The Ziggurat (Stepped Temple-Tower)
A mountain of brick climbing toward heaven — the city's stairway to its god.
Also: ziggurat · ziqqurratu · temple tower · Etemenanki · Tower of Babel · stepped tower · Eunir
The ziggurat was the most striking monument of a Mesopotamian city: a massive, stepped tower of mud-brick, rising in terraces with a small shrine at its summit. It was not a building people entered like a hall but a solid platform — conceived as a bond and meeting-point between the human and divine realms, set beside the god's temple. The most famous, Etemenanki ('House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth') at Babylon, gave rise to the biblical image of the Tower of Babel. Names like 'House Linking Heaven and Earth' express the ziggurat's purpose: to join the city to the sky.
In short
The ziggurat (Akkadian ziqqurratu, from zaqāru 'to build high'), the stepped, solid-brick temple-tower that stood at the heart of a major city, conceived as a bond between earth and heaven.
Where it’s found
Ziggurat references across temple hymns and royal building inscriptions; Etemenanki in Neo-Babylonian inscriptions (akkadian-pending). Sumerian temple-platform language in 'The temple hymns' (ETCSL 4.80.1, in corpus)
How the idea developed across Sumer, Babylon & Assyria
Ziggurats develop from earlier temple platforms; the great ones (Ur's under Ur-Namma, c. 2100 BCE; Babylon's Etemenanki) are Ur III and later. Their meaning is consistently 'bond/stairway of heaven and earth,' as their ceremonial names (Etemenanki, Eunir) declare.