I recently read a 1964 piece on ancient architectural history by the architectural historian Siegfried Gideon, The Origins of Monumental Architecture. Gideon writes about how the earliest monuments of ancient Mesopotamia, before the rise of later empires such as Ur or Assyria, placed the majority of focus on the interior architecture. The greatest level of detail, delicacy, and functionality was placed within the inner sanctums of the mounds, where furniture for living and worship commingled in the dark, cool, subterranean space. The deeper one goes into the mound, the holier the space becomes.

Of course, this changed at some point in the ancient days – the layers of ruins atop the buried mounds grow taller and taller until we begin seeing the iconic ziggurats we associate with these civilizations. These structures placed almost no focus on interiors – the key element of these designs were their prominence. The details and furniture of worship, such as altars and benches, were built at the zenith, with minimal interior design. 

The implication is that, in the early mound monuments, people spent their time inside them, cozy, worshipping together and living life in this holy hidden space under the mound. In this way, deities and worship were kept close to human life, to the home – people gathered and lived their lives within the very same places they worshipped and the holiest places were also the coziest, the deepest, the darkest, the safest, and the spaces in which people spent most of their domestic lives. For some reason, our monumental architecture began growing taller and taller and less and less interior and we never really stopped doing that.

Gideon argues that the ziggurats and pyramids of the early great empires started a history-spanning trend of a continually growing distance between everyday human life and the holiness of God or whichever deities. As we build higher and higher we stray further and further from what is holy – never again building mounds under which to live among our communities and alongside our objects of ritual and worship.

Below are some images, drawings, and descriptions of the mounds at Tepe Gawra, copied and pasted from Siegfried Gideon’s work The Origins of Monumental Architecture. Feel free to skim, it is somewhat dense architectural history writing from 1964.

“To understand the evolution of protohistoric architecture it is not enough simply to compare the ground plans of important buildings. In one case in particular we are able to observe the relation of a temple to its immediate environment: the three temples at Tepe Gawra, stratum XIII. It was recognized immediately that this discovery was of fundamental significance for the earliest cultural history of the Orient (Moortgat, 1945, p. 42). Here in Tepe Gawra XIII one can recognize more vividly than almost anywhere else the leap forward of this early architecture to a monumental form, and gain an understanding of the handling of interior space.

The situation is approximately as follows: Tepe Gawra, fifteen miles northeast of Mosul, consists today of two mounds divided by a depression. These mounds doubtless still contain many interesting secrets, particularly in the lowest levels where, unfortunately, excavation was very limited. Speiser made some test diggings here in 1927. Actual excavations were undertaken between 1931 and 1938 by him and others under the sponsorship of the University of Pennsylvania, and the results were published in two handsome and meticulous volumes (Speiser, 1935; Tobler, 1950).

The excavations extended through twenty levels: the first nine covering the entire site, the rest taking in less and less of the area. Tepe Gawra, as we have seen, was a place of continuous settlement throughout long ages. It was abandoned around 1500 B.C. — and forever. Here no conqueror raised a ziggurat over the ruins.

It was the open plan of the three temples of stratum XIII and the unexpected architectural sensitivity of one of them that prompted me to visit the site and see it with my own eyes. Naturally I could not expect to see the remains of any buildings, for each stratum had to be completely cleared to allow the one below it to be examined. The site now again lies covered with turf and grazed by sheep, as it had for more than three thousand years before it was excavated. Its situation in the landscape, however, remains unaltered. To the south the relics of past ages are again buried in the sand, for storms have swiftly obliterated what the spade so painstakingly revealed.” (Siegfried Gideon. The Origins of Monumental Architecture. 193-194)

“The structure of the Tepe Gawra mound itself shows a close and intimate grouping of temples and private houses, the latter often astonishingly spacious. If it was in fact a temple settlement, as has been assumed, it can throw some light upon the first beginnings of this system. The site was not so completely organized as, for example, the later site of Khafaje, where the temple storerooms and workshops were built between the double walls of the great temple courtyard (Frankfort, 1933b, p. 68). At Tepe Gawra the relationship between temple and dwelling houses is more like that in small medieval towns than in the forbidding Assyrian temple-fortresses.” (Gideon. 194-195)

“Of the three, it is the northern temple in which the inception of monumental architecture is most unmistakably displayed. The delicacy and sensitivity of its surface modeling were unsurpassed by any later Mesopotamian building. As in a bud, this modest temple (8.5 x 12.25 m.) enfolded all that was later to be expanded to gigantic dimensions in the great centers of power and administration, Ur and Uruk…The most sacred part of the northern temple was its spacious open cella at the northern end. Its encircling walls were even more strongly modeled than others in the building. The jutting freestanding panels merged the central hall with the cella and at the same time created two large side niches—pockets of space. The articulation of the walls in the rest of the building seems merely a preparation for that of the cella. The pair of projecting buttresses on the central axis still have only two pilasters, but the buttresses to right and left of them are bordered by four pilaster shafts. This is a tremendous development from the clumsy buttresses of other temples in the strata immediately beneath.

The architect of the northern temple must have possessed a feeling for the total unity of a building, a feeling for the interrelation between the interior and exterior faces of the walls. The cella buttresses with many pilasters penetrated the wall and repeated their form on its outer surface. Their fourfold pilasters were also echoed in all corners of the chapel-like niches. All in all, the modeling and organization of the walls of this temple exhibit the refinement and delicacy that exist only in monuments of great architecture.” (Gideon. 197-198)

“But the forms of both pottery and architecture grew from the same ruling principle of the time: abstraction. The origins of monumental architecture are rooted in abstraction. This can explain the organization and division of its interior space. Both the articulation of the temple walls and the surface decoration of the pottery vessels testify to this, as can be observed from any random fragment. In stratum XIII at Tepe Gawra, a beaker was found whose decoration the excavator described as "admirably balanced, and well adapted to the contours of the beaker to which it was applied/' He then added: "The design suggests a comparison with the triangular windows and long, vertical grooves to be found on the incense burner from this stratum. . . . It is not improbable that we have in the central decoration of this beaker a stylized representation of an entrance to one of the temples" (Tobler, 1950, p. 143). Pottery was not a model for architecture, nor was architecture a model for pottery. The basis and background for both embraced a common conception: abstraction and symbolism.” (Gideon. 201)

If you have made it this far, great job, please dm me and let me know – I am truly impressed with your dedication. I hope you thought about these ancient mounds and how people might have lived in and beside them.

Perhaps you even pictured yourself as a worshipper underneath a mound, gathered closely with your village community, worshipping alongside your family and friends, cooking and eating, and living your life in this cozy, cool, dark mound room, deep within the inner sanctum of an ancient monument, which to ancient you would just be a place everyone you know hangs out.

It's important to remember that the people who designed and built these monumental mounds and lived their lives in them were fundamentally just like us, only in a radically different context. It was also their civilization that led to the formation of the Abrahamic religions, the eventual global dominance of monotheism, and, in a sense, the formation of the West, its mythology, its symbols, and, indeed, its monuments.

Isn’t it kind of cool to look at these ancient monuments and trace how they developed and grew over time? But doesn’t it also make you kind of sad? It makes me wonder whether people will ever build mounds for living and worshipping in again. When we started building higher and higher, with less focus on our interiors, we strayed from what was most important.