As to the general plan of Sumerian temples we are still in a state of ignorance, for on the earliest sites of Babylonian occupation, few important buildings have been unearthed. The best preserved and most thoroughly explored temple in Southern Babylonia is that of En-lil at Nippur. A Babylonian plan of this once famous shrine, drawn on a clay tablet and probably belonging to the first half of the second millennium B.C. was discovered by Haynes in the course of his excavations, and has been of no small assistance in determining the general character of this Babylonian temple in its later reconstructed state, while it may be in reality a copy of an earlier plan,[59] as it accords so well with the general conclusions to be drawn as to the configuration of the temple in the time of Shar-Gâni-sharri and Nâram-Sin, both of whom, and especially the latter, did much in the way of repairing this ancient fane. _PLATE X_ [Illustration: THE RUINED MOUNDS OF NIPPUR] [Illustration: COURT OF THE MEN FROM THE NORTH-EAST: NIPPUR _(Both from C. S. Fisher’s “Excavations at Nippur,” by permission)_] The most prominent feature in connection with the temple of Nippur as revealed by the excavations, is the ziggurat, or stage-tower erected by Ur-Engur, king of Ur (_circ._ 2400 B.C.). The ruined mounds of Nuffar, or Niffer (cf. Pl. X), are situated on the eastern side of the Shatt-en-Nîl canal which at one time formed a line of communication between the Persian Gulf and the city of Babylon. The mounds in question, the principal of which marks the site of Ur-Engur’s ziggurat, were excavated by Peters, Harper, Haynes and Hilprecht, under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, between the years 1889 and 1900. The tower surmounts an artificial platform measuring roughly 192 × 127 feet, and in accordance with the usual Babylonian principle of orientation, has its four corners facing the cardinal points of the compass. The ziggurat apparently only had three stages in contradistinction to the seven-staged tower characteristic of the Babylonian and Assyrian temples of later days, though Gudea’s temple of E-pa erected in honour of his god Nin-girsu was seven-zoned, which probably means that it was a seven-staged tower. The ziggurat at Muḳeyyer[60] (Ur) excavated by Taylor similarly appears to have been three-storied, or possibly only two-storied. The lower storey, protected with a wall of burnt brick four feet in thickness, was further strengthened with buttresses, though it should be mentioned that the so-called “buttresses” of the stage towers of Babylonia and Assyria are in the majority of cases water-conduits for draining the upper platforms. The second storey, the base of which is connected with the lower storey by means of a staircase three yards broad, is composed of bricks entirely different to those of the lower storey, those of the lower storey being 11-1/4 × 11-1/4 × 2-1/4 inches, and bearing a small