Substantially correct

And finally Delougaz applied himself to the problem of what lay beneath the oval. He then discovered that the findings obtained from Preusser’s trench were substantially correct. The entire temple complex, up to the periphery of the outer enclosure wall, was founded on a bed of clean sand having a depth of over fifteen feet.

He was by now aware that this could not be

a natural deposit, since, in a neighboring part of the site to which I shall

presently refer, he had continued to encounter occupational levels right down

to the water table, twenty seven feet beneath the surface. He was able to check

this situation by cutting a careful section through the outer enclosure wall.

This showed very clearly how the horizontal strata of occupation levels,

(previous to the temple period), stopped dead against the sand deposit, of

which the outer face could be traced sloping sharply inwards as it descended.

For some reason perhaps for some ritual

purpose, about which there is much speculation in Delougaz’ report the site on

which the temple was built must have been excavated, perhaps down to the clean

soil beneath, and then filled with uncontaminated sand brought from outside the

city. He estimated that the cubic capacity of the excavation made to receive

the sand and therefore of the sand itself was sixty four thousand cubic meters.

To us this may seem an unreasonable and pointless task for a builder to have deliberately set himself. But the impulse to seek a basis of clean soil for the foundations of a monumental building is something quite frequently found in other periods of Mesopotamian history. An even more striking example is for instance Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon.

There, as is today fairly well known, the

king applied this principle to the whole vast structure of the famous Ishtar Gate

and the walls of the so called Procession Street behind it. Modem visitors to

the site of Babylon see the walls of these enormous buildings still perfectly

preserved to a height of about thirty feet, and ornamented with heraldic

devices of dragons and bulls, modelled in relief on the brickwork. And it is

difficult for them to realize that these are in fact not the walls at all, but

merely the foundations.

The gateway and walls themselves, which

were identically ornamented but in brilliantly colored glazed brickwork, stood

on top of the present ruins and have now almost completely disappeared. In

order to reach union  contaminated soil,

Nebuchadnezzar had cut deep trenches down through the remains of earlier

cities, and built in them these foundation walls, whose decoration was never

meant to be seen by human eyes. In fact, the relief figures had been carefully

plastered over with a protecting coat of clay before the trenches were filled

in.