Ziggurat of Eridu

30.8095°N, 45.9910°E.

The ziggurat of Eridu — Sumerian Eridug, named in the Sumerian King List as the first city ever to receive kingship from heaven — in modern Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq. The surviving ziggurat dates to the Ur III dynasty (~2100 BCE) and was dedicated to the god Enki, lord of the freshwater abyss. Original base 61 by 47 metres; original height around 30 metres on three terraces. The structure sits atop a sequence of eighteen earlier mudbrick temples stretching back to ~5400 BCE — the longest unbroken religious building stratigraphy known from anywhere in the world: 3,000 years of continuous reconstruction on the same eight-square-metre footprint before the ziggurat itself went up. Excavated by Fuad Safar and Seton Lloyd for the Iraqi Directorate of Antiquities between 1946 and 1949.

The ziggurat in the city the Sumerians named as the first place humans were given the right to govern themselves, on a site where people built and rebuilt the same temple for thirty centuries before any king commissioned the platform that covers them.