This story features a ‘confusion of tongues’ as well as the construction of temples at Eridu and Uruk, so parallels have been drawn between it and the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis. Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is a Sumerian text from around four thousand years ago, describing the conflicts between Enmerkar, king of Uruk, and the king of Aratta. The artefact was explored during the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary, ‘Secrets: Tower of Babel’. It is astounding what God has allowed us to observe regarding the brain. The mound had fallen into bad condition and Nebuchadnezzar restored it. Nebuchadnezzar claimed that an earlier king had built it but had not finished the job. It has existed since before the time of Nebuchadnezzar (600 B.C.). The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn. Today what I want to talk about is the brain. Near Ancient Babylon These ruins are of a pyramid mound that exists today some 8-10 miles southwest of Babylon. Although it was barely 325 feet in height, this still made it the tallest structure in southwestern Asia, and it would retain that record for many centuries afterwards.Īnd curiously enough, the Tower of Babel story may well have grown out of an earlier Sumerian myth, much as the account of Noah and the Great Flood finds a precursor in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The similarity in pronunciation of Babel and balal (to confuse) led to the play on words in Genesis 11:9: Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. A tower in Babel was eventually completed, by Nebuchadnezzar. It remained half-finished for centuries, so it may well have served as the real-life inspiration for the mythic Tower of Babel. Such a structure is known as a ziggurat: a pyramidal tower.Ī Sumerian king began building a ziggurat in Babel, but this was left unfinished, perhaps because the Sumerians were too busy fending off the Akkadians. As Isaac Asimov notes in Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament by Isaac Asimov, temples to the gods in these cities took the form of stepped pyramids which were ascended by inclined planes around the outside. Babylonia, the considerable region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was named for Babylon, which was itself the Greek version of Babel.īabel (or Babylon) did indeed have a real, historical tower, but then that needn’t surprise us, since most Sumerian and Babylonian cities boasted one. If its name sounds unfamiliar to us now, except in connection with the biblical Tower of Babel story, that’s because we know it better under its Greek name, which was Babylon. For the next two thousand years, Babel changed hands but remained an important city.
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