A ziggurat is a very old kind of temple tower, built thousands of years ago in the part of the world we now call Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia — Sumer, Babylon, Assyria). It is made of mud brick and built in levels, like a wedding cake or a staircase made of boxes: a big square level at the bottom, a smaller one on top of that, a smaller one on top of that again. At the very top there was a small temple, because people believed the god came down there to meet the priests. So it is not a tomb — nobody was buried inside — and that is the thing most people get wrong. It is also not empty inside like a pyramid with rooms and tunnels; a ziggurat is basically a solid mountain of brick with stairs and ramps on the outside. Today the word is used mostly in history class, in museums, and in books about the ancient world. But architects and writers also borrow it for anything modern that goes up in shrinking steps — a building, a stack of boxes, even a big pile of pancakes. When people use it that way it sounds a little playful and a little grand at the same time. The Tower of Babel story in the Bible is probably about a ziggurat, which is why the word carries a feeling of 'huge, ancient, and reaching for heaven'.

金字形神塔／塔廟（美索不達米亞的階梯式神塔）