A house between heaven and earth
The name says what the building was for. É-temen-an-ki is Sumerian for “House of the foundation platform of heaven and earth”: a structure meant to tie the sky to the ground at the centre of Babylon. It belonged to Marduk, the city’s chief god, and stood next to his main temple, the Esagila, in a walled precinct of its own.
A ziggurat had no rooms inside. It was a solid stepped mass of brick that lifted a small shrine high above the city, and Etemenanki was among the tallest ever built. It reached its final form under Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar II, in the late seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Nebuchadnezzar also lined the road to it with walls glazed in blue.
How do we know what it looked like?
Almost nothing of it stands, so every picture of Etemenanki is put together from three kinds of evidence.
The first is a set of numbers. The Esagila tablet, a cuneiform text now in the Louvre, is a copy made at Uruk in 229 BCE of an older original. It lists the stages one by one with their measurements: seven in all, on a square base of about 91 m a side, with a total height of about the same. A cube of air, in other words, filled by a stepped pyramid.
The second is a picture. A small black stone stele, 47 cm high and now in a private collection in Norway, shows Nebuchadnezzar II beside a stepped tower seen from the front, with seven stages and a temple on top, plus a plan of the shrine. Its inscription speaks of the king rebuilding Etemenanki. When the Assyriologist Andrew George published it in 2011, it became the only image of the ziggurat made in its own time.
The third is the ground itself. German excavators led by Robert Koldewey, working at Babylon from 1899, found the base: a square of foundations about 91 m a side, and a large stairway on the south side, facing the Esagila.
A mountain built three times
Like the Ziggurat of Ur, Etemenanki had a core of sun-dried mudbrick wrapped in fired brick set in bitumen, the waterproof tar of Mesopotamian builders. The casing kept rain out of the core. A survey of the remains by the architect Hansjörg Schmid showed that it grew in stages: an older mudbrick tower about 65 m square, then a mudbrick mantle about 73 m square, and finally the fired-brick casing that brought it to about 91 m.
The numbers alone are hard to take in. At about 90 m, Etemenanki stood roughly as tall as the Statue of Liberty on its pedestal, in a flat city where most houses had one or two storeys. Building it took millions of bricks, and royal inscriptions boast of the labour that went into it.
What about the colours? Many reconstructions paint each stage a different colour. No Babylonian text says so. The famous list of seven coloured rings comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, and he was describing the walls of Ecbatana, a city in Iran. The faces of Etemenanki were probably the colour of fired brick, and the top temple may have had glazed bricks, as other buildings in Babylon did.
Why the Tower of Babel is often round
Herodotus also visited, or heard about, Babylon in the fifth century BCE. He described a tower of eight stages with a path winding round the outside, so that climbers went up in a spiral. Combined with the story in Genesis, that description shaped how Europe pictured the tower for centuries. When Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Tower of Babel in 1563, he made it a round, spiralling mass of arches, closer to the Colosseum in Rome than to anything in Babylon.
From tower to hollow
After the Persians took Babylon in 539 BCE, the tower was neglected. Alexander the Great reportedly had the rubble cleared to rebuild it, but he died in 323 BCE before any rebuilding began. Over the following centuries its fired bricks, already shaped and ready to use, were carried off for other buildings. What remains is the footprint: a square of foundations around a hollow where the core once stood.
Where to see it
Babylon, about 85 km south of Baghdad, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2019, and the outline of Etemenanki can still be traced on the ground. The Esagila tablet is in the Louvre in Paris. For the city that surrounded the tower, from its blue gate to the legendary gardens, Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum holds the Ishtar Gate, although its south wing is closed for renovation. Check current travel advice and opening times before you go.
Sources
- Musée du Louvre, “Esagila tablet” (copy dated 229 BCE).
- A. R. George, “The Tower of Babel: archaeology, history and cuneiform texts”, Archiv für Orientforschung 51 (2005/2006).
- A. R. George, “A stele of Nebuchadnezzar II”, in Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection (CDL Press, 2011).
- H. Schmid, Der Tempelturm Etemenanki in Babylon (1995).
- Herodotus, Histories 1.98 (Ecbatana) and 1.181 (Babylon).
- R. Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon (1914).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Babylon” (2019).
