There are building that let you in, but a ziggurat isn’t one.
You don’t get inside a ziggurat, for a ziggurat has no doors.
This is a thing people don’t expect.
You look at it and your mind fills in the unsaid – a temple, like thousands of others across the world; maybe hallways, some kind of interior, a place where a king might keep a room or a tomb, where people are sacrificed.
But a ziggurat, like the one in Ur is not hollow. And there was no sacrifice.
It is a mountain built by men out of hundreds of thousands of sun-dried bricks packed into a solid core, wrapped in a skin of baked brick and bitumen, with small weeper-holes left in the surface so the mass could breathe out its own dampness. It cannot be walked into. It can only be climbed.
At the top of a ziggurat once there were shrines, but none have survived. Time kept everything about the one in Ur except the one thing it was all built for.
And the hot desert kept the stars above, in the evening, after the sun set over the vast sandland.
