# Ziggurats and the Tower of Babel ## Intro Southern Iraq is full of the ruins of ziggurats. A ziggurat was a huge stepped tower of brick, built in levels like a giant staircase, with a temple on the top. Every major city in ancient Mesopotamia had one. The most famous stood in the middle of Babylon, next to the temple of the god Marduk, and the Babylonians called it Etemenanki, "House: Foundation of heaven and earth." [Genesis 11:1-9](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/) tells of people in "the land of Shinar" who baked bricks, used bitumen for mortar, and began "a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven." Those details are exactly how Mesopotamian builders worked, and the city is named Babel, the Hebrew name for Babylon. So the ziggurats show that Genesis is describing a real kind of building in a real place, built the real way. They do not prove that the event in Genesis 11 happened, and no tablet tells the story of a tower abandoned when languages were confused. Both halves of that answer matter. ## In full The Tower of Babel account ([Genesis 11:1-9](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/)) is set in Shinar, the biblical name for southern Mesopotamia ([Genesis 10:10](/codex/genesis-10-8-10/) lists Babel first among the cities "in the land of Shinar"). Its building details (fired brick in place of stone, bitumen in place of mortar, a tower with its top "unto heaven", a project meant to "make us a name") are, in the words of the Hebrew Bible scholar Christoph Uehlinger, "known features of Mesopotamian civilization in the second and first millennium B.C.E." The temple-tower of Babylon, Etemenanki, beside the Esagil temple of Marduk, was excavated by the German expedition (Robert Koldewey's work, with the ziggurat site investigated in 1913 and reexamined in 1962 and 1967-68). Olof Pedersén of Uppsala University (*Iraq*, 2023) describes its remains as a 90 by 90 metre ziggurat with a preserved 60 by 60 metre mud brick core and a 15 metre wide baked brick mantle. A black stone stele showing Nebuchadnezzar II beside a stepped tower labelled Etemenanki, and carrying his account of building it, was published by Andrew George in 2011 and in December 2023 was given to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The ziggurat of Ur, built by Ur-Nammu around 2100 BC, shows the same mud brick core with a facing of baked brick laid in bitumen more than a millennium earlier. Mainstream scholarship widely treats Etemenanki as the structure most likely behind the story, while noting that the Hebrew *migdal* can mean any tower or citadel. The archaeology establishes the setting; it does not, and could not, confirm the divine act the text reports. ## The text [Genesis 11:1-9](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/) (ASV): *"And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And Jehovah came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And Jehovah said, Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do: and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do. Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So Jehovah scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off building the city. Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because Jehovah did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did Jehovah scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth."* Three features of the text carry the archaeological comparison: 1. **The place.** Shinar is southern Mesopotamia, and Babel is the city the rest of the Hebrew Bible calls Babylon. The Hebrew word (Strong's H894) is tagged in 233 verses of the KJV, printed "Babylon" almost everywhere and "Babel" only twice, at [Genesis 10:10](/codex/genesis-10-8-10/) and [Genesis 11:9](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/) (measured). 2. **The materials.** "Brick for stone" and "slime for mortar." The ASV's "slime" is *chemar* (H2564), bitumen or natural asphalt. It occurs in only three verses: here, the "slime pits" of the vale of Siddim (Genesis 14:10), and the bitumen with which Moses' mother sealed his basket (Exodus 2:3) (measured). The brick is *lebenah* (H3843), and the builders "burn them thoroughly", that is, they fire them in a kiln rather than drying them in the sun. 3. **The tower and the name.** A tower "whose top may reach unto heaven" and a project to "make us a name" are a builder-king's language. Uehlinger notes that "to make oneself a name" means "to become famous through monuments." **The text never says the tower was destroyed.** It says the builders "left off building the city" ([Genesis 11:8](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/)). Jan Christian Gertz of Heidelberg University makes the same observation: the tower's destruction, "though often read into the story, is never stated." ## What a ziggurat was A ziggurat was a solid, stepped platform of brick, rising in terraces, with a shrine on the top level. It was the tower of a temple complex, the high point of a city's chief sanctuary. It was not a building people lived in, and it was not hollow. Uehlinger notes that Babylonians called Etemenanki the "ziggurat of (the god) Marduk." The connection to the Genesis wording is the claim these towers made. A structure named "Foundation of heaven and earth" presents itself as the point where the two meet. The codex's treatment of what that means for the objection that God was threatened by innocent technology is at [Tower of Babel Objection Defeater](/codex/tower-of-babel-objection-defeater/). ## Etemenanki in Babylon - **Name.** Sumerian *E-temen-an-ki*, which Uehlinger renders "House: Foundation of heaven and earth." Other renderings ("Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth") say the same thing. - **Location.** In the centre of Babylon, north of Esagil, the main temple of Marduk. Pedersén locates the remains north of the mound of Amran, under which Esagil lies. - **Size.** Pedersén describes the remains as a 90 by 90 metre ziggurat, with a preserved 60 by 60 metre mud brick core and a 15 metre wide mantle of baked brick, and gives the width of the lowest terrace, from the excavations, as about 91.5 metres. Using the proportions on the Nebuchadnezzar stele, he offers a provisional reconstruction of a tower about 73 metres high in six terraces, with a temple of about 20 metres on top. He is explicit that this is a projection from the stele's picture, not a measured height. - **Builder.** The structure whose remains survive is the one Nebuchadnezzar II (reigned 604-562 BC) claims in his inscriptions to have built. The stele below names both Etemenanki in Babylon and the ziggurat of Borsippa as his work. - **Excavation.** Uehlinger reports that the structure was excavated in 1913 and reexamined in 1962 and 1967-68. Pedersén describes the German excavation of the Esagil area by Walter Andrae in 1900, and later soundings in 1910-1911. - **What is left.** Little more than the core and the outline in the ground. Gertz connects the idea of an unfinished tower with the damage Xerxes did to religious buildings in Babylon, and Erin Blakemore, writing in *National Geographic* (2026), reports that Alexander the Great, after taking Babylon in 331 BC, ordered the remains destroyed in preparation for a rebuilding that never happened. ## The Tower of Babylon stele The one ancient picture of Etemenanki is a small black stone stele, 47 by 25.5 by 11 cm, from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II. - **What it shows.** On the front, a stepped tower in side view with a temple on its summit, a plan of the top sanctuary, and a standing king in royal dress. A three-line label beside the tower identifies it as Etemenanki in Babylon. Below the images, a longer inscription in three columns is a version of Nebuchadnezzar II's known building inscriptions, describing how he built Etemenanki and the ziggurat of Borsippa. The Schøyen Collection's summary of the inscription says it records the king mobilising workers from distant lands to complete the reconstruction with bitumen and baked brick. - **The king's portrait.** Pedersén notes that the figure of Nebuchadnezzar on the stele "is the only known representation of him from Mesopotamia"; the only other images of him are worn rock reliefs in Lebanon. - **Publication.** Andrew George, "A stele of Nebuchadnezzar II," in *Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection* (Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 17, CDL Press, 2011), text 76, pp. 153-169. - **Where it came from.** It was long held in the private Schøyen Collection (as MS 2063) with inconsistent and, in one version, impossible findspot claims. Pedersén's 2023 study in *Iraq* reports that the two fragments were found in the early 1990s in the open trench of the German 1900 excavation at Amran, about 20 metres north of the Esagil temple, in a later level, possibly Parthian. After he shared that study, the collector returned the stele to Iraq, and in December 2023 it was presented to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. - **Its status.** Pedersén acknowledges that "some scholars have even expressed doubts about the authenticity of the stele," partly because of the false findspot stories, and offers his account of the find circumstances and his inspection of the original as a remedy. A forthcoming study by George on its authenticity is cited in his bibliography. The stele should be presented as a published royal monument whose provenance has now been reported, with that debate noted. For Nebuchadnezzar's own boast about Babylon, see [Daniel 4:30](/codex/daniel-4-30/): *"Is not this great Babylon, which I have built for the royal dwelling-place, by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?"* The person page is [Nebuchadrezzar](/codex/nebuchadrezzar/). ## The ziggurat of Ur Babylon's tower was the latest in a long line. The ziggurat of Ur, the best preserved example, shows that the building method in [Genesis 11:3](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/) was ancient in Mesopotamia long before Nebuchadnezzar. - **Builder and date.** Senta German (Khan Academy) dates it to around 2100 BC, built by Ur-Nammu of the Third Dynasty of Ur for the moon deity Nanna, patron of the city. (The excavator Leonard Woolley, writing in 1924, dated it earlier, around 2300 BC; later scholarship places it around 2100 BC.) - **Construction.** Woolley described it in the Penn Museum's *Museum Journal* (1924) as "crude brick inside with a thick facing of baked bricks laid in pitch for mortar," with "reed mats dipped in pitch" laid between courses to bind the brickwork. He judged that "the quality of the bricks and of the bricklaying is astonishingly good." - **Excavation.** Woolley excavated Ur in a joint expedition of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the British Museum. - **Restoration.** The Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus repaired and completed it in the sixth century BC. His foundation cylinders from that work are the ones that name his son Belshazzar; see [Nabonidus Cylinder and Belshazzar](/codex/nabonidus-cylinder-and-belshazzar/). The point for Genesis: fired brick laid in bitumen was a Mesopotamian technique by the late third millennium BC. It is not evidence for one particular century. ## Brick and bitumen Mesopotamia's river plain has clay and little building stone. It also has natural bitumen. So its monumental builders used mud brick for the bulk of a structure and baked brick, often set in bitumen, for the facing that had to withstand weather. Gertz writes that "the use of fired bricks and bitumen for mortar was unknown in ancient Israel." That is why [Genesis 11:3](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/) explains it: "they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar." The narrator is describing a foreign way of building to readers who built with stone. That explanatory aside is one of the clearest signs that the setting is not invented in a vacuum. An author imagining a great tower in Canaanite terms would have built it of stone. ## Babel and Babylon: the name - **The Babylonian meaning.** The city's own name comes from Akkadian *bab ili*, "the gate of the god" (*HarperCollins Bible Dictionary*, ed. Mark Allan Powell, 2009, via Bible Odyssey). - **The Hebrew wordplay.** Genesis does not explain the name that way. [Genesis 11:9](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/) says it was called Babel "because Jehovah did there confound the language," linking *Babel* with the verb *balal* (H1101, "confound" or "mingle"; 42 KJV verses, rendered "confound" only at Genesis 11:7 and 11:9, measured). The KJV margin at 11:9 reads "Babel: that is, Confusion." - **The effect.** What Babylon called the gate of the god, Genesis calls the place where speech fell apart. Gertz describes the ending as an etiology, an origin story that ties the city's name to the confusion of languages and makes it the starting point of humanity's dispersion. Whatever one concludes about authorship, the pun is a deliberate theological answer to Babylon's self-description. The theme returns at Pentecost, where the crowd "were confounded, because that every man heard them speaking in his own language" ([Acts 2:6](/codex/acts-2-5-11/)); see [Pentecost](/codex/pentecost/). ## What archaeology does and does not show **What it shows.** 1. Mesopotamian cities built monumental stepped temple-towers, and Babylon's was among the largest. 2. Babylon's tower was named as a meeting point of heaven and earth, which is the claim Genesis 11 answers. 3. Baked brick and bitumen were the standard Mesopotamian materials for such work, from Ur-Nammu's ziggurat around 2100 BC to Nebuchadnezzar's in the sixth century BC. 4. The details of [Genesis 11:1-9](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/) fit their stated setting closely. Uehlinger, writing from a critical standpoint, calls the story's "Mesopotamian touch" strong. **What it does not show.** 1. No inscription or tablet records a tower left unfinished because the builders' languages were confused. Uehlinger notes that no Mesopotamian parallel to the Babel story earlier than the Hellenistic period is known. He also discusses the Sumerian epic *Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta*, sometimes called a "Sumerian version" of Babel: it ascribes the multiplication of languages to the god Enki, whereas Genesis has one speech confused, and because the epic was not transmitted beyond the middle of the second millennium BC, Uehlinger rules out a link. 2. Archaeology cannot confirm that Etemenanki, rather than some earlier tower, is the structure the text has in view. Both Gertz and Uehlinger note that *migdal* can mean any tower, fortress or citadel. Gertz still calls the Etemenanki identification "reasonable." 3. Nothing in the ground dates the events of Genesis 11 or confirms the origin of the world's languages. Those are claims of the text, held on the authority of the text. **A critical argument to know.** Gertz argues that the reference to fired brick points to a late date of writing, because Babylon's ziggurat received its fired-brick sheathing only in its latest building stage, in the seventh century BC; he concludes that the story is "likely a postexilic addition." The argument depends on the story being about the Etemenanki of the seventh and sixth centuries. The ziggurat of Ur shows the same fired-brick-and-bitumen method in the late third millennium, so the building detail fits a Mesopotamian setting in many centuries and does not by itself fix a date. On source-critical theories generally, see [Documentary Hypothesis](/codex/documentary-hypothesis/); on the chronology of the chapter, see [Genesis 11 Chronology](/codex/genesis-11-chronology/). **The careful claim.** The archaeology of ziggurats supports the historical realism of the Babel account's setting: a real region, a real city, a real type of building, built with the right materials, for the purpose the text names. Belief that God acted there rests on Scripture, not on bricks. ## Biblical references - [Genesis 11:1-9](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/), the account itself - [Genesis 10:10](/codex/genesis-10-8-10/), Babel the first city of the kingdom "in the land of Shinar" - [Daniel 4:30](/codex/daniel-4-30/), Nebuchadnezzar's boast over "great Babylon, which I have built" - Jeremiah 51:53, *"Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify the height of her strength, yet from me shall destroyers come unto her, saith Jehovah"* - [Acts 2:5-11](/codex/acts-2-5-11/), the reversal at Pentecost, every man hearing "in his own language" ## Evidential status **Well established:** the existence, location, materials and approximate footprint of Etemenanki; the date and construction of the ziggurat of Ur; the Akkadian meaning of Babylon's name; the Hebrew wordplay in Genesis 11:9. **Reasonable but not certain:** that Etemenanki, or Mesopotamian ziggurat-building generally, is the background the text has in view. **Debated:** the provenance history and, for a minority, the authenticity of the Tower of Babylon stele; the height of the tower. **Beyond archaeology:** the event of Genesis 11 itself. ## See also - [Biblical Archaeology](/codex/biblical-archaeology/), parent hub - [Tower of Babel Objection Defeater](/codex/tower-of-babel-objection-defeater/), the debate-prep reply to "God was threatened by human progress", including the ziggurat context - [Tower of Babel Objection](/codex/tower-of-babel-objection/), the concept-level treatment of the objection - [Nebuchadrezzar](/codex/nebuchadrezzar/), the king who built the Etemenanki whose remains survive - [Nabonidus Cylinder and Belshazzar](/codex/nabonidus-cylinder-and-belshazzar/), the foundation cylinders from Nabonidus's restoration of the ziggurat of Ur - [Babylonian Chronicle and the Capture of Jerusalem](/codex/babylonian-chronicle-and-the-capture-of-jerusalem/), Nebuchadnezzar's reign from the Babylonian side - [Genesis 11 Chronology](/codex/genesis-11-chronology/), the dating questions in Genesis 11 - [Pentecost](/codex/pentecost/), the reversal of Babel's confusion - [John Currid](/codex/john-currid/), on Genesis as polemic against ancient Near Eastern religion ## Common questions this page answers **Q: Do ziggurats prove the Tower of Babel?** No, not by themselves. They show that [Genesis 11](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/) describes a real kind of building, in a real region, built with the real materials of that region: baked brick and bitumen on the plain of Shinar. That supports the realism of the setting. No ancient tablet records a tower abandoned because languages were confused, so the event itself rests on the testimony of Scripture. **Q: What was Etemenanki?** The ziggurat of Babylon, a stepped temple-tower beside Esagil, the temple of Marduk. Its Sumerian name means "House: Foundation of heaven and earth." Its remains are a ruin about 90 by 90 metres with a mud brick core and a baked brick mantle. Nebuchadnezzar II claimed to have built it, and a stele bearing his picture and a drawing of the tower survives. **Q: Why does Genesis 11:3 mention brick and bitumen?** Because that is how Mesopotamians built, and Israelites did not. The plain had clay and natural bitumen but little stone, so monumental towers were made of mud brick with a baked brick facing laid in bitumen. The ziggurat of Ur, built around 2100 BC, was made exactly that way. The verse explains the method to readers who built with stone: "they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar." **Q: What does the name Babylon mean?** In Akkadian, *bab ili*, "the gate of the god." Genesis answers that claim with a pun: the city is called Babel "because Jehovah did there confound the language," tying the name to the Hebrew verb *balal*, "to confuse." What Babylon called the gate of the god, Genesis calls the place where human speech broke apart. **Q: What is the Tower of Babel stele?** A small black stone stele from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II showing the king beside a stepped tower labelled Etemenanki, with an inscription describing his building of it. Andrew George published it in 2011. Olof Pedersén reported in 2023 that it was found in the early 1990s near the Esagil temple in Babylon, and it was given to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in December 2023. Some scholars have questioned its authenticity, which Pedersén's study addresses. **Q: Was the Tower of Babel destroyed?** Genesis does not say so. It says the builders "left off building the city" ([Genesis 11:8](/codex/genesis-11-1-9/)). The idea of a tower struck down is a later addition to the story in popular retelling. Babylon's real ziggurat suffered damage under the Persians and was cleared under Alexander the Great, which is why little more than its core remains.