Engineering the Ancient World by Dick Parry

Author:Dick Parry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

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ZIGGURATS, RITUAL MOUNDS AND AN ANCIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ICON

As the Tigris and Euphrates, boosted by their tributaries, descended from the mountains to the nearly level Mesopotamian plain the rush of water slowed, allowing silts to be deposited on the riverbeds, raising their levels and causing periodic flooding. Sometimes these floodwaters swamped the works of man and buried them beneath yet more layers of silt. As a result of this silt deposition the Persian Gulf has retreated: the ancient town of Ur, excavated by Woolley, was at the head of the Gulf at the time of its First Dynasty, around 2700 BC, but is now over 200km inland. Taking his excavations down to almost 20m depth, Woolley found an ancient land surface of stiff green clay overlain by a metre of ‘mud’ which consisted largely of organic material. Remains of the earliest settlers in the area were found in this organic layer. Known as the al Ubaid period, and dating before about 3750 BC, the remains consisted of pottery in abundance, flints, clay figurines and flat (accidentally burnt) bricks. Immediately above this Woolley found a uniform stratum of ‘clean silt’, 3.3m thick, the origins of which he attributes to the middle reaches of the Euphrates River. This was overlain, in turn, by 5.5m of pottery fragments, with the kilns which produced them, embedded in the rising layer and, finally, a topmost layer, 6m thick, made up of eight layers of the remains of mud-brick houses. The Early Dynastic Period of Ur, dating from about 2700 BC, coincides with the top three housing layers.

Woolley identifies the natural silt layer as being the product of a ‘Flood’, from which may derive the story of the biblical flood. He also points out that the water needed to deposit this 3.3m layer would have been at least 8m deep, which, on the flat Mesopotamian plain, would have covered an area nearly 500km long and 160km wide, embracing the whole of the fertile land between the Elamite Mountains and the Syrian Desert. Only a few settlements, sitting on their own built-up mounds, could have survived. In order to deposit substantial depths of silts the inundation must have lasted many years, and may have been caused by rivers such as the Karun discharging massive amounts of silts into the Persian Gulf, forming a bar across it, behind which the silt-laden waters from the Tigris and Euphrates banked up and spread across the land.

It is apposite to ask why the ancient civilisations, which arose on the Mesopotamian plains, were so fixated with building enormously heavy structures on these soft alluvial soils. Strabo described the nature of the earth aptly: ‘The soil is deep and soft; it yields so easily that the trenches and canals are choked or silted up and the plains near the coast form lakes and marshes filled with weeds.’ Perhaps, even more pertinently, it might be asked how these peoples succeeded in building heavy structures on these soft soils.

Around thirty ziggurat sites have been identified in

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