Читать книгу Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder - Страница 84

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.”

Because of its mud-brick construction, most Sumerian architecture has disappeared, and gauging the original grandeur of it from the ruins left behind is difficult. However, the epic Gilgamesh gives a brief description of the glittering beauty of a Sumerian temple in Uruk:

 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.