What connects the ancient Ziggurat of Ur, a Soviet-era broadcast tower, the founding vision of Tel Aviv, and a volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? At first glance, these seem like disparate fragments from different epochs and geographies. Yet threaded through them all is a single conceptual lineage—what we might call the televe principle: the human impulse to build upward, to see from afar, and to control the transmission of reality itself.
This essay explores an unexpected convergence where etymology meets function, where ancient sacred architecture prefigures modern surveillance infrastructure, and where the "temple on the mound" reveals itself as the original prototype for everything from military watchtowers to television broadcast systems.
In Hebrew, tel (תל) refers to an archaeological mound—the accumulated layers of human civilization built atop one another over centuries or millennia. These artificial hills mark where cities once stood, were destroyed, and were rebuilt again and again. Each layer represents a chapter of history compressed into stratigraphy.
The ancient Near East is dotted with these tels: Tel Megiddo, Tel Dan, Tel Hazor, Tel Be'er Sheva. They rise from flat plains like geological punctuation marks, and archaeologists excavate them to read the story of human settlement backwards through time.
But tels were never merely accidental accumulations. They represented strategic elevation—natural or constructed high ground that provided defensive advantage and observational superiority. Whoever controlled the tel controlled the territory. Height equals power. Height equals sight.
When Jewish settlers chose the name "Tel Aviv" in 1910 for their new neighborhood north of Jaffa, they were drawing on this rich symbolism. The name came from Nahum Sokolow's Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland ("Old New Land").
Tel (mound) represented the ancient—the accumulated weight of Jewish history and connection to the land. Aviv (spring) represented renewal, rebirth, the fresh beginning of Zionist settlement. Together: an old mound sprouting new life. The past as foundation for the future.
But there's another layer to tel that matters here: these mounds frequently served as sites for watchtowers and fortifications. The tel wasn't just archaeological sediment—it was a viewing platform, an elevated position from which to survey the landscape, watch for enemies, guard the territory. The tel was always already a televe.
According to historical usage documented in Russian sources, the term televe (телеве) existed before the invention of television, referring specifically to watchtowers, observation towers, and lighthouses—structures built for the purpose of distant viewing and surveillance.
This is etymologically fascinating. The Russian tele- prefix comes from Greek τῆλε (tēle), meaning "distant" or "far." It appears throughout Russian borrowed from scientific and technical terminology: telefon (telephone), telegraf (telegraph), teleskop (telescope). All describe technologies or techniques for bridging distance.
A televe tower, then, would literally mean a "distant-viewing tower"—a structure that enables you to see what would otherwise be beyond your visual range. By elevation, you achieve extension of sight. The watchtower collapses distance through height.
This is the crucial insight: a watchtower performs remote viewing not through electronic transmission but through vertical displacement. You don't move horizontally toward the distant thing you want to observe; instead, you move vertically upward until your sightline clears the obstacles (trees, buildings, hills) that block ground-level vision.
Ancient and medieval military architecture understood this perfectly. Castles had towers. City walls had elevated guard posts. Fortifications occupied hilltops. The watch was always kept from above.
What we call "remote viewing" in modern terminology—the ability to observe distant locations without physically traveling to them—was already operative in the watchtower. The technology was architectural rather than electronic, but the function was identical: extending human perception beyond its natural bodily limits.
When television was invented and named in the early 20th century, the Greek tele- prefix was combined with Latin visio (sight) to create "television"—literally "far-seeing" or "distant viewing." Constantin Perskyi coined the term in 1907, well before practical television broadcasting existed.
The name captured the essential promise: you would be able to see events happening at a distance, transmitted to you electronically in real-time. The television screen would become a window onto remote locations. Seeing without being there.
Now here's where the convergence becomes uncanny: when television broadcast towers began to be built, Russian speakers continued to use the term televe for these structures. The historical continuity is perfect:
The function remained constant across the terminological evolution. Both old watchtowers and new TV towers were structures for projecting sight across distance. One through height, the other through electromagnetic waves. But both were televes—distant-viewing apparatuses.
There's a deeper continuity here about power and perception.
The military watchtower allows you to see the enemy before they see you. It provides informational asymmetry—you observe while remaining hidden, elevated, protected. The watchtower is panoptic; it makes surveillance possible.
The television broadcast tower inverts this relationship in a fascinating way. Instead of pulling distant images toward a centralized observer, it pushes images outward to dispersed receivers. But the power dynamic remains: whoever controls the tower controls what people see. The broadcast tower is also panoptic—not by watching everyone, but by being watched by everyone, by controlling the content of mass perception.
Both architectures—watchtower and broadcast tower—are about controlling the visual field. Both create hierarchies of seeing and being seen. Both locate power in elevation and transmission.
Now we need to zoom out to the deepest layer of this pattern: the nearly universal human impulse to build sacred structures on elevated ground, and particularly to construct artificial elevation when natural hills aren't available.
Across cultures and millennia, humans have built what Mircea Eliade called the axis mundi—the cosmic axis, the pillar connecting underworld, earth, and heaven. This vertical architecture takes many forms:
The pattern is consistent: sacred space is elevated space. To approach the divine requires ascent. Heaven is literally up.
The Mesopotamian ziggurat is perhaps the clearest expression of the temple-on-mound principle. These massive stepped pyramids were artificial mountains, constructed tels crowned with shrines to the gods.
The Ziggurat of Ur, built around 2100 BCE by King Ur-Nammu and dedicated to the moon god Nanna, exemplifies the form: a solid core of mud brick, faced with fired bricks set in bitumen, rising in three stages to a temple at the summit. The structure was both:
These functions weren't separate. The priests who ascended the ziggurat were simultaneously:
The ziggurat was temple, observatory, and watchtower all at once. It was the original televe—a structure for distant viewing that connected earth to heaven.
Fast-forward 4,000 years to March 2003. US and coalition forces invade Iraq, and one of the major military installations established is Tallil Air Base (also called Ali Air Base), built directly adjacent to the ancient Ziggurat of Ur.
The base's defensive perimeter enclosed the ziggurat. Soldiers climbed its ancient stairs. Photographs show American troops, weapons in hand, standing atop the 4,100-year-old structure.
The symbolic resonance is almost too perfect to believe:
The televe principle operating continuously across four millennia: whoever controls the elevated position controls perception, and whoever controls perception controls territory.
The ziggurat was built as a stargate—a portal between earthly and cosmic realms, a ladder for ascending to divine knowledge. The modern military base transformed it into a data gate—a node for intelligence gathering, missile tracking, air traffic control. Same structure, same function: processing and transmitting information about distant realities.
Ascension Island is a volcanic speck in the South Atlantic, roughly equidistant between Africa and South America. It measures just 34 square miles, formed by eruptions over the past million years, with its last eruption occurring within the past 2,000 years. The island features 44 distinct volcanic craters and cones.
Its highest point is Green Mountain (859 meters / 2,818 feet)—a volcanic peak that was originally barren but was deliberately transformed into an artificial cloud forest starting in the 1850s through one of history's first large-scale ecological engineering projects. Thousands of trees were imported and planted to create a self-sustaining ecosystem that would capture moisture and make the island more habitable.
At the summit sits an observation station, a dew pond, and an anchor chain marking the very top. From this peak, you can see the entire island and vast stretches of empty ocean in all directions.
But Ascension Island's true significance lies not in its natural geography but in what has been built upon it—a dense lattice of overlapping watchtower functions:
Military Infrastructure:
Communications & Broadcasting:
Signals Intelligence:
Ascension Island is a perfect contemporary instantiation of the ancient temple-on-mound:
The Mound: A volcanic island—a natural tel rising from the ocean floor, topped by Green Mountain's artificial cloud forest (human-engineered nature atop geological elevation)
The Watchtower: Military observation posts, radar installations, aircraft control tower, Space Force tracking systems
The Stargate/Portal: Broadcast transmitters sending signals across continents and oceans, satellite uplinks connecting to orbital infrastructure, GPS systems positioning global navigation
The Sacred Name: The island is called "Ascension"—literally invoking the vertical movement from earth toward heaven that every ziggurat symbolized
Strategic Control: Controls mid-Atlantic air and sea routes, projects British-American military power, serves as logistical hub for operations across multiple continents
Just as the Ziggurat of Ur was simultaneously temple, observatory, and fortress, Ascension Island is simultaneously:
The entire island functions as a singular televe—a distributed architecture of remote viewing and signal transmission.
The detail of Green Mountain is particularly resonant. Here we have:
Green Mountain is simultaneously natural and artificial, found and made. It's a constructed tel, even though the volcanic core is geological. The cloud forest is as much human architecture as the transmission towers.
This echoes the original meaning of tel in Hebrew—not just any hill, but the accumulated human settlement, the civilizational mound. Green Mountain is a mound of human intention: the intention to occupy, observe, control, transmit.
When we trace the etymology and function of tel, televe, and television through their convergence at sites like the Ziggurat of Ur and Ascension Island, a pattern emerges that transcends any single technology or era:
Power locates itself in elevation to control the field of perception.
This is true whether we're talking about:
The technology changes—stone stairs become elevators, human eyes become radar arrays, visual observation becomes electromagnetic sensing—but the geometry remains constant.
We can identify three overlapping modes in which the televe principle operates:
1. Observation (Watching)
2. Transmission (Broadcasting)
3. Integration (Gating)
Ancient ziggurats performed all three functions. So do modern installations like Ascension Island. The temple on the mound was never only a temple—it was always already a communications infrastructure.
Michel Foucault famously analyzed Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon—a prison design where a central tower allows guards to observe all inmates while remaining unseen themselves. The power of the Panopticon lies not in constant actual surveillance but in the possibility of being watched at any moment, which disciplines inmates into self-regulation.
The televe is the geopolitical and cosmic version of the Panopticon. The elevated position—whether literal watchtower, broadcast antenna, or orbital satellite—creates an asymmetry of perception that translates directly into power:
The temple on the mound was always panoptic—the gods saw everything from their elevated shrines. The broadcast tower is panoptic—mass media shapes perception for millions who cannot broadcast back. The surveillance satellite is panoptic—it observes continuously while remaining invisible.
Elevation = Information Asymmetry = Power
If we take "remote viewing" seriously as a philosophical concept rather than just a technological description, it names something fundamental about human consciousness and civilization:
The desire to transcend the body's limitations of location and perspective.
We want to see what we cannot see from where we are. We want to know what's happening beyond the horizon, beyond our lifespan, beyond our world. Every televe—from ancient watchtower to modern space telescope—is an attempt to overcome the constraint of being here in order to perceive over there.
This is why the ziggurat connects to the stargate metaphor so powerfully. Both represent technologies (one architectural, one hypothetical/fictional) for projecting consciousness beyond local bounds. The temple on the mound was humanity's first remote viewing apparatus—a way to see into the heavens, to perceive the movements of celestial bodies, to touch something beyond terrestrial limitation.
Television mechanized this magical function. Satellites extended it to orbital scale. The internet distributed it to networked ubiquity. But the underlying impulse—to see remotely, to transcend location—remains constant.
One final observation: televes are always infrastructural. They don't exist in isolation; they're nodes in larger networks of perception and communication.
This infrastructural quality is essential. The televe doesn't just enable an individual to see farther—it creates systems of distributed remote viewing that operate at collective scales. The infrastructure makes certain forms of knowledge, control, and coordination possible.
When US forces established operations at the Ziggurat of Ur, they weren't just occupying a symbolic site—they were plugging an ancient node back into a contemporary network. The 4,000-year-old watchtower became compatible with satellite uplinks, GPS systems, encrypted communications. The infrastructure recognized itself across the millennia.
We began with a simple etymological curiosity: why do "tel" (Hebrew mound) and "tele" (Greek distant) sound so similar? Why did Russian watchtowers and television towers share the name "televe"?
The answer that emerged is that these aren't merely linguistic coincidences but functional convergences. Across languages, technologies, and eras, humans have repeatedly discovered that height enables sight, and that sight enables control.
The temple on the mound was never just about worshipping gods—it was about accessing superior vantage points for observation, communication, and coordination. The sacred and the strategic were always entangled.
When we call a modern communication hub like Ascension Island a "21st-century ziggurat," we're not speaking metaphorically. We're identifying a genuine structural and functional continuity. The island performs the same operations as the ancient stepped pyramid: it elevates viewing and transmission capabilities, it controls information flows, it projects power through perception management, it serves as a portal between local and distant realities.
The name "Ascension" perfectly captures the vertical aspiration that drives all televe architecture. To ascend is to rise above the limitations of ground-level existence—to gain the god's-eye view, the strategic overview, the broadcast vantage.
Every television tower is a temple. Every military watchtower is a sacred site. Every satellite is a shrine orbiting in the digital heavens. The geometry is ancient; only the materials have changed.
We are still building ziggurats. We have never stopped building ziggurats. We will continue building ziggurats—whether we call them broadcast towers, space stations, or observation platforms—because the televe principle is foundational to how humans organize perception, knowledge, and power.
The tel is the mound of accumulated history. The televe is the tower for viewing distance. Television is the technology for transmitting that view. And the temple on the mound—from Ur to Ascension—is where they all converge: where earth meets sky, where past meets present, where seeing becomes power, and where power becomes architecture.
We look up to look out. We ascend to extend. We elevate to dominate.
The watchtower watches still.
Thanks for reading!