Chogha Zanbil

Chogha Zanbil is the best-preserved ziggurat outside Mesopotamia, a stepped temple tower of the Elamites on the plain of Khuzestan, south-east of Susa. It was built around 1250 BCE by the Elamite king Untash-Napirisha as the centre of a new religious city, called in its own time Dur Untash, and dedicated chiefly to Inshushinak, the god of Susa. Its modern name means roughly “basket mound”. It was among the first Iranian sites inscribed by UNESCO, in 1979.

The ziggurat was built of mud brick faced with baked brick, rising in concentric stages; today about half of its original height survives. Thousands of the baked bricks carry inscriptions in Elamite cuneiform naming the king and the god, and visitors can still pick them out in the lower courses, the wedges sharp enough to touch.

Around the tower lay courts, temples to other gods, and an outer wall enclosing palaces and tombs. The city declined after the king's death and was sacked by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE. Excavated in the twentieth century, it now stands alone in a flat landscape of sugar cane and scrub, and the best time to see it is late afternoon, when the low sun throws the stepped profile into relief.