It may seem curious that monumental architecture was first developed in a land that was so poor in such building resources as timber and stone. But from the 4th millennium BCE a series of diverse and warring civilisations residing in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers succeeded in inventing both writing and urban society, including mankind’s first essays in architectural building on a monumental scale. That these Mesopotamian cultures were able to accomplish this using only sun-dried mud bricks is remarkable, and is perhaps a testament to the extreme degree of social control wielded by their rulers. The exact sequence of peoples who inhabited and fought over this region over many hundreds of years constitutes a notoriously complex historical patchwork, yet archaeology has revealed a recognisable consistency among them, especially in regard to architectural and urbanistic form.

      The monumental architecture of the ancient Sumerians, who established a series of city-states near the Tigris-Euphrates delta, was largely religious in nature. The Mesopotamian temple soon came to assume a standardised arrangement, consisting of a taller central chamber (cella) flanked by lower spaces. As the older mud temples crumbled and were replaced by new ones on the same foundations, these shrines came to be set on tall hills, and these, ultimately, took on the form of stepped pyramids, or ziggurats – the real-life inspiration, in fact, for the Biblical Tower of Babel. Lifting the holy sanctuary as close to the sky as possible, the profile of ziggurats was further meant to recall that of a mountain, a vertical axis by which the supernatural realm could be accessed. After the Akkadian conquests of the mid-3rd millennium BCE, we find early (though limited) use of the round arch, the dome and the vault. Perhaps just as importantly, there also appear the first aesthetic impulses in monumental building: the external appearance of temples, whose simple, load-bearing masonry construction meant that they were necessarily massive, cubic and closed, came to be modulated by the addition of evenly spaced pilasters or decorative buttresses, thus creating a sculptural sense of strength and an attractively regular patterning of light and shade in the strong sunlight. In societies ruled by god-kings, in which little distinction was made between secular and religious powers, temples came to form larger precincts with royal palaces and administrative buildings. Much of this architecture was defensive in function and appearance, though often clad with fired or glazed terra-cotta tiles for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Individual domestic buildings, such as those comprising the city of Ur on the Euphrates, were again inwardly focused, and consisted of an inner courtyard surrounded by smaller rooms, thus serving as a prototype for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean houses for millennia to come.

      From the 9th through the 7th centuries BCE the warlike Assyrians built palaces of immense size at their successive capital cities of Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh. The fortified citadel of Khorsabad, erected during the 8th century BCE by Sennacherib, consisted of some 25 acres of palaces, courtyards, temple chambers and a tall ziggurat. Technically, the Assyrians made no great strides beyond their Sumerian predecessors, but their temples became increasingly large, lavish and colourful. The last great surge of monumental building in Mesopotamia took place after the fall of the Assyrians, with the erection of Nebuchadnezzar’s great city of Babylon in the 7th century BCE. Its palaces and temples, their external walls decorated by glazed terracotta tiles of animals and mythological beasts, were arranged along a great processional way. In the following century the accomplishments of the Assyrians would come to be rivaled by those of the neighbouring Persians, as epitomised by the great royal palace at Persepolis, built atop a broad terrace of native rock. Every element of architecture and relief sculpture here served to glorify the ruler, and the great audience chamber (apadana, or hypostyle hall) and nearby throne hall were notable for their numerous tall stone columns set in grid formation, some topped with addorsed bulls’ heads.

      While the Sumerian culture was rising, further to the west the pharaohs were consolidating their power in Upper and Lower Egypt. Here an architecture of extraordinary monumentality and stability emerged, founding a tradition that was to last almost three thousand years. Though favouring structurally conservative techniques, the Egyptians created the world’s first large-scale buildings in finely carved stone, and developed stonemasonry to a peak of skill that has rarely been surpassed. It has nevertheless been demonstrated that Egyptian honorific architecture was to a large extent modelled on the forms and building materials of their much more modest domestic constructions of mud, timber and papyrus, and traces and reminiscences of these older techniques can be discovered in many temple structures. Most monumental buildings were religious and/or funerary in character, beginning with the great pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara and the unprecedentedly colossal Old Kingdom pyramids at the edge of the desert at Giza, both dating from the mid-3rd millennium BCE. There was a relative lull in monumental construction during the Middle Kingdom period (1991–1650 BCE), but from the beginning of the New Kingdom (1570 BCE) the freestanding temple again came to the fore and assumed a standardised typology, rarely departed from afterwards: as at Luxor, a central axis leads through a monumental gateway (pylon), a forecourt and a columned hall towards a smaller sanctuary in which the cult image was kept, inaccessible to all but a handful of upper-caste individuals. Egyptian tombs, like the pyramids, were inevitably associated with nearby temples. One of the most notable temple-tombs is that of Queen Hatshepsut in the 18th Dynasty, which was partly set on ramped terraces and partly cut into a stone cliff. Cult temples, which usually took shape gradually over many centuries, were places of holy dread, for they were seen as the literal dwelling place of the Egyptian deities. In all cases the desire of Egyptian architecture was to evoke a sense of religious mystery and awe, an effect heightened by the necessarily thick walls and dark interiors. A secondary aim, as in the Pyramids, was to foil tomb robbers through the inclusion of internal portcullises, false chambers and corridors and the like, though such strategies almost always proved ineffective and virtually all Egyptian funerary architecture has long since been looted. The Egyptians apparently felt little need to expand their interior spaces, and large enclosed areas were only made possible, as in the great hypostyle hall at Karnak, by the insertion of a closely-spaced forest of thick columns to support the roof. Externally, walls were often battered (canted inwards) so as to give a greater effect of strength, and could be covered with large areas of intricately incised hieroglyphics and low-relief scenes, thus leaving us a vivid record of the beliefs and everyday life of Egyptians of all classes. With only a little exaggeration one might say that down through the millennia Egyptian architecture was to remain essentially unchanged, mirroring – if not a lack of intellectual curiosity or desire for innovation – the underlying stability of social life and religious belief. The Egyptians built for eternity, and their architecture is correspondingly massive, stable and timeless.

      Until recently the study of the historical architecture of sub-Saharan Africa was largely the province of the anthropologist rather than the architectural historian. This is because few of the building traditions of the continent’s innumerable