Temples, Shrines, and Ziggurats of Uruk

Uruk

Several first-millennium-BC lists of temples and ziggurats preserve the Sumerian names of religious structures at Uruk (Sumerian Unug; modern Warka; biblical Erech; Greek Orchoi), a large and important southern Mesopotamian city situated ca. 15 km east of the modern city of as-Samāwa and about 12 km east of the present course of the Euphrates River. Those aforementioned texts mention that Eanna and Egiparimin were the temple and ziggurat of the goddess Ištar (in her manifestation as Bēlet-Eanna, "the (Divine) Lady of Eanna"). Unfortunately, the relevant passages of those same texts recording information about Uruk's other divine patron, the sky-god Anu, are not preserved. Numerous other texts — including epics, hymns, liturgies, myths, prayers, and royal inscriptions — record the names of many different temples and shrines at Uruk, most of which are listed below.

Rev. of K 2053A+

Reverse of K 02053a + K 04337, col. iv of which contains the "Kuyunjik Ziggurat List." The name of Ištar's ziggurat at Uruk, Egiparimin, is mentioned in col. iv 20. Image adapted from the CDLI.

Alphabetical list of temples at Uruk

At the heart of Uruk — which developed from the joining of two earlier mounds — were the Eanna and Anu districts. The former was dedicated to the goddess Inanna/Ištar, was walled off from the rest of city, and contained several buildings, workshops, while the latter consisted of a single massive terrace and was dedicated to the god An/Anu. Until the fifth century BC, Eanna was Uruk's principal temple. After that time, the local pantheon was reorganized and the sky-god Anu and his consort Antu supplanted Ištar as the city's principal divine patrons. In the Seleucid Period, the massive bīt rēš (Rēš Temple) and Eʾešgal (or possibly called Eirigal) temples dominated the landscape. Several texts dealing with the New Year's Festival from the Seleucid Period record details about the Urukian New Year's festival.

At the present time, the only temple discussed on BTMAo is Ištar's temple Eanna. In due course, the site will provide information about the Rēš temple and Eʾešgal.

Banner image: visualization of principal temples of Uruk during the Seleucid Period overlaid on a satellite image of the site (left); photograph of the White Temple and ziggurat (center); and reconstruction of the Rēš Temple during the Seleucid Period (right). The left and right images are from the Uruk Visualisation Project (© artefacts-berlin.de) and the center image is from the Madain Project.

Jamie Novotny

Jamie Novotny, 'Temples, Shrines, and Ziggurats of Uruk', Babylonian Temples and Monumental Architecture online (BTMAo), The BTMAo Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, [http://oracc.org/btmao/Uruk/]

 
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BTMAo 2019-. BTMAo is based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department) - Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East. BTMAo is part of the four-year project Living Among Ruins: The Experience of Urban Abandonment in Babylonia (September 2019 to October 2023), which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung as part of the program "Lost Cities. Wahrnehmung von und Leben mit verlassenen Städten in den Kulturen der Welt," coordinated by Martin Zimmermann and Andreas Beyer. Content released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license, 2007-.
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