and accompanied by dancers, singers, and instrumentalists
to the open-air court. Here the god met visiting gods, while
the assembled worshipers, including common people, could
glimpse the shrine and ask the god within for oracular re-
sponses.
MESOPOTAMIA. Our knowledge of Mesopotamian temples
is seriously limited by the fact that they were built in mud-
brick. For this reason, only a few of them have been pre-
served above the level of the foundations, and none in its en-
tire elevation.
Temples from the fourth millennium BCE have been
documented. They could be very large, and they had general-
ly a tripartite plan, consisting of a cella (the space that con-
tains the cult statue) at the center and subsidiary rooms off
either side. The cella included altars and offering-tables, and
it could be entered from different sides of the building. Very
often, multiple recesses and buttresses were used to add some
variety to the exterior (and sometime even to the interior)
of the building, by creating contrasts in light and shadow.
In plan, the temples of the third millennium BCE are
characterized by their continuity with the preceding period.
There was, however, a marked tendency to set them apart
from the rest of the settlement. They were constructed on
top of high platforms and enclosed with high walls. Some-
times there was an outer enclosure that included, along with
the temple and the inner enclosure, other shrines and proba-
bly offices for the temple administration. In the inner court
around the temple there were stores and workshops: their lo-
cation gives clues about the part played by temples in the
economy of this region. In these temples the gods were be-
lieved to be present in their cult statues, which stood in front
of a niche at one end of the cella. Near the niche were an
altar and an offering-table, and along the walls stood the stat-
ues of the worshipers, represented with their hands clasped.
Near the end of the third millennium, the habit of set-
ting the temples apart, in a high position, culminated in the
placing of some of them at the top level of ziggurats, the most
conspicuous landmarks of Mesopotamian towns. Whether
all ziggurats had temples at their top level, however, remains
unclear, because of the poor state of preservation of these
monuments. For the same reason, we know nothing of the
architecture of these “high temples”—as in the case of the
ziggurat built by Urnammu at Ur, which is generally restored
with a single room, but incorrectly so. In the absence of spe-
cific texts, it is also difficult to have an idea of the rituals per-
formed in these “high temples,” or to understand what corre-
lation they might have had with the buildings found at the
base of the ziggurats in the same sacred enclosure. From He-
rodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BCE, we are
informed that in the ziggurat at Babylon one of the rituals
was a sacred marriage between a priestess and the god, which
took place at night. Yet, this was clearly not the only ritual
performed in the temple, but only the one that captured the
attention of the historian.
After the fall of Ur, a temple of Ishtar-Kititum was built
at Ishchali (nineteenth to the eighteenth century BCE). The
large structure (about 100 by 65 meters) stood on a platform
and had a rectangular plan articulated around two open
courts. Three entrances framed by towers gave access to the
interior: two on the south side, leading into the open courts,
and one on the east side, in relation to a secondary temple
located to the north of the main complex. The main shrine
was located at the western end and was elevated with respect
to the rest of the temple. This shrine was accessible from the
smaller court, and consisted of an ante-cella, a broad, shallow
cella with a niche for the cult statue, and a treasury on the
back. This building condensed the previous, Mesopotamian
tradition, but it also introduced features that would be char-
acteristic of temples built in Mesopotamia during the Assyri-
an (c. 1350–612 BCE) and Neo-Babylonian periods (c. 612–
539 BCE).
AEGEAN IN THE BRONZE AGE. Places set aside for the cult
of the divinity can be recognized in the material remains of
the Bronze Age, in Crete as well as on the Greek mainland.
The Cretans worshiped at shrines of various types. Natural
caves were used for the deposit of offerings. The peaks of cer-
tain mountains were also sites of sanctuaries—some simply
defined by enclosure walls, others given a number of rooms,
usually rectangular—in which large stones served as altars.
Thick layers of ash show that bonfires were lit, which would
have been visible from sanctuary to sanctuary. The use of
these sanctuaries ended abruptly, perhaps as a consequence
of the cataclysmic eruption of the volcano of Thera in the
fifteenth century BCE. Finally, there were sanctuaries in the
palaces of the Cretan kings, shrine rooms marked by central
pillars, with the symbolic double ax. These rooms were small
and shallow, functioning as a focus for offerings rather than
for any form of congregational ritual. It is likely that other
parts of the palace complexes served ritual functions, includ-
ing the bull-leaping depicted in Cretan art, but here the in-
teraction of religion and architecture is, at best, uncertain:
clearly none of it constitutes a temple in the normal sense.Sanctuaries on the Greek mainland were probably influ-
enced by Cretan practice. One at Mycenae consisted of a set
of small, irregularly shaped rooms containing benches on
which offerings could be placed, along with terracotta figu-
rines apparently intended as representations of the deity, a
goddess. There was also a mural painting of her. Such shrines
are found in the fortified sites close to the walls and gateways;
they seem to have had a special role in the protection of the
community. The possibility of religious functions in the pal-
aces cannot be excluded.
GREECE. There are few remaining traces of religious practice
during the Protogeometric period (1050–900 BCE), when
cult buildings were generally small. An exception is the large
building with apsidal plan surrounded by wooden posts at
Lefkandi, in Euboea (1000 BCE). The function of this short-
lived building was funerary, for in the main space were bur-
ied a warrior, a woman, and a number of horses.9062 TEMPLE: ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN AND MEDITERRANEAN TEMPLES