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Tagged “iraq”

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  Great Ziggurat of Ur

  On a dead-flat alluvial plain with no stone, no timber and no mountain for hundreds of kilometres, how did Sumerian builders raise a thirty-metre artificial peak out of nothing but mud, reeds and tar — and engineer it so cleverly that its lowest stage is still standing, and still load-bearing, four thousand years later?

  c. 2100–2050 BCE (Third Dynasty of Ur — begun by Ur-Nammu, completed by Shulgi) · Ur, near Nasiriyah, Dhi Qar Governorate, IraqAdded September 2026
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  Taq Kasra, the Arch of Ctesiphon

  How did Sasanian builders raise a 25-metre unreinforced brick vault to a height of 37 metres with no timber centring holding it up — and how did they arrive at a curve that European engineers only described mathematically eleven centuries later?

  3rd–6th century CE (Sasanian; most often placed c. 540 CE under Khosrow I) · Ctesiphon, Salman Pak, Baghdad Governorate, IraqAdded September 2026