Ziggurat Alchemy

Ziggurats, Colors, and Planets

An insightful article by Peter James and Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs in JCS 60, they have answered a few things that I have been trying to understand for a while.

Some ziggurats that have been excavated, namely from Borsippa, Khorsabad and Ur, appear to have a certain colour scheme for each level of the tower.


When Henry Rawlinson excavated the Borsippa ziggurat in the mid 19th century, he reconstructed the colours and associated each level with a planet depending on its colour (black for Saturn, etc.). If he was correct, then it would give a geocentric order, the same as the Ptolemaic system. Unfortunately his reconstruction is "wishful thinking" and isn't really useful, so I won't go into details about it.

Simo Parpola has also attempted to connect the colours of the ziggurat to the planets (in Assyrian Prophecies, n. 114). James and Sluijs state that Parpola's scheme is also mistaken since it relies on Rawlinson's correspondences.

--

So, first of all, how should the colour scheme look. Scholars have mostly relied on the account of the Greek Herodotus, who described the battlements of the Median city Ecbatana. The battlements were in this order, from the outer/lower to the inner/higher:

white - black - dark red - blue - light red - silver - gold

The assumption that Mesopotamian towers would have followed this scheme is not without reason. The ziggurat found at Khorsabad has preserved four levels, and possibly originally had seven. The four levels are coloured: white at the bottom, then black, then reddish purple, then blue fourth. Also found were fragments of enamelled bricks that were vermilion, silver-gray, and gold; so if there were an extra three levels then they could have been coloured with these bricks.

As for the ziggurat at Ur, Leonard Woolley had this to say:
The shrine, as we have seen, was bright blue, shining in the sun. The top was red: it was built of large lightly fired bright red bricks and was covered with plaster of the same colour. Below this the whole ziggurat, walls and steps alike, was black, the brickwork covered with a thin coat of bitumen applied with a brush. Below this again was the white-washed columned wall of the court.


Right, if this is a standard colour scheme, the next thing we would wonder is if there is a planetary association. What James and Sluijs have done is looked at how the planets were coloured in astrological texts. Following Babylonian Omen Texts: Part Three, where a text gives a standard list of colours:
The white star is Jupiter, the red star is Mars, the green star is Venus, the black star is Saturn, variant: Mercury.

The colours for Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are also confirmed by other sources. Green for Venus is no difficulty, since the Mesopotamians did not distinguish between green and blue. And Mercury is elsewhere said to be red. For the sun and moon, their colours as gold and silver is universal.

This would give us the following scheme:

Gold - Sun
Silver - Moon
Light Red - Mercury
Blue - Venus
Dark Red - Mars
Black - Saturn
White - Jupiter

Which is almost a geocentric order, but with Saturn and Jupiter reversed. Apparently this order is even identical to some later Greek sources, and similar to that of Egyptian tombs.