Mesopotamia-The Ziggurats

I have been learning about Mesopotamia in school. We then picked a topic to study that related to Mesopotamia, and I chose to study The Ziggurats. We then had to create a question about our topic. My question is:  Why did the Sumerian people decide to build the Ziggurats? In the second paragraph, I will slowly reveal the answer.

A Ziggurat is what Sumerians called a temple. A Ziggurat was a large, pyramid-shaped tower. Some of the largest ones have been known to be over seven stories tall! The biggest and tallest Ziggurat that didn’t crumble is 335 feet (102 meters) on each side and people who studied this Ziggurat estimated it to have been over 150 feet (45 meters) tall when it was first built. Most of the taller ones were found in bigger, wealthier cities. Each floor of the Ziggurats is smaller than the one below it, why it was a lot like a pyramid. The land around a Ziggurat would often include large areas of farmland that was controlled by the temple of that area. A Ziggurat is a building, so you could have walked in it. The Sumerians would furnish the inside of some Ziggurats with beautiful statues and paintings. The priests lived and ruled out of the Ziggurats. The Sumerians believed that only the priests could communicate with their gods. Some of their gods and goddesses were: Ki the goddess of earth, Utu, god of the sun and of justice, Ninhursag, who the Sumerians thought was Mother Earth, or the source of all life, and Enki who was the lord of both water and wisdom.

I have now finished my project, and am now going to reflect on it. First off, I will say that the easiest thing was probably this blog post. I say this because I had already typed a lot of this and just had to format it to be three paragraphs and add a sentence or two. My power point (which was my physical project, we had to do create a question, research our topic, write a blog entry, create a physical project, and read and respond to at least four other blogs.) was the second hardest. I say this was the second hardest because reading a responding to other blogs I thought was the hardest. I thought that this was the hardest because I had to do my project and blog post (both are due today or 10/14/11 -we have to finish them this morning.) first and the reading and responding isn’t due today (or 10/14/11). I will try to post my power point on my blog so everyone can look at it. Hope to post something else really soon!

My Bibliography:

“The Civilization of Sumer/Sumerian Religion.” Pearson My World History. 110-14. Print.

“Sumerian Gods and Goddesses.” World History International: World History Essays From Prehistory To The Present. Web. 14 Oct. 2011. <http://history-world.org/sumerian_gods_and_goddesses.htm>.

 

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