The Temple as Mountain in the Sumerian Gudea Cylinders

A recurring motif in sacred architecture is that temples are imagined as mountains. We see this in monumental structures like pyramids, but also in far smaller temples and houses of worship. I call these built structures manufactured mountains, for lack of a better term, because the pattern turns out to be remarkably widespread, showing up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, across Mesoamerica, on the Indian subcontinent, and just about everywhere in between. What I want to look at today is this idea in Mesopotamia. But instead of focusing on the structure of the ziggurat, I want to look at a little-known work of Sumerian literature, a myth called Building Ningirsu’s Temple found on the Gudea Cylinders, in what might be the earliest account of a temple as a manufactured mountain.

Building a House for Ningirsu

The Gudea Cylinders are a pair of clay cylinders from the third millennium BCE, inscribed in cuneiform with a Sumerian story called Building Ningirsu’s Temple. Ningirsu was the patron deity of Lagash, a city-state in southern Mesopotamia not far from where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. As the title suggests, the text recounts the building of Ningirsu’s temple, known as the E-ninnu, under the rule of Lagash’s governor, Gudea.

The story opens with Gudea receiving instructions to build Ningirsu’s temple. These instructions come first in a dream he doesn’t understand, then, after he asks for clarification, in a second dream that spells things out. It’s here that Ningirsu describes his future house as “bigger than the mountains.”¹ He goes on to promise Gudea that building the temple will bring the land prosperity:

When you, true shepherd Gudea, really set to work for me on my house, the foremost house of all lands, the right arm of Lagaš, the Anzud bird roaring on the horizon, the E-ninnu, my royal house, I will call up to heaven for humid winds so that plenty comes down to you from heaven and the land will thrive under your reign in abundance. Laying the foundations of my temple will bring immediate abundance: the great fields will grow rich for you, the levees and ditches will be full to the brim for you, the water will rise for you to heights never reached by the water before. Under you more oil than ever will be poured and more wool than ever will weighed in Sumer. When you drive in my foundation pegs for me, when you really set to work for me on my house, I shall direct my steps to the mountains where the north wind dwells and make the man with enormous wings, the north wind, bring you wind from the mountains, the pure place, so that this will give vigour to the Land, and thus one man will be able to do as much work as two. At night the moonlight, at noon the sun will send plentiful light for you so the day will build the house for you and the night will make it rise for you.²

It is worth noting here that Lagash sits on flat alluvial land, nowhere near a mountain in southern Mesopotamia.

It is also worth noting here that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh has dreams about mountains, yet he has his dreams in makeshift temples on actual mountain peaks. The connection with mountains and dreams, which are but forms of revelation, might be worth exploring at a later time.

Built High as a Mountain

Gudea does build the temple as instructed, and the text is explicit about the comparison:

The ruler built the house, he made it high, high as a great mountain.³

Even the temple’s sections are described as mountains. Its front is “a great mountain.” Its wine cellar is “a mountain oozing wine.” Its coach house is “a mountain.” Its stone stairway is “like a mountain range lying down in princely joy.” One damaged section of the cylinder even describes an unknown part of the temple as “a firmly founded lapis lazuli mountain connecting heaven and earth.”⁴ We can read all this mountain talk as simple hyperbole — mountains are often a metaphor for strength and greatness.

Ningirsu’s House, “mooring post of the Land, grown so high as to fill the space between heaven and earth, E-ninnu, the true brickworks, for which Enlil determined a good fate, green hill standing to be marveled at, standing out above all the lands! The house is a great mountain reaching up to the skies.⁵

The house reaches up to heaven like a huge mountain and its fearsomeness and radiance have settled upon the Land. An and Enlil have determined the fate of Lagaš; Ninĝirsu’s authority has become known to all the countries; E-ninnu has grown so high as to fill the space between heaven and earth. Ninĝirsu be praised!⁶

On multiple occasions, the text reaches for the same image. The temple closes the gap between heaven and earth, built to mountain scale. But the text keeps pushing past metaphor. The temple is mountain-like because it is a mountain.

Mountains in Every Stone

The temple imagined as a mountain makes even more sense once we note where the temple’s building materials come from. The cedar was cut from the cedar-covered hills of what’s presumably Lebanon and floated down the Euphrates. Stone, bitumen, and gypsum arrived the same way, ferried downriver from distant highlands:

Lord Ninĝirsu directed Gudea into the impenetrable mountain of cedars and he cut down its cedars with great axes and carved the Šar-ur, the right arm of Lagaš, his master’s flood-storm weapon, out of it. It was like a giant serpent floating on the water as, for Lord Ninĝirsu, Gudea had the long rafts floating downstream moor at the main quay of Kan-sura: logs of cedar wood from the cedar hills, logs of cypress wood from the cypress hills, logs of zabalum wood from the zabalum hills, tall spruce trees, plane trees, and eranum trees. Lord Ninĝirsu directed Gudea into the impenetrable mountains of stones and he brought back great stones in the form of slabs. For Lord Ninĝirsu, Gudea had ships with ḫauna dock there, and ships with gravel, with dried bitumen, …… bitumen, and gypsum from the hills of Madga, cargoes like boats bringing grain from the fields. Great things came to the succour of the ruler building the E-ninnu: a copper mountain in Kimaš revealed itself to him. He mined its copper onto rafts. To the man in charge of building his master’s house, the ruler, gold was brought in dust form from its mountains. For Gudea refined silver was brought down from its mountains. Translucent cornelian from Meluḫa was spread before him. From the alabaster mountains alabaster was brought down to him.⁷

Cedar, stone, copper, gold, silver, carnelian, alabaster — the list reads like an inventory of mountain resources in places far from Lagash. If the temple is described as being mountain-like, it is perhaps because it is made of actual mountains.

Manufactured Mountain

In a southern Mesopotamian landscape without mountains, the temple becomes a stand-in for one. A temple is a house for the gods built from mountain materials, standing in for the real thing where the real thing doesn’t exist. This is, as far as I can tell, one of the earliest literary examples of a pattern that shows up again and again in the ancient world: the temple as a manufactured mountain, a built peak for gods who are otherwise enjoy dwelling on actual summits.

This idea didn’t stay confined to Sumer. It is something we see in Exodus, among other works of literature. It’s not hard to see that it would surface later in Judeo-Christian thought, and the scholar Richard Averbeck offers one small but telling clue:

An apt lexical illustration is the well-known but clearly non-Semitic word in the Hebrew Bible, hekal, ‘palace, temple’, which derives originally from Sumerian E-GAL, ‘big house’, via the Sumerian loanword in East Semitic Akkadian, ekallu. True, the connection from Sumerian to Hebrew is indirect here, but it is clearly a Hebrew word that has its ultimate origin in Sumerian.⁸

The Cuneiform Logogram for “Temple”

It’s perhaps interesting to pause on a single cuneiform sign: E (𒂍), the word for “temple” or “house.” Its evolution is worth seeing. The logogram starts out looking like a tall structure with a doorway, flattens into something like a floor plan, and eventually abstracts into the wedge-shaped strokes of cuneiform.

Is the early symbol a tall structure with a doorway, or just a doorway? Is it an entire house? It is hard to say. Whatever it may be, it clearly exhibits a vertical form as opposed to the more horizontal, say, ranch-style home in which I live. Which is to say: I wonder if the association between verticality and temples or, here, “house,” was implied very early on. I also wonder about the association between temples and gateways (through the image of the door), and the association between mountains and gateways, like we see in the Epic of Gilgamesh and elsewhere.

Assyriology and the Bible: A Postscript on Connections

There’s a corner of Mesopotamian studies devoted to tracing the connections between ancient Mesopotamian texts and the Bible. Drawing a straight line between Mesopotamia and ancient Judea is hard to do, but the field has built a compelling case for indirect connections. Instead of connections, perhaps we can only draw parallels. The most famous example is probably the flood narrative, where Noah’s story in Genesis lines up nicely with the story of Uta-napishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. While we cannot say how one story came to influence the other, the parallels are nonetheless too striking to ignore. Many other parallels run between Sumerian literature and the Bible more broadly.⁹

One literary parallel that gets much less attention than the flood story involves the Gudea Cylinders, a Sumerian temple-building story, and its Biblical counterparts, most notably in 1 Kings. Those lines have already been drawn by R. E. Averbeck, so I won’t sketch them out here.¹⁰ But what I want to do instead is read the Gudea Cylinders closely because it describes a temple in an important way: the temple as a house of god is like a mountain, built from its resources. I wonder if this is the first (if not, it certainly is one of the firsts) accounts of a temple as a manufactured mountain.