Chogha Zanbil

Feel the heat rising from the ground first. Out here on the plain of Khuzestan, the air shimmers above dry earth, and the light turns everything the colour of honey. Then the shape comes into focus. It is a vast stepped mound of brick, square and deliberate, rising out of flat land with nothing else nearby to rival it. Your shoes crunch on gravel. A hot wind moves across the open ground. You are standing before one of the oldest surviving temple towers in the world.

This is Chogha Zanbil. The name is not ancient. It comes from the local dialect and is usually translated as basket mound. Before excavation, the structure looked like an upturned basket half buried in the soil. The people who built it knew it by another name entirely. They were the Elamites, a civilisation that flourished in this corner of southwestern Iran for many centuries, long before the Persian empires that most visitors know from history books.

The Elamites are often overshadowed by their neighbours in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. But they were a major power. Their great capital was Susa, not far from here, near the modern town of Shush. They had their own language, their own gods, and their own way of writing. They traded with Mesopotamia, fought against it, and at times conquered parts of it. This temple tower is one of the clearest physical records they left behind.

The builder was an Elamite king named Untash-Napirisha. He ruled in the middle of the thirteenth century before the common era — more than three thousand years ago. He founded a new religious city on this site and named it after himself. Scholars call it Dur Untash, meaning the fortress or town of Untash. At its heart he raised this ziggurat. A ziggurat is a stepped temple tower, built in tiers, with a shrine at the top. Think of a pyramid made of terraces rather than smooth sides.

Here is the first surprise. Most ziggurats in Mesopotamia were built like a stack of boxes, each level placed on top of the one below. This one was different. Archaeologists believe the builders first raised a square courtyard enclosure, then filled the inner part and built upward, so the inner levels rose from the ground rather than sitting on the lower ones. It was an unusual method, and it is one reason why the structure has held together for so long.

Today the tower stands at roughly half of its original height. The upper stages have worn away, eroded by rain, wind and time. But the base is still enormous, more than a hundred metres along each side. Walk slowly along the outer face and look at the brick. The core is made of sun-dried mud brick. The outer skin is baked brick, harder and more durable, and in places you can still see the dark traces of bitumen used as mortar. Bitumen is natural tar, and this region has always had plenty of it.

Now the second surprise. Look closely at the bricks at roughly eye level. On many of them, you will see lines of small wedge-shaped marks running in neat bands. This is cuneiform writing, pressed into the clay before firing. The inscriptions are mostly in the Elamite language, and they name the king and dedicate the temple to the gods. Inshushinak, the protector god of Susa, was among the most important. In effect, the walls themselves carry the founder's signature, repeated thousands of times.

The ziggurat was only the centre of a larger plan. Around it ran a series of enclosure walls, one inside another. Between them stood temples to other deities and, in the outer zone, buildings that appear to have been palaces and tombs. The whole complex was laid out as a sacred city. Some of it was never finished. After the death of its founder, major construction seems to have slowed, though the site continued to be used for religious purposes for a long time afterward.

Water mattered greatly here, and the Elamites thought about it carefully. The builders brought water to the city by canal from a river some distance away. Near the outer wall, archaeologists identified a structure that appears to have been part of a reservoir and settling system, where water could rest and clear before use. In a landscape this hot and dry, managing water was not a luxury. It was the condition for a city to exist at all.

The story of Chogha Zanbil has a dramatic ending. In the seventh century before the common era, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal led campaigns deep into Elam. His armies sacked Susa and laid waste to much of the region. Assyrian records describe this destruction with great pride. The sacred city here was damaged, and over the following centuries it slowly disappeared beneath its own collapsed brick and drifting soil. For a very long time, it was simply a mound on the plain.

The modern rediscovery came almost by accident. In the 1930s, the region was being surveyed for oil, and the unusual mound drew the attention of people working on that survey. Serious excavation followed in the 1950s under the French archaeologist Roman Ghirshman. His teams cleared the tower and much of the surrounding complex. In 1979, Chogha Zanbil became the first site in Iran to be added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, the global register of places considered important to all of humanity.

As you walk the site, notice the silence. There are no city sounds here, only wind, the occasional bird, and the voices of other visitors carried across open ground. The scale feels different in person than in photographs. The terraces are steep, the brick is warm under the sun, and the shadows are sharp in the morning and late afternoon. Conservation work is ongoing, so you may see sections that have been carefully repaired with new brick alongside the ancient fabric.

Before you leave, stand back and take in the whole shape once more. Picture the tower at full height, its upper shrine visible from far across the plain, with priests climbing its stairways to honour their gods. Then look down at the bricks near your feet, with their rows of tiny wedges. Somebody pressed those marks into wet clay more than three thousand years ago. They are still here. And for a few minutes, so are you.