To my eye, the pockmarks are too regular in the image to work as weathering. Plus you may find that at different image resolutions, they don't always look the same anyway.

If you want the ziggurat to look more weathered, I'd suggest using fewer neatly-straight lines. Try drawing them instead with a new tool using a low-level fractal polygon, at least in places, and you might want to show some areas of greater damage if the structure has been standing for hundreds to a few thousand years (take a look at the Egyptian pyramids for ideas, for example, and, given the grey colouring, it may be worth looking at some of the more worn examples of diorite statues from the same region for ideas of how they look too). If it's been repaired in places, that might be an excuse to some some subtly different grey stonework over a few "stone/brick" equivalent areas.

Just a thought, but if there are four main staircases, shouldn't they each have a road/track leading to them (even if those are old, worn and hard to make out completely)?

The dunes aren't really working to me, because while everything else is seen top-down, they're viewed side-on. I'd be more inclined to experiment with some terrain drawing tools and textures instead, including trying some of the various darkness Solid bitmap fill options with a suitable bevel or lighted bevel effect to make them look sufficiently hilly and dune-like.

You could also have the canals running directly through the city (or connecting inside it in a variety of ways). Keeps the water flowing through, so it stays fresher, basically. From Sumerian archaeology (albeit very little's been done on this aspect), harbours in the cities could well have been placed a bit like market places - wherever there was convenient space and a couple of canals (or more) met, say. Water transport was just so vital for bulky, heavy or large cargoes there (e.g. nearly all timber had to be imported), it's arguable their canals and waterways were more important than the roads. Rulers seemed always to comment on having improved, or "built" (usually meaning something nearer "rebuilt" or "repaired" in many cases, given how many different rulers claimed to have "built" the same thing over time), with rather less emphasis on roadworks, beyond making them safe for travel (i.e. keeping the bandits away). That's probably too historically/archaeologically "real" for this setting, however 😁!

Happy I could help a little!

For a "proper" Sumerian settlement though, you need some canals passing through it, and maybe a bit less city planning 😉!

You can certainly get an effect like that just using the normal DD3 symbols and drawing tools. I did something of the sort for Wyvern Citadel in the Community Atlas in 2021. The Forum topic on that's here, which gives an idea as to how I arrived at the final concept. That's shown on this shot of the ground level of the fortress (which shows the cliff lines the clearest):

There are higher res versions of all the maps in my Gallery, while you can pick up copies of the Atlas FCW files for the drawings here.

Glad the shaded relief concept has helped - and very nicely executed too!

In case you haven't seen it, there is this Annual issue that deals specifically with watercolour-look map designs using CC3+ too. You may also get more ideas on this theme by searching through posts on the Forum by Lillhans, who was for some time our resident expert on creating this type of drawing style.