ziggurat

(redirected from Ziggurats)
Also found in: Thesaurus, Encyclopedia.

Related to Ziggurats: Mesopotamia

zig·gu·rat

(zĭg′ə-răt′)

A temple tower of ancient Mesopotamia, having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories.

[Akkadian ziqqurratu, temple tower, from zaqāru, to build high; see zqr in Semitic roots.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ziggurat

(ˈzɪɡʊˌræt) ,

zikkurat

zikurat

(Archaeology) a type of rectangular temple tower or tiered mound erected by the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians in Mesopotamia. The tower of Babel is thought to be one of these

[C19: from Assyrian ziqqurati summit, height]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

zig•gu•rat

(ˈzɪg ʊˌræt)

also zik•ku•rat

(ˈzɪk-)

n.

a brick temple tower built by the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, consisting of a number of successively receding stories giving the appearance of a series of terraces.

[1875–80; < Akkadian ziqquratu]

ziggurat

- A tower in the form of a terraced pyramid.

ziggurat

An ancient Assyrian or Babylonian temple in the form of a pyramid with terraced sides tapering toward the top.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Switch to new thesaurus

Noun

ziggurat - a rectangular tiered temple or terraced mound erected by the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians

zikkurat, zikurat

temple - an edifice devoted to special or exalted purposes

Translations

zikkurat

ziggourat

ziggurat

[ˈzɪgʊræt] N → zigurat m

Collins Spanish Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged 8th Edition 2005 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1971, 1988 © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005

ziggurat

n → Zikkur(r)at f

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

Mentioned in ?

References in periodicals archive ?

He traces some of Washington's "religious" aspects back to Babylon an other ancient capitals: radiating avenues, orientation of the city's main axes to the four points of the compass, "central monumental architecture like temples, palaces, pyramids, ziggurats, and raised altars," and "processional boulevards connecting these places of power." Such architecture, Meyer says, symbolizes the larger cosmic order and proclaims a connection between the city and its heavenly sponsors.

Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C

Under those ziggurats she stood, around her the crosswalk's rumpled hide of even bars striving, white and black, and I saw her nod and raise her throat to the light's acute descent fiercely, vainly, I thought at first: let November match this cheekbone's Lithuanian shadow (as if to say), let the triumph of concrete ramparts somehow narrow and cure the light in these eyes from green to dull gray.

In passing

"Twin Cities of Sin" said the catch line on a somewhat lurid depiction of the action complete with collapsing ziggurats.

Golden days of the silver screen

Redeeming an ordinary building material for art and evoking enormous towers and ziggurats, the block pieces make explicit the artist's fascination with architecture, catalyzed during an early stmt as a draftsman for I.

"Sol Lewitt: structures, 1965-2006"

Moreover, neither divine kingship nor ziggurats emerged suddenly in Mesopotamia, and the anteriority of the alleged Egyptian models for the Mesopotamian banquet and related imagery is at least questionable.

"Modell Agypten": Adoption von Innovationen im Mesopotamien des 3. Jahrtausends v. Chr

Parked in a stockade we stand beside their pickup while admittance is sought to a building.Yet all I can think of is the carpet I had seen in the suq, a carpet in scarlet and brown with a pattern of ziggurats on which a figure was visible, climbing towards the sky.

MORNING SERIAL

It was only rediscovered in the early twentieth century by German archaeologists and now consists of a vast number of mounds covering acres of land -- the remains of ancient buildings -- dominated by the huge bulk of a ziggurat. Ziggurats -- stepped pyramids, formed with a series of terraces and ramps -- seem to have been evolved by the Sumerians around 6000 ye ars ago and were taken over and developed by succeeding Mesopotamian civilization like the Assyrians.

Letter from baghdad: Dan Cruickshank went to Iraq late last year to make a film about the country's extraordinary heritage of ancient buildings which are now threatened with further destruction

Photos taken in Venezuela or South Africa, for example, are literally "prolonged" in hand-drawn pendants executed several years later; a six-monitor video piece takes its images from a 1997 performance in Angola and its title from a seventeenth-century haiku; and an installation from the series "Nuevas architectures" (New architectures 2001), uses rice-paper lamps to construct millennial table-top cities where igloos, ziggurats, and pyramids coexist with modernist monoliths and futuristic towers undulating toward the ceiling/sky.

Carlos Garaicoa: Maison Europeenne de La Photographie. (Reviews: Paris)

Half-finished apartment towers and bare concrete skeletons of huge hotels whose doors never opened loom above the jungle canopy like the deserted ziggurats of some forgotten civilization.

Portfolio: Simryn Gill

But when I arrived at his loft on Greene Street in SoHo, which felt like the inside of a cedar trunk, I found the floor covered with ziggurats of piles of playing cards, scraps and colored paper, ripped cardboard, gnarly flatened metal coffee cans.

NANCY IDEAS

Laib also sculpts rudimentary house forms in stone and wax that serve as containers for rice ("Rice Houses") and large-scale beeswax constructions in the shape of steps, ziggurats, boats, and walk-in rooms.

WOLFGANG LAIB

Prominent themes of his works include the inscription of naive motifs within a grid structure as well as references to architecture through evocations of ziggurats, doors, steps, and tunnels.