“Ten thousand years ago men were building round huts with red clay plaster at Tell Mureybit on the upper Euphrates River. About 7500 B.C. they took to building larger houses with neat square corners. . . . High in the hills between [the rivers Tigris and Euphrates] lies the site of Cayonu, where varied types of building were put up around 7000 B.C. Some have long parallel rooms on level dirt floors. Solid floors distinguish two larger structures; one is paved with flat flagstones as long as five feet, while the other has a striking orange-red floor with a mosaic of four kinds of limestone, all carefully polished. . . . Here, perhaps, we sense the inspiration for many great buildings of antiquity.

Five thousand years later these village cults had developed into the state-run religion of Sumer, first of civilizations. The house-size holy places had grown outward and upward to become the ziggurats, as low supporting platforms had been rebuilt time after time atop their predecessors. The shrine became the high holy of holies, enclosed within its own precinct in the heart of a walled city—the new way in which men had chosen to live.”

—Norman Hammond, from his introduction to Builders of the Ancient World: Marvels of Engineering, a National Geographic Society book, 1986.