Was Etemenanki the Tower of Babel?

Two names for one city

Start with the name. The Babylonians called their city Bāb-ili, “gate of the god”. The Hebrew text of Genesis calls it Babel and links that name to the verb balal, “to confuse”. A city that saw itself as the doorway to the divine became, in the Bible, the place where human language fell apart. The two names already tell you that the story is about Babylon, and that it is not on Babylon’s side.

At the centre of that city stood Etemenanki, “House of the foundation of heaven and earth”: the ziggurat of Marduk, a solid stepped platform of brick with a temple on top, about 91 m square at the base. The page on what it probably looked like goes into the reconstruction. Here the question is different: did this building give the world the Tower of Babel?

What Genesis says

The biblical story is short, nine verses at the start of Genesis 11. All the people of the earth speak one language. They settle in a plain in the land of Shinar, the biblical name for Babylonia, and decide to make bricks, bake them, and build a city with a tower whose top is in the heavens, to make a name for themselves. God comes down, confuses their language so they cannot understand each other, and scatters them across the earth.

Three clues that point to Babylon

The first clue is the material. The builders in Genesis use baked brick “for stone” and bitumen “for mortar”, and the text stops to explain this to its readers. In Judah, a land of limestone, people built in stone; in Mesopotamia, monuments were made of fired brick set in bitumen. The gloss sounds like someone describing a foreign building site.

The second clue is the language of height. Late in the seventh century BCE King Nabopolassar wrote that Marduk had ordered him to rebuild the ruined tower, setting its foundation on the breast of the underworld and making its top reach towards the heavens. His son Nebuchadnezzar II finished the upper stages. “A tower whose top is in the heavens” is almost a quotation of the kings’ own boasting.

The third clue is the crowd of foreign workers. A small black stone stela, made under Nebuchadnezzar and published by the Assyriologist Andrew George in 2011, shows the king beside the stepped tower. Its inscription says that to complete Etemenanki he mobilised all countries everywhere and every ruler raised over the peoples of the world. A tower built by many nations speaking many languages is very close to the scene in Genesis, and George calls the stela very strong evidence that the story was inspired by this real building.

Who saw it?

Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar was the capital of an empire. In 597 and again in 586 BCE, after taking Jerusalem, he deported thousands of people from Judah to Babylonia. They and their descendants saw the city at its height, with the rebuilt tower rising above the temple of Marduk at the end of the processional way through the Ishtar Gate.

When and where the Babel story was written is debated, and parts of it may be older than the exile. Many scholars still connect its final form with Judeans who knew Babylon at first hand. For them, a vast tower in a city of many peoples, built to reach the sky for a foreign god, made an obvious target for a story about human pride and a God who sets limits.

The weak point

The Bible never names Etemenanki, and Mesopotamia had dozens of ziggurats. No text links the two directly. That is why the honest answer is “probably”. Etemenanki remains the best candidate by far, because it stood in the city the story names, it was rebuilt on a colossal scale at the very time Judeans were living in Babylonia, and its builders described it in the same words.

From ruin to legend

The tower did not last long after Nebuchadnezzar. In the fifth century BCE the Greek historian Herodotus described a tower of eight stages in Babylon. Later writers say that Alexander the Great planned to rebuild it and had the ruins cleared, a project that ended with his death in 323 BCE. Local builders carried off its baked bricks for centuries, and by the time Robert Koldewey’s German team arrived in 1899 only the lower core was left.

Meanwhile the story travelled without the building. European painters pictured the Tower of Babel with no idea of what a ziggurat looked like. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s version of 1563, now in Vienna, is a spiralling mass of arches modelled on Roman ruins such as the Colosseum. Babylon’s other famous puzzle, the Hanging Gardens, went through the same mix of memory and imagination.

Where to see it

Only the foundations of Etemenanki survive, at Babylon, about 85 km south of Baghdad, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2019. The Esagila tablet with its measurements is in the Louvre in Paris, and Bruegel’s painting hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Check current travel advice before planning a trip to Iraq.

Sources

• ORACC, Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo), inscriptions of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II on Etemenanki.
• A. R. George, “The Tower of Babel: Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts”, Archiv für Orientforschung 51 (2005/2006).
• A. R. George, in Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection, CUSAS 17 (2011).
• R. Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon (1914).
• Genesis 11:1-9; Herodotus, Histories 1.181.
• Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Tower of Babel” (GG 1026).
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Babylon” (inscribed 2019).