644 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
We know that Sumerian architects drew plans of the contemplated 
buildings and built accordingly. This is attested by a statue of Gudea 
in the Louvre, showing the priest-prince of Lagash holding in his 
lap the plan of the temple he built. 
Earlier, far more primitive glyptic representations show rulers 
carrying on their heads the basket of the masons, all evidence pointing 
to the fact that, while the later Assyrian rulers paraded usually in 
the role of formidable warriors, the Sumerian rulers wanted to convey 
to posterity the idea: “We were builders.” And so they were. 
Among others, the early dynastic Temple Oval, excavated by P. 
Delougaz, was built according to a remarkable plan. 
Sumerians placed all their buildings, temples, palaces, office build- 
ings, treasuries, and libraries, on artificial platforms built of brick 
and bitumen, several yards high. The platform was constructed over 
soil hardened by filling and stamping and called temen—the word 
from which the Greek temenos and our temple originate. The reason 
for the platform is obvious—in the flat riverland protection from 
floods was necessary, 
In the great public buildings of the Sumerians, the excavators have 
found all basic elements of classic architecture—the colonnade, the 
arch, and the vault. In the ruins of many public buildings have 
Figure 12.—The ziggurat (temple hill) of Ur, reconstructed. 
been found carefully waterproofed boxes with foundation deposits, 
statuettes, and tablets—messages to posterity. Five such deposits 
were buried under the Inanna temple of Nippur, excavated in 1956. 
After Woolley’s discoveries at Ur, the invention of the arch could 
no longer be attributed to the Etruscans or Assyrians. While there 
are in Egypt some ancient arches of an age comparable with those 
of Sumer, there the arch had neither the importance nor the frequency 
of application which this architectural element had in Mesopotamia, 
where the available building units, the bricks, were small and neces- 
sity would have prompted the invention. 
R. A. Jones (1941) suggests that Sumerians may have chanced 
upon the invention of the arch by the burning of the arched reed top 
