Compare Pyramids

Babylonian ziggurats or temple-towers consisted of a series of quadrilateral stages set one on top of the other.  In some cases three, four, or as many as seven of these were stacked together.  At the top stood the temple of the city-god. Set within a temple-complex that was generally square, the corners of both temple and court boundary were oriented to the cardinal directions.  A slight difference between Egyptian pyramids and Mesopotamian ziggurats is that the corners of ziggurats point to the compass points; in Egypt the pyramid sides face these same directions.

There was not only one temple on top of the tower, but also a second one at the foot.  From this temple on the ground, the priests ascended the stairs to the temple on top; but at the same time, the temples at the foot of the ziggurat were placed so that the deity might also descend down the steps of the mountain to meet with his people.  This indicates a twofold function: to allow the people to go up, and the deity to come down.  Because the tower is the center of this ascent and descent it stands in mid-way between the two worlds of heaven and earth.

The famous "Tower of Babel" painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder is one of those rare cases where the painter got it wrong. One of many artists since the Middle Ages to depict the Tower of Babel as a spiral, yet in fact, only one ziggurat spirals (at Khorsabad). The apparent source for this contradiction is Herodotus. He describes the ascent to the top as running "outside round about all the towers". His choice of words, then, is unhappily ambiguous and applies to both types of constructions, spiral and square.