What’s your knowledge of these two historical sites?
I’ve spent so much time in Stonehenge (when you could walk among the stones) and Avebury/West Kennet, and I’d love to see Newgrange and some of the Scottish sites, esp the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkneys, but today I’ve been struck by the age of the places in title of this thread.
I saw an interesting ‘conspiracy’ theory about the Tower of Babel being the Ziggurat of Ur, but wonder what other apocryphal stories Chronners might know about these sites.
On more positive vibes,
There is a wealth of ancient sites that we are just starting to uncover in Turkey - Çatalhöyük & Göbeklitepe being the original big finds of
really ancient stuff. But other sites, some older than Gobeklitepe are currently being investigated. Karahan Tepe which is close by, has similar finds and architecture. Turkey at around 11,000-7,000 BCE was a really busy place!
Ziggurats are interesting. I understand that, like the Egyptians, the Sumerians believed that land first got created by a mound coming out of the primal waters. (This makes sense, at least to me, as Sumer came to be in the marshlands of lower Mesopotamia - land coming out of water.) So the first temples holding their gods probably started around mounds, later generations building more and more around the site until they became massive and then ziggurats.
They are really the abode of the gods. Each city had a resident deity and as their myths go, when the gods found themselves on Earth, none of them wanted to do any hard work. So they created humans to do the building and farming (I believe the gods of the pantheon killed a god and used his essence to animate clay in a sort of 1/4 to 3/4 mixture. One could see that god essence as 'spirit' or 'soul'.) So the gods would site atop their ziggurat (unless it was the god of death Nergal who resided underneath his temple in Kutha, in the Sumerian underworld, of course!) and the temple's priests would bring the produce of the land for their 'feasts' and give offerings etc.
Although the ziggurats were massive, they did not represent hills or mountains. Other cultures did build large pyramids, see the Tucume in Peru, that did represent mountains (I suppose you could not miss mountains if you are living amongst the Andes.)
Interestingly the Egyptian pyramids were, in the builders minds, representations of beams of light, coming down from heaven. They are a bit squat, but that's the limitations of trying to stack up millions of blocks of heavy stone together. If you look at the original angle they tried to build the bent pyramid you can see what sort of shape they were aiming for, before discovering that it just wasn't possible with the technology they had. It would have been a bit more shaft of light shaped!
EDIT: Oh, try and find an account of the stuff that Leonard Woolley found when he excavated at Ur in the 1930s. The big pieces he found (The Standard of Ur, the bull-headed Lyre and the Ram in the Thicket) are all in the British Museum, but it's a fascinating story. I would also recommend Irving Finkel's book
The First Ghosts, which has a chapter on the burials at Ur, but also a lot more on what the Sumerians and Babylonians actually thought about their world, esp. with regards to Ghosts!
