Great Ziggurat of Sumer
 Great Ziggurat of Sumer
| |
 Render on 2021/12/28 facing Northeast | |
| About | |
|---|---|
| Owner |  Hackaloken  UndullingBlade
|
| Category | Monuments |
| Underground? | No |
| Public? | Yes |
| Started | May 2019 |
| Completed | ??? |
| Size north to south | 368m |
| Size west to east | 244m |
| Height | 101m |
| Location | |
| Coordinates | X=5880 Y=164 Z=9248 |
| Dimension | Overworld |
| Settlement | Sumer |
| Map Link | |
What is it?
Currently, it's a completed shell, one of the largest sandstone structures on the server, and larger than most pyramids on the server also.
In the future, the top level will have a temple, and the inside might have any number of things in it.
History
The Great Ziggurat of Sumer is the successor to a smaller ziggurat that Hackaloken constructed on a now-defunct Minecraft server in about 2012-2013.
Plans to build a new ziggurat on MCO date back to at least 2015, alongside a re-incarnation of Sumer. Its design is based off of drawings and records of real ziggurats from Mesopotamia, but isn't an exact re-creation. It's also bigger than life size.
Because of the varying accounts of what Mesopotamian ziggurats looked like, and the fact that they likely had sloped walls, creating a design that worked well in minecraft took a long time. The actual ziggurats it is based on were likely made of sun-baked mud bricks, but sandstone was picked for both practical and aesthetic reasons. UndullingBlade created the design of the Ziggurat, with input from Hackaloken.
While waiting for a design, Hackaloken predicted that the Ziggurat would need more sandstone to construct than would be harvested from clearing a spot for it. So, he set to to clear out a small desert, creating the Valley Of Stone. The project was completed by September 2017.
Meanwhile, the exact location of the Ziggurat within the desert of Sumer had not been decided, and was not fully claimed. Ultimately, 
Artykus constructed two structures in the desert that conflicted with possible Ziggurat locations, now located directly North and West of the Ziggurat. The goal was to build as big of a Ziggurat as possible, but this reduced how big the Ziggurat could be while allowing space for Sumer and keeping the entire Ziggurat inside the desert biome. This conflict partially caused the Ziggurat to be delayed, alongside general life events.
Finally, after a hiatus the design of the Ziggurat was finalized and the ground clearing process began late in May of 2019. The ground clearing was completed in early June. The first (and largest) layer was completed later that month, and the third layer was completed that September. The staircase and covered landing was finished in April of 2020, after a claimed desert temple was moved by 
Anna_28 (now located to the Southwest).
Since April 2020, there has been another hiatus. Now that the server has been updated to 1.12.2, we hope to start more work soon.
Gallery
~~ Coming soon ~~