Iraq is located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and includes land that is known as Mesopotamia, or the cradle of civilization. Some archaeologists believe this is where the biblical Garden of Eden was located. Mesopotamia was home to the first cobblestone streets and city buildings – even before ancient Greece, Egypt and the Roman Empire.
Since this is where many archaeologists believe civilization began, it is full of archaeological artifacts and treasures. The Sumerians are thought to be the first group of people to make buildings other than barns and houses around 3500 B.C. Most of these buildings were made of mud-brick made from clay because there is not a lot of stone in the area. Early architects did not know how to make big hollow buildings that would stand up (like a sky scraper) so they built solid structures. Egyptian pyramids are an example of this, and so are the ziggurats that the Sumerians built. Ziggurat comes from the Assyrian word ziqquratu, which means high. Ziggurats are basically big mudbrick staircases that would take people to the top of a brick platform where there would be a small brick house. Each city would build its own ziggurat. The townspeople used them as temples for their gods. It was also a way to show how powerful the town was. The bigger the ziggurat, the more prestige the town had. The Sumerians knew how to build walls, too. They built walls around their towns using the same mudbricks as they did to build ziggurats to protect them from enemies.
They also built palaces, but they didn’t look like the palaces we think of today. Sumerian palaces were built as a place for kings and their families to live, but also as a place to store wheat and cloth and even taxes that the king collected from his people.
For more information visit: http://architecture.about.com/cs/countriescultures/a/iraq.htm, www.historyforkids.org/learn/westasia/architecture/sumerian.htm and www.crystalinks.com/sumerart.html.
