The explanation seems to be that the Sumerians were originally a hill folk, accustomed, as all hill folk are, to putting up their temples and their altars on “high places” and “on every high hill ” when they moved down into the plain of Mesopotamia, where the flat alluvium stretches unrelieved to the horizon, they felt the need of the “high place” where God could be properly worshipped and so set to and built artificial mountains whereby man might approach nearer to heaven. The amount of labour that went to the building of such a tower was immense, and one wonders why it should have been incurred so regularly in every great town. They were great solid structures rising up tier above tier, each stage smaller than the one below, so that the whole had the effect of a stepped platform stairways or sloping ramps led from the ground level to the summit, and thereon was set a little shrine dedicated to the city’s patron god. In each of the chief cities of Mesopotamia there stood of old one of these ziggurats or staged towers whose ruins today dominate the lower mounds that were temples or palaces. The Ziggurat of Ur in the process of excavation. During the whole of our digging season (1923-24) the greater number of the workmen have been engaged upon the clearing of the Ziggurat, and before the work closed down this, the most imposing of the monuments of Ur, was fully exposed as it had not been since its destruction in the fifth century B.
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