The Staircase at the Ziggurat at Ur

JACOB'S "LADDER"?

For over a thousand years people have been reading and illustrating the story about how Jacob slept near some stones in the desert one night and dreamed about angels going up and down a ladder that stretched from earth to heaven. At least that's how the story was told in the King James Bible of 1611 and for hundreds of years before and after. (To read that venerable version of the story, and see and hear some of the paintings and songs it inspired, click here.) Most modern translations of the story say it was not a ladder but a stairway that Jacob dreamed about. Here, for example, is how the New Jewish Version translates it:

Jacob then dreams the Lord is standing beside him, promising that his descendants shall multiply like "the dust of the earth." Still shaking, he wakes and says: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.” (v 17)

What Jacob saw in his dream was not a ladder but a ramp or stairway like the one shown here - "a stairway set on the ground" whose "top reached to the sky." It is true that the Hebrew word sulam, whose root sense is to "raise" or "heap up," can mean a ladder as well as a ramp or stairway. But try to imagine a troop of "angels of God going up and down" on a ladder! Jacob himself calls it "the gateway to heaven." Which exactly describes the stairway you see before you.

THE STAIRWAY FROM EARTH TO HEAVEN...

This is the main staircase of the ziggurat of Ur, built over 4000 years ago in ancient Sumer, on a site in southern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers once flowed into the Persian Gulf.

The "stones" you see are not really stones. They are bricks. There is no stone to quarry in that region; but there is plenty of mud. With straw as a binder, the Sumerians made bricks of mud, baked them in the sun, then piled them up into a solid block 36 feet high on a rectangular base that could cover two football fields. Layers of reed-mats reinforced the mud-bricks, like steel rods in modern reinforced concrete. On top of this platform they built a second, smaller block, and on that a third, smaller still, resulting in a three-stage man-made mountain.

Connecting these three stages on the front side was a series of three stairways. The first and longest was the stairway you see here, as it was rebuilt 16 centuries later by Nabonidus in the 6th century BC. (At the top of this first stairway you confront the front wall of the first gateway, leading to a second level, whose ruins you glimpse just beyond). Originally the entire long three-stage stairway led to a little temple at the top. Nothing is left of it now. But it seems to have been built as a sort of royal wedding chapel and honeymoon suite, complete with a kingsize bed. In fact the whole temple-tower looked like a three-tiered wedding cake.

... AND FROM HEAVEN TO EARTH

Thanks to Leonard Woolley's reconstruction of this temple-tower, we can picture what the New Year Festival was like at Ur in the reign of Ur-Nammu about 2100 BC, when the moon-god descended to his temple to unite with a mortal princess.

New Year's Day at the Ziggurat of Ur. From a painting by John McDermott © 1967 National Geographic.

Represented by his golden statue, and accompanied by a procession of priests and musicians, the moon god Nanna-Sin is paraded on his throne toward the long staircase leading to his blue-clad temple at the top. He wears a fringed sheepskin robe and a high-god's triple crown of bull horns. In his right hand he holds the tools of his rule: a rod and a ring, or rather a rod and reel - the measuring rod and measuring line of the Architect and Master Builder, first of the world, and then of Ur, the world's first city. What will happen at the summit? If we can trust Herodotus (called both the Father of History and the Father of Lies), the god himself will descend from heaven and, in a sacred union of heaven and earth, of the divine and human, he (perhaps impersonated by the king) will sleep with a beautiful princess on a golden bed.

BRICKS AND MORTAR PROTECT THE CORE

To protect their mountain of mud from washing away in the rain, the Sumerians surfaced it over with a "frosting" or façade of oven-baked bricks set in a mortar of tar (the black lines you see between the bricks in the top photo) - a natural asphalt found throughout Mesopotamia. (Unlike the oil deep underground, the bituminous tar lies on the surface.)

Despite this protective skin, over the centuries rain and frost got in, and the man-made mountain began to dissolve, like a sand castle on the beach when the tide comes in. Sandstorms swept it over it, partially burying the ruin.

Even so, the ruin was impressive.

NABONIDUS' SEVEN-STORY MOUNTAIN

So impressive that later Assyrian and Babylonian kings were moved to repair it. One was Nabonidus, ruler of Babylon in the Sixth Century BC. He retreaded the steps you see here, and added four more levels, to turn the old three-story Sumerian relic into an upscale Babylonian skyscraper - a seven-stage temple-tower - the fabled "seven-story mountain" of the Bible?

An Ancient Skyscraper: The Seven-Story Mountain. The Ur Ziggurat after Nabonidus added 4 more stories to the original 3-story ziggurat in the 6th c BC. Drawing by Leonard Wooley.

FROM MUD TO MUD, and DUST UNTO DUST?

The ruined ziggurat at Ur

The ziggurat at Ur from the rear