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The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
A magnificent garden paradise said to have been built in 7th century B.C. in the middle of the arid Mesopotamian desert, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were testimony to one man's ability to, against all the laws of nature, create a botanical oasis of beauty amid a bleak desert landscape. King Nebuchadnezzar created the gardens as a sign of esteem for his wife Semiramis, who, legend has it, longed for the forests and roses of her homeland. The gardens were terraced and surrounded by the city walls with a moat to repel invasion.
The Tower of Babel
(From the Wikepedia Encyclopedia)
Narrative
The story is found in Genesis 11:1-9 as follows:
1 Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words. 2 And it came to pass when they traveled from the east, that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly"; so the bricks were to them for stones, and the clay was to them for mortar. 4 And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the entire earth". 5 And the Lord descended to see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built. 6 And The LORD said, "Lo! (they are) one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do? 7 Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion". 8 And the Lord scattered them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 Therefore, He named it Babel, for there the Lord confused the language of the entire earth, and from there the Lord scattered them upon the face of the entire earth.
Historicity
Historical and Linguistic context
"The Tower of Babel" by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563)
The Greek form of the name, Babylon, is from the native Akkadian Bāb-ilu, which means "Gate of the god". This correctly summarizes the religious purpose of the great temple towers (the ziggurats) of ancient Sumer (Biblical Shinar in modern southern Iraq). These huge, squared-off stepped temples were intended as gateways for the gods to come to earth, literal stairways to heaven. ("Reaching heaven" is a common description in temple tower inscriptions.) This is the type of structure referred to in the Biblical narrative. The common conical depictions of the tower (as shown here) resemble much later Muslim towers observed by 19th century explorers in the area.
Ziggurats are among the largest religious structures ever built, and their use dates back to the dawn of history. The Biblical narrative is a reaction to the ancient Mesopotamian system of beliefs reflected in these impressive structures, beliefs that ruled the hearts and minds of some of the greatest civilizations of ancient times.
The Hebrew version of the name of the city and the tower, Babel, is attributed in Gen. 11:9 to the verb balal, which means to confuse or confound in Hebrew.
According to the documentary hypothesis, the passage derives from the Jahwist source, a writer whose work is full of puns, and like many of the other puns in the Jahwist text, the element of the story concerning the scattering of languages is thought by many to be a folk etymology for the name Babel, attached to a more historic story of a collapsing tower.
Historical linguistics has long wrestled with the idea of a single original language. Attempts to identify this language with a currently existing language have been rejected by the academic community. This was the case with Hebrew, and with Basque (as proposed by Manuel de Larramendi). Yet the well-documented branching of languages from common ancestors (such as modern European languages from ancient Indo-European) points in the direction of a single ancestral language. The main issue of dispute is the date, which most modern scholars would put several thousand years before the Bible's own date for the demise of the Tower of Babel.
A large construction project in the ancient world might have used pressed labour from a diverse set of conquered or subject populations, and the domain of the empires covering Babylon would have contained some non-Semitic languages, such as Hurrian, Kassite, Sumerian, and Elamite, among others.
There is a similar story to that of the Tower of Babel in Sumerian mythology called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, where the two rival gods, Enki and Enlil end up confusing the tongues of all humankind as collateral damage arising from their argument.
In Genesis 10, Babel is said to have formed part of Nimrod's kingdom. Although not specifically mentioned in the Bible, Nimrod is often associated with the construction of the tower in other sources. One recent theory advanced by David Rohl associates Nimrod with Enmerkar, and proposes that the actual remains of the Tower of Babel are really the much older ruins of the ziggurat of Eridu, just south of Ur, rather than of Babylon. Among the reasons for this association are the larger size of the ruins, the older age of the ruins, and the fact that one title of Eridu was NUN.KI ("mighty place"), which later became a title of Babylon.
Traditionally, the peoples listed in Chapter 10 of Genesis (the Table of Nations) are understood to have been scattered over the face of the earth from Shinar only after the abandonment of The Tower, which follows as an explanation of this cultural diversity. Some, however, see a contradiction between the mention already in Genesis 10:5 that "the isles of the Gentiles (were) divided in their lands; every one after his tongue" and the subsequent Babel story, which begins "Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words" (Genesis 11:1).
The Tower
Construction of the Tower of Babel in the Maciejowski Bible
In 440 BC Herodotus wrote,
Babylon's outer wall is the main defence of the city. There is, however, a second inner wall, of less thickness than the first, but very little inferior to it in strength. The center of each division of the town was occupied by a fortress. In the one stood the palace of the kings, surrounded by a wall of great strength and size: in the other was the sacred precinct of Jupiter(Zeus) Belus, a square enclosure two furlongs 402 m each way, with gates of solid brass; which was also remaining in my time. In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong 201 m in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. When one is about half-way up, one finds a resting-place and seats, where persons are wont to sit some time on their way to the summit. On the topmost tower there is a spacious temple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned, with a golden table by its side. There is no statue of any kind set up in the place, nor is the chamber occupied of nights by any one but a single native woman, who, as the Chaldeans, the priests of this god, affirm, is chosen for himself by the deity out of all the women of the land.
This, Tower of Jupiter Belus, is believed to refer to the Akkadian god Bel, whose name has been hellenised by Herodotus to Zeus (Jupiter) Belus. It is likely that it corresponds to the giant ziggurat to Marduk (Etemenanki), an ancient ziggurat which was abandoned, falling into ruin due to earthquakes, and lightning damaging the clay. This huge ziggurat, and its downfall is thought by many academics to have inspired the story of the Tower of Babel. However, it would also fit nicely into the Biblical narrative--providing some archaeological support for the story. More evidence can be gleaned from what King Nebuchadnezzar inscribed on the ruins of this ziggurat.
In c. 570 BC Nebuchadnezzar, seeking to restore the ziggurat, wrote of its ruinous state,
A former king built [the Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth, but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time earthquakes and lightning had dispersed its sun-dried clay; the bricks of the casing had split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps. Merodach, the great lord, excited my mind to repair this building. I did not change the site, nor did I take away the foundation stone ? as it had been in former times. So I founded it, I made it; as it had been in ancient days, I so exalted the summit.
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