovered the Nabonidus cylinders in 1854, and their text, together with the brick inscriptions, identified Tell el-Muqayyar as Ur.
What did Leonard Woolley find at Ur?
Sir Leonard Woolley led the joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum at Ur from 1922 to 1934, clearing the ziggurat and its precinct and much of the surrounding city. His reconstruction drawings of the stairways and terraces still shape how the monument is pictured today.
The Royal Cemetery of Ur
From 1926 Woolley's team excavated the Royal Cemetery, a burial ground of more than 2,000 graves. He singled out 16 as “royal tombs” because of their built chambers, their wealth and the attendants buried with the principal dead. These tombs date to roughly 2600–2500 BCE, several centuries before the ziggurat was built, so the cemetery and the ziggurat belong to different eras of the city.
The tomb known as PG 800 belonged to Puabi, identified by a cylinder seal bearing her name, and held her gold headdress of leaves, rings and beads of lapis lazuli and carnelian. The so-called Great Death Pit, PG 1237, held 74 bodies, most of them women, laid out in rows with their ornaments. From it came the pair of goat figures Woolley named the “Ram in a Thicket,” after the ram in Genesis 22. The cemetery also produced several lyres decorated with bull heads. The finds were divided among the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, the British Museum in London and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
The flood layer
Woolley also cut a deep shaft below the cemetery and found a thick layer of clean, water-laid silt separating earlier and later settlement. He presented it as evidence of a great flood behind the Mesopotamian and biblical flood stories. Later archaeologists showed that comparable flood deposits at other Sumerian cities date to different periods, so the layer is now read as a local river flood, one of many on the Euphrates plain, rather than proof of a single worldwide event.
Was Ur the birthplace of Abraham?
Genesis 11:28–31 names “Ur of the Chaldeans” as the home of Abraham's family before they moved to Harran, and Woolley popularised the identification of that Ur with this one in his book Ur of the Chaldees (1929). The identification is traditional and widely accepted, but it is not proven. No inscription at Ur mentions Abraham, and the Chaldeans were a people who appear in southern Mesopotamia only in the first millennium BCE, long after the period usually assigned to the patriarchs, so the label reflects the time the text was written. Some scholars have argued for a northern Ur, often placed around Urfa in southern Turkey, near Harran.
How much of Genesis draws on older Mesopotamian material is a central question in Billy Carson's reading, set out below.
Why do parts of the ziggurat look new?
Parts look new because they are. In the 1980s the Iraqi government rebuilt the lowest facade and the main stairway in new brick, so the crisp lower walls visitors see are a modern reconstruction over the ancient core. The structure was damaged in the 1991 Gulf War by gunfire, and bomb craters lie nearby.
In 2016 Ur was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, with Uruk and Eridu, as part of “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq,” a mixed cultural and natural site. On 6 March 2021, during the first papal visit to Iraq, Pope Francis held an interreligious meeting on the plain of Ur within sight of the ziggurat. He honoured Abraham as a shared ancestor of Jews, Christians and Muslims and said that “the greatest blasphemy is to profane his name by hating our brothers and sisters.”
Is the Ziggurat of Ur the Tower of Babel?
No. The Babel story in Genesis 11 is usually linked to Etemenanki, the ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon, not to Ur. Babylon's tower stood roughly 240 km to the northwest and was rebuilt on a grand scale by Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century BCE. What Ur offers is the best-preserved example of the building type, which makes it the clearest picture of what the tower in Genesis may have looked like, with its baked brick and bitumen exactly as Genesis 11:3 describes. The full story is in the guide to the Tower of Babel and Etemenanki.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson places ziggurats inside his larger argument that the Hebrew Bible reworks older Sumerian and Babylonian sources. In his live stream covered in Was the Bible Copied from Ancient Texts?, he describes the building of a ziggurat as “the Tower of Babel incident, which comes out of the Sumerian tablets,” and ties it to the Enuma Elish, where Marduk founds Babylon as the gate of the gods. Mainstream scholarship agrees that the Babel story reflects Mesopotamian temple towers and plays on Babylon's name, though it usually points to Etemenanki at Babylon rather than to Ur.
In a separate live stream, covered in Underground City Beneath the Pyramids, Carson relays a claim he heard from an Egyptian guide that tunnels beneath Giza run for miles, with some said to reach as far as the ziggurat of Ur in Iraq. He connects the idea to the Sumerian accounts of Enki building a kingdom beneath the earth. He presents this as a report and a question worth investigating. There is no archaeological evidence for such tunnels: Giza and Ur are about 1,400 km apart in a straight line, and the ziggurat's excavated core is solid brick with no passages.
Carson's wider framework, in which the Anunnaki of the Sumerian texts were real beings, is developed across the Anunnaki topic hub. Readers can weigh his reading against the brickwork, the inscriptions and the excavation reports set out above.
Watch, read and go deeper
The 4BK TV series Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed is where Billy Carson develops his Sumerian reading at length. For the wider picture, start with the Anunnaki topic hub, then follow the Babel thread through the Tower of Babel guide and the older temple tradition at Eridu. Woolley's own Ur of the Chaldees remains a readable first-hand account of the dig.
Frequently asked questions
How old is the Ziggurat of Ur?
The ziggurat was built around 2100 BCE by Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, and completed by his son Shulgi. That makes it a little over 4,000 years old. Its upper stages were rebuilt by the Babylonian king Nabonidus in the 6th century BCE, and the lowest facade and main stairway were reconstructed in the 1980s.
Who was the Ziggurat of Ur dedicated to?
It was the platform for the temple of Nanna, the Sumerian moon god, known in Akkadian as Sin. Nanna was the patron god of Ur, and his consort Ningal had a temple in the same precinct. The shrine on the summit has not survived.
Is there anything inside the Ziggurat of Ur?
No. The ziggurat is a solid core of mud brick encased in baked brick, with no chambers or tunnels inside. The only internal features are narrow channels through the brickwork, generally read as drainage and ventilation. Ziggurats were platforms for temples, not tombs.
Is the Royal Cemetery the same age as the ziggurat?
No. The royal tombs Woolley excavated date to about 2600–2500 BCE, several centuries before Ur-Nammu built the ziggurat. They belong to an earlier phase of the city, and the treasures from them, including Puabi's headdress and the Ram in a Thicket, are not grave goods of the ziggurat's builders.
Can you visit the Ziggurat of Ur today?
Yes. The site lies near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq and is part of a UNESCO World Heritage property inscribed in 2016. Travel conditions in Iraq change, so current official advice should be checked before planning a trip.
Sources and further reading
- Leonard Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees (1929), and the expedition reports Ur Excavations, vol. II: The Royal Cemetery (1934).
- Leonard Woolley, Ur Excavations, vol. V: The Ziggurat and Its Surroundings (1939).
- Richard L. Zettler and Lee Horne (eds.), Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur (University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998).
- Harriet Crawford, Ur: The City of the Moon God (Bloomsbury, 2015).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “The Ahwar of Southern Iraq: Refuge of Biodiversity and the Relict Landscape of the Mesopotamian Cities” (inscribed 2016).
- Pope Francis, address at the Interreligious Meeting on the Plain of Ur, 6 March 2021 (Holy See).
- Genesis 11 and 22, in the New Revised Standard Version.
