Even amid all the iconic tales of Genesis, the story of the Tower of Babel stands out. In nine short lines, it tells us how the uppity men of Earth decided to build a tower so big it could feature as a set piece in MI:5.
To prevent that from happening, God messed up all their languages. Since we’d have probably noticed an ancient mega-tower in the Middle East by now, the story has to be a fable, right?
Well, a few years back, scholars got around to translating some very ancient cuneiform tablets. Believed to be about 2,500 years old, one of them contained a description of a giant ziggurat built by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. At the time it was built, this huge, pyramid-like object would have been the biggest thing for hundreds of miles. But the real clincher comes from an engraving on the tablet describing how Nebuchadnezzar gathered “all the people of the world” to build his tower.
Thanks to inscriptions on walls across Babylonia, the ziggurat and its multilingual construction crew would have been known to everyone in the ancient Middle East—including the author of Genesis.
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