Ziggurats, Axis Mundi And Strong Connection To Religion In Mesopotamia

A. Sutherland  – AncientPages.com – The ancient civilization of the Sumer still hides many secrets. Representatives of this unique culture left behind many art pieces, pottery, writing hydraulic engineering, and monumental ziggurats, which were artificial mountains of sunbaked brick with outside staircases that tapered toward a shrine at the top.

The Sumerian tradition of building ziggurats was adopted by other Mesopotamia civilizations such as the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians.

The ziggurat, according to the Sumerians, was a cosmic axis. As Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a Romanian historian of religion, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago, maintained, the Sumerians tried to live in the presence of the sacred because they “desired access to the ultimate reality and the power of the sacred.”

The Axis Mundi, the vertical feature, was considered the center of the world that linked all three cosmic levels. Instead of a tree, pole, or pillar, the Axia Mundi might be “a ladder or a mountain.” Beliefs in heavenly mountains included the idea that ‘our world’ is holy because it is the place closest to heaven. Eliade suggested that temples might be seen as equivalents of sacred mountains. Indeed, some, such as the Babylonian ziggurat, were built to be artificial holy mountains.

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