The Babylonian Origin of the Tower of Babel

At the ancient city of Babylon in Iraq, the place associated with the Tower of Babel is remarkably flat. What survives of Etemenanki, a huge stepped temple tower, is its archaeological footprint. The biblical Tower of Babel belongs to the story in Genesis, in which people build a city and a tower and end up speaking different languages. Etemenanki belongs to the history of a city with royal building projects, brick makers, temples and scribes. The two can be connected through the way Babylon’s monuments were remembered. They are documented by different kinds of evidence. Etemenanki stood in Babylon’s sacred district near Esagila, the temple of Marduk, the city’s patron god. Its Sumerian name refers to a foundation of heaven and earth. Ziggurats raised a sacred building on a series of broad terraces. The base was massive, and the upper levels were reached by stairs. Much of the structure depended on brick, a practical building material in a region where alluvial soil was abundant. Sun-dried bricks could provide bulk, and fired bricks and bitumen could protect exposed surfaces. The use of brick in Genesis is one of several details that place the literary account in a recognizably Mesopotamian setting. The tower had a history of damage and rebuilding. In 689 BCE the Assyrian king Sennacherib took Babylon, and a generation of rulers faced the political and religious consequences. His successor Esarhaddon undertook reconstruction. Later, Babylonian rulers including Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II worked on the monument. Their inscriptions present building as an achievement worthy of royal commemoration. The Met holds a cylinder on which Nebuchadnezzar describes work on Etemenanki. Such inscriptions are useful for identifying the building and its patrons. Their praise of a king belongs to the conventions of royal writing and has to be read alongside physical and administrative evidence. An especially useful object is a clay tablet now at the Louvre, usually called the Esagila tablet. The surviving copy dates from the Hellenistic period and transmits measurements and descriptions associated with the sacred complex. Scholars use it to reconstruct the arrangement of the ziggurat. A widely reproduced reconstruction gives it a square base about 91 meters on each side and a height of roughly the same order. The base can be compared with the excavated remains. The height is a reconstruction from ancient written figures, and those figures can describe an ideal scheme as well as a finished building. No visitor can stand beside the tower today and check its elevation against the tablet. The site itself supplies a different scale of evidence. Archaeologists could trace foundations and the relationship between the ziggurat and the neighboring temple precinct. The excavated footprint anchors the monument inside the city, beside streets and buildings with their own histories. The surface that visitors see is the product of long deterioration, removal of building material and excavation. Once the upper structure disappeared, a later account could still preserve the idea of an extraordinary tower while losing the details that an archaeologist would want to recover. Genesis gives the tower a different role. People who speak a common language settle in the land of Shinar and make bricks to build a city and a tower. The narrative links the name Babel to the confusion of speech and the scattering of the builders. Its subject includes human ambition, a shared language and the dispersal of people. A ziggurat built beside a major temple would have offered a recognizable image of a tower that seemed to reach into the sky. The resemblance helps explain why Etemenanki is often proposed as a historical referent. It does not establish that the writer described a particular phase of construction or that the events in the narrative happened at the excavated foundations. European artists later gave the tower forms that fit their own surroundings. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted it as a vast circular structure with arcades and a spiral of construction, a familiar image for people who have never seen a reconstruction of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. His 1563 painting tells us how a Renaissance painter pictured the biblical story. A square footprint in Iraq and a circular painting in Vienna are both part of the tower’s reception history. For the ancient architecture, the ground plan, clay tablet and building inscriptions carry the evidence. The word tower can also obscure the size of its base. A side of about 91 meters would have taken up nearly the length of an American football field, excluding the end zones. Anyone approaching it at street level would first encounter that broad mass of brick. The height that later readers remember depended on the area the builders committed to it on the ground. The map pin marks the Etemenanki archaeological feature at Babylon, rather than a point chosen for the biblical episode. From there, the striking fact is how little vertical structure survives of a monument remembered almost entirely for its height. Much of what can be learned about it comes from objects small enough to carry away, including a tablet that preserves dimensions and a cylinder that records a king’s building work. Those objects return the tower to a specific place in Babylon without resolving every question about how the city’s architecture entered a much later reader’s imagination.