Older Worlds of Building: Twelve Traditions from Mesopotamia to the Pueblos

The path starts on the Tigris and Euphrates, where the ziggurat, a receding-tier temple tower with a sun-baked brick core faced in fired brick, was first built in the Sumerian city states and later developed in Babylonian and Assyrian cities. The entry also credits this region with urban planning and the courtyard house.

Along the Nile, building stayed conservative for more than three thousand years: massive post-and-lintel stone construction, columns carved to resemble papyrus and lotus plants, and careful alignment to the sun and stars. The pyramids at Giza and the temples at Karnak and Luxor are its best known monuments.

On Crete, the palace at Knossos shows a different idea of a great building: a multi-storey complex of about 20,000 square meters around a central court, rebuilt after a destruction around 1700 BC with staircases, light wells, drainage systems and richly decorated wall paintings.

On the Greek mainland the mood turns defensive. Mycenaean citadels such as Mycenae and Tiryns rely on Cyclopean masonry, walls of massive roughly worked boulders with little mortar, and the Lion Gate carries a triangular relief of two lionesses flanking a column. Rulers were buried in beehive-shaped tholos tombs built from corbelled rings of stone.

Upriver from Egypt, the Kingdom of Kush absorbed Egyptian forms but kept its own: fields of royal pyramids at Napata and later Meroe, smaller than Egyptian ones and rising at a much steeper angle. Kushite rulers also built temples in the Egyptian idiom, including the Temple of Amun at Jebel Barkal.

In Persia, Persepolis shows an imperial style built around the apadana, an enormous hypostyle hall roofed in timber on rows of tall stone columns with double-animal capitals, most often paired bulls. Walls and staircases carry bas-relief scenes of tribute processions and royal ceremony.

China took the opposite structural path from the stone traditions before it. Buildings were framed in timber posts and beams, planned symmetrically around axes and courtyards, and used bracket sets called dougong to carry deep overhanging eaves down through the columns. The Forbidden City in Beijing is the most complete surviving expression.

In southern India the Hindu temple developed its own profile: a shorter, sharply pyramidal vimana over the inner sanctuary, in place of the curving tall shikhara of the north, with soaring gopura gateway towers added later. The Brihadeshwara Temple at Thanjavur, completed in 1011, is the celebrated early example.

Crossing to the Americas, Maya cities such as Tikal, Chichen Itza and Palenque built stepped pyramids with flat tops for temples and rituals, unlike the smooth-sided pyramids of Egypt. Corbelled roof vaulting, where each stone course projects slightly past the one below, let builders cap a gap without a true arch.

At Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital on the site of present day Mexico City, the Templo Mayor paired two stepped pyramids on one platform, one for the rain god Tlaloc and one for the war god Huitzilopochtli. First built in simple form in 1325, it was enlarged through seven major construction phases before the Spanish conquest.

In the Andes, the Inca perfected dry stone masonry without mortar, shaping massive blocks so they fit almost seamlessly together. The entry notes that this interlocking construction resists earthquakes because the stones can shift slightly without the wall collapsing, as seen at Machu Picchu.

The path ends with adobe in the American Southwest. Pueblo builders stacked dwellings in multistory terraces around plazas and kivas, roofed them with vigas and latillas, and used adobe thermal mass to soften the desert swing between hot days and cold nights. After Spanish colonists arrived, both peoples borrowed from each other.