CHOQA ZANBIL

Choqa Elam, which means the "empty hill", is a élamite élamite, the origin of five floors and a height of about 60 m. It is the only building of this kind known to date in Iran. In the light of this, it was believed that the Biblical Babel Tower was to be recognized. It was originally surrounded by a paved courtyard flanked by a high wall separating it from popular neighbourhoods. Low temples were located inside this closed courtyard. Behind the ziggourat, one can still see an altar, shaped in a single block of stone, used for human sacrifices to the gods of Suse and Anshan. It is also evident, clearly marked, the laugh that collected the blood to flow… From the city of Hard-Untash itself, there is nothing left, apart from a few vestiges of a royal quarter in the south-east and a little distance from the ziggourat. This royal district included residential buildings and a burial palace equipped with vaults intended to receive royal ash. The funeral rooms in the ground are well preserved and can be visited freely. Opposite the royal quarter, on the other side of the ziggourat, lies the fairly well preserved remains of an ingenious drainage and water purification system of the New which fed the temple as well as the entire old town of Hard-Untash. King Untash had done great work for the water supply of his capital. It is the oldest existing water reservoir. A 45 km canal provided water so far, where it was filtered through a brick wall attached by natural bitumen.

Choqa Elam dates from the reign of King Élamite Untash. In fact, around 1340, this great king of a new Élamite dynasty founded a great, the "Holy place" in the centre of a new city, Hard-Untash, located on the road leading from Suse to Anshan. The town of Anshan was then the main centre of the kingdom. To make Choqa Elam the centre of a kind of religious worship, King Untash devoted the Consecrated to the Gods - bosses of the two major components of the kingdom: Napirisha of Anshan and Inshushinak of Suse. These two gods were honoured at the top and at the foot of a high ziggourat, at the time, of some 60 m. After his death, the king was cremated and his ashes buried under a neighbouring funeral temple, in a temple devoted to the god the fire. This self-evident cult of the funeral ritual poses an interesting problem, as it is a history of the one that should characterize Iranian religion. In the early th century, Hard-Untash was at its peak and had a large number of temples. Today, the Ziggourat Choqa Elam is the only remaining standing of this ancient city. The ziggourats were, in general, built on a quadrangular plane about meters apart. The general volume was in a scale pyramid of 5 floors. Construction materials were made of raw brick for the big work, and carved brick for external formwork. La is a land of immense and naked plains with few trees, but with abundant clay and asphalt deposits. Clay kneaded in mussels with the minced straw formed prefabricated bricks that the Elamites were drying in the sun because of lack of wood. They used cooked bricks obtained by cooking in stoves, glazed or enamelled, only to strengthen the architecture and decoration of the walls. The mud was most often used as a mortar, but in more carefully-treated buildings, bitumen or molten asphalt was used from abundant wells in this region, which has always been rich in fossil carbides. Like les mésopotamiennes, mesopotamians mesopotamians were composed of a mass of raw brick drawing several degrees in successive withdrawals, but appreciable differences made the originality of the Elam. Unlike a superposition of truncated pyramids that were accumulated in successive plans, in Choqa Elam the floors were nested in each other, so that everyone rested on the ground. This technique, whose origin is unknown, remains a élamite characteristic for the moment. Five floors were built in Choqa Elam. If, today, the ziggourat has only 3 floors measuring only 25 m high (the last two floors being destroyed), it was more than 60 m in origin. In addition, its 5 floors were crowned with a quadrangular temple, accessible only to the elite of the. Unlike mésopotamiennes mésopotamiennes, more stubby and equipped with a large, left-wing exterior staircase, access to Choqa Elam is done by arched stairs, conserved within the masonry and invisible from the outside. These stairs include a succession of doors covered with terracotta arches. The bricks bear inscriptions with cuneiform signs (with 150 signs of an alphabet) that replaced the paleo-élamite hieroglyphic writing dating from about 3 000 BC. In Iranian architecture, the decor often plays a very important role. From the last centuries of the second millennium, the susiens temples, like the ziggourat of Choqa Elam, were decorated with enamelled terracotta slabs, the oldest known to date. This technique of enamelled decor doubled in Mesopotamia with the Cuites bricks cuites. The result was a new process that first knew its apogee in Babylon, then to Suse.