Word of the Day

: May 2, 2025

ziggurat

noun ZIG-uh-rat

What It Means

A ziggurat is an ancient Mesopotamian temple consisting of a pyramidal structure built in successive stages with outside staircases and a shrine at the top. The word ziggurat is also sometimes used for a similarly shaped structure.

// Ancient ziggurats were always built with a core of mud brick and an exterior covered with baked brick. They had no internal chambers and were usually square or rectangular.

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ziggurat in Context

"The Breuer building, the former home of the Whitney Museum on New York's Upper East Side, counts as one of the defining buildings of the brutalist movement. Completed in 1966, it was designed by Marcel Breuer, who envisioned the structure as an inverted ziggurat." — Alex Greenberger, Art in America, 14 Jan. 2025

Did You Know?

French professor of archaeology François Lenormant spent a great deal of time poring over ancient Assyrian texts. In those cuneiform inscriptions, he pieced together a long-forgotten language, now known as Akkadian, which proved valuable to our understanding of the ancient civilization. Through his studies, he became familiar with the Akkadian word for Mesopotamia’s towering, stepped temples: ziqqurratu, which stepped into English as ziggurat.