Why were the ziggurat built?
“The ziggurat was probably not the place of public worship or ceremonies, but rather the house of God. Through the ziggurat, the gods could be close to mankind. The cults in the ziggurats were performed and witnessed only by the priests, and their assignments were to provide for all the needs of the gods. There are several ideas about the symbolic meaning behind the ziggurats. One is that they were reconstructions of the mountain temples that the new inhabitants to Mesopotamia used to erect while they lived in either the Taurus (now Turkey) or the Zagros Mountains (now Iran). Another theory tells that the ziggurat was a reconstruction of the cosmic mountain from the creation myths. A third theory tells us that the ziggurat was built as a bridge between heaven and earth. A fourth theory is linked with Egypt, where the predating step pyramids have many similarities to the ziggurat, and people and ideas moved between distant regions even in ancient times. All four theories can be true at
