In Protoliterate ruins the temples are the most striking feature. We have seen how, in the Al Ubaid period, temples were erected at Eridu in the south and at Tepe Gawra in the north. But the edifices of the Protoliterate period at Erech are much more impressive. The temple of the god Anu (Figs. 8, 45) was placed upon an artificial mound forty feet high and covering an area of about 420,000 square feet. It dominated the plain for many miles around. Near its base lay another great shrine, dedicated to the goddess Inanna. Several times changed and rebuilt, it measured, at one stage, 240 by 110 feet; at another it possessed a colonnade in which each column measured 9 feet in diameter (Figs. 9, 10). Each of these, and also the adjoining walls and the sides of the platform supporting them, was covered with a weatherproof “skin” consisting of tens of thousands of clay cones, separately made, baked, and coloured. These formed patterns of lozenges, zigzags, and triangles, and so on, in black and red on a buff ground. The cones were stuck into a thick mud plaster which covered the brickwork. The patterning in colour enlivened a façade already richly articulated by complex systems of buttresses, recesses, and semi-engaged columns, and thus achieved an effect far beyond anything which the exclusive use of mud as building material would suggest as attainable. The most characteristic feature of Mesopotamian temple architecture was the artificial mound, called a ziggurat or temple tower (Figs. 8, 11), the tower of Babel being the best known, that of Ur the best preserved, example. However, ziggurats were not found in connection with all temples. The Protoliterate temple at Tell Uqair, which has the same plan and even the same dimensions as the contemporary temple on the ziggurat at Erech, stands on a platform only a few metres high.[90] I am inclined to see in this an abbreviated rendering of the ziggurat, but the possibility that the two differed in significance cannot be excluded. We cannot explain why some temples should lack ziggurats; but we can understand why so many great shrines were equipped with them, and why the staggering communal effort which their construction entailed was undertaken.