Build the temple tower as a solid stepped mass of brick, each stage set back on the one below, with a shrine on its summit and stairs climbing its principal face.
Rules · Proportion · Façades · Modules
The tower as high as it is wide
Build the temple tower in seven levels on a square base, the first two stages tall and the upper four low, with the god’s house on top, so that its total height equals the side of its base.
base 15 nindan (≈ 90 m) = height; stages 5½, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1 and temple 2½ nindan high
The Esagila Tablet gives Etemenanki, “the house of the foundation of heaven and earth”, as a square of 15 nindan with seven levels whose heights add up to 15 nindan again: a tower that is as high as it is wide. Its excavated base measures about 91 m a side, with a great stair projecting from the south face; everything above was quarried away for brick, and the reconstruction here follows the tablet as it is usually read.
Herodotus, who describes eight towers one on another with a stair winding round the outside (The ziggurat: a solid mountain in stages), probably counted the temple on top as a stage, or saw the tower before it was finished to the tablet’s design.
Related rules
Break the long faces of brick walls with regularly spaced shallow buttresses (or recesses), so that light and shadow give scale and rhythm to a material without mouldings.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The tower as high as it is wide”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/esagila-etemenanki. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.