Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [78]
Was the Tower of Babel in Babylon?
History, myth, and biblical traditions all come crashing together in the largely familiar account of the Tower of Babel, a story which appears in Genesis 11. In this tale, men have come from the east and settled in Shinar—a biblical place understood to be the kingdom of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia. The men all speak the same language and decide to build a city and a tower to “make a name for ourselves.” But when God comes down and sees this activity, in which men are making bricks to build a tower with its “top in the heavens,” He is not happy. Men are making their way heavenward. Threatened and annoyed, God decides to confuse their speech so that the tower-builders cannot understand one another. After the construction of the tower is thrown into chaos, God scatters these people all over the face of the earth. The biblical account has traditionally been viewed as an explanatory myth that accounts for the world’s many different languages and the spread of different nations.
But in exploring life and myth in the “cradle of civilization,” it should be noted that many more languages were spoken over the centuries in Mesopotamia than elsewhere, due to the successive waves of people who conquered or moved through the area, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, and later, Persians. The conquerors of Mesopotamia all spoke different languages, so Babylon’s “multicultural” history, and Israel’s place in that history, need to be taken into account when considering the Bible story and its historical background.
The first great Babylonian civilization had flourished between 1800 and 1600 BCE, under Hammurabi and other kings. The Babylonians later fell to the Kassites, who ruled Babylon from the sixteenth to the twelfth century, in what is called the Kassite Period. Speaking a little-known language, they came from the Caucasus region, the mountainous area between the Black and Caspian Seas (an area that today includes Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as Chechnya, the restive and very troubled region of Russia).
The Assyrian Empire, based in northern Mesopotamia, took control of Babylon during the 700s BCE, but the city resisted Assyrian rule, and King Sennacherib of Assyria destroyed Babylon in 689 BCE. The New Babylonian, or Chaldean, Empire began in 626 BCE, when the Babylonian military leader Nabopolassar became king of Babylon. Nabopolassar won control of Babylon from the Assyrians, and under his reign, the Chaldean Empire grew to control much of what is now the Middle East. Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadrezzar II rebuilt the city on a grand scale. During the reign of Nebuchadrezzar, from 605 to 562 BCE, workers built huge walls almost 85 feet (26 meters) thick around the outside of Babylon, and people entered and left the city through eight bronze gates. The grandest of these was the Ishtar Gate, decorated with figures of mythical dragons, lions, and bulls made of colored, glazed brick. The Ishtar Gate opened onto a broad paved avenue connecting the Temple of Marduk inside the walls and the site of the great New Year festival. Nebuchadrezzar’s main palace stood between the Ishtar Gate and the Euphrates River, an area that may have included the famed Hanging Gardens. The ancient Greeks described these gardens, which grew on the roof of a high building, as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Temple of Marduk stood in an area to the south and included the famed ziggurat tower.
The function of the ziggurat has inspired several theories, including the idea that these