Tepe Sialk Ziggurat

33.9689°N, 51.4047°E.

The ziggurat of Tepe Sialk in modern Kashan, Isfahan Province, Iran — the oldest dated ziggurat structure currently known, with the earliest construction phase dated to approximately 3000 BCE during the late Chalcolithic period of the Iranian plateau. Original base approximately 90 metres per side; original height around 25 metres on multiple terraces, though the surviving structure preserves only the lower courses. Excavated by Roman Ghirshman for the French Archaeological Mission between 1933 and 1937 and re-examined by Iranian missions from 2001 onward. The site is one of two adjacent prehistoric mounds — North and South Tepe Sialk — together preserving the longest continuous occupation sequence on the Iranian plateau, from the seventh millennium BCE to the first millennium CE. The pre-ziggurat painted-pottery industry recovered from the lowest strata is one of the foundational sources for the typology of Chalcolithic ceramics from Anatolia to Pakistan.

A ziggurat older than the Mesopotamian template it would later be assimilated to, in a settlement that was already five thousand years old when the platform went up.