Lecture IX. The Ritual Of The Temple. 413
Its first name, Ê-kur,“the house of the earth”or“mountain,”
continued always to cling to it, even though the original meaning
of the name was forgotten, and it had come to signify a temple
in the later sense of the word.
The temple was the sign and token of the reclamation of the
primitive Babylonian swamp. Before it could be erected, it was
needful to construct a platform of solid earth and brickwork,
which should rise above the pestiferous marsh, and serve as a
foundation for the building. The Sumerians called the platform
the ki-gal or“great place”; it was the first place of human or
divine habitation wrested from the waters of the swamp, and it
marked the triumph of civilised man over nature. Emphatically,
therefore, it was a“great place,”a solid resting-place in a world
of water and slime.
On the platform the temple buildings were piled. There was
no stone in Babylonia; it was a land of mud, and of mud
bricks, accordingly, baked in the sun, the temple of the god was
constructed. What was lost in beauty or design was gained in
solidity. The Babylonian temples were huge masses of brick,
square for the most part, and with the four corners facing the
four cardinal points. It was only exceptionally that the four sides,
instead of the four corners, were made to front the four“winds.”
These masses of brick were continually growing in height. [450]
The crude bricks soon disintegrated, and the heavy rains of a
Babylonian winter quickly reduced them to their primeval mud.
Constant restorations were therefore needed, and the history
of a Babylonian temple is that of perpetual repairs. Efforts
were made to keep the walls from crumbling away by building
buttresses against them, and the bricks were cemented together
with bitumen. But all precautions were in vain. A period of
national decay inevitably brought with it the decay also of the
temples, and a return of prosperity meant their restoration on the
disintegrated ruins of the older edifice. The artificial platform
became atelor mound.