I mentioned ziggurats in my first chapter. Its existence in my story quite took my by surprise. I certainly hadn’t planned on it. Not sure I planned religion really. At least I knew it would appear in some form, but I thought it wouldn’t be all that important to the story. It remains to been how right I was about that.

In anycase, this is a picture of a ziggurat from Ur. Ur was an ancient Sumerian city in what is now present day Iraq. It was also a coastal city, but it well in-land now. I suppose the weather must have changed.

So . . . ziggurats? Why not a church or temple or something more familiar? Well, I wanted something different. I don’t recall much about Sumerian religion from my class on near eastern religions, beyond a creation story where everything came out of the sea and that all the cities had their gods and anthropomorphic gods. I am not going to use it, I will probably invent some for this world and a creation myth, too, maybe. But I like how the ziggurat looks and it fits with my vision of this city – there are no fluted columns, no arched ceilings, not many domes, but a clear angular beauty.

I might change the name eventually to avoid confusion with the real ziggurats, but I am keeping how it looks.