Anu Ziggurat (White Temple)

31.3234°N, 45.6383°E.

The Anu Ziggurat at Uruk — Sumerian Unug, biblical Erech, modern Warka — in Muthanna Governorate, Iraq, dedicated to An, the sky god of the Sumerian pantheon. The earliest construction phases are radiocarbon-dated between 3517 and 3358 BCE, making this one of the oldest religious platform structures known anywhere on Earth. Original base of the final phase 60 metres per side; original height around 13 metres on a single high terrace. The summit carried the White Temple — a small mudbrick sanctuary with whitewashed plaster walls, three internal chambers, and a podium for the cult image. The temple was still partially preserved when the German Oriental Society excavated it under Julius Jordan in 1929 and 1930, making it one of the very few prehistoric Mesopotamian temples recovered with its superstructure intact above its terrace. Uruk in this period was the largest city in the world and the site at which the world's first writing emerges in temple archives.

A ziggurat from before writing existed, in the city that invented writing, with a temple still standing on its summit fifty-five centuries later.