Babel, Language, and Human Dispersal

Morris, Henry M.  The Genesis Record:  A Scientific and Devotional Commentary on the Book of Beginnings.  Creation-Life Publishers / Baker.  1976.  The founding young-earth commentary on Genesis, by the co-author of The Genesis Flood and founder of the Institute for Creation Research.  Its Babel chapter makes the confusion a miracle that created new phonologies for about seventy family groups, dates the dispersion to Peleg's birth, and allows gaps in Genesis 11 of a thousand years or more.  It cites no linguist and no excavation.

1. 1a.

   Page 264:  “The Flood was worldwide in its effects, and so was the confusion of tongues of worldwide impact — at least as far as man was concerned.” ↩

2. 1b.

   Page 277:  “Likewise, another miracle of creation was required to create many new such phonologies all at once (presumably leaving the old intact, in the brain-nerve-tongue complex of those who did not participate in the Babel rebellion).” ↩

3. 1c.

   Page 262:  “distinct family units, distinct languages (therefore, subsequent to Babel), distinct regions, and, finally, actual nations. A total of twenty-six such 'nations' is listed as coming from Shem, as compared with thirty listed from Ham … and only fourteen from Japheth. Thus a total of seventy such primeval nations is listed”. ↩

4. 1d.

   Page 282:  “Adding up the numbers in these verses, therefore, the record indicates that Peleg was born 101 years after the Flood. This probably was the year of the Babel Dispersion.” ↩

5. 1e.

   Pages 309–310:  “If Thiele's analysis is correct, this would place the Flood (assuming no gaps in Genesis 11) at 2459 B.C. and the Dispersion at about 2358 B.C. If gaps are allowed, however, these dates might conceivably be increased by, say, up to about one thousand years or more (possibly five thousand years at the very outside).” ↩

Speiser, E. A.  “Word Plays on the Creation Epic's Version of the Founding of Babylon.”  Oriental and Biblical Studies:  Collected Writings of E. A. Speiser, 53–61.  University of Pennsylvania Press.  Edited by J. J. Finkelstein and M. Greenberg.  1956 (edition of 1967).  Argues that the building scene of Genesis 11:3-4 answers Enuma Elish VI 60-62 point by point (the year of brick-making, the raising of Esagil's head), so the story's source was literary, not a sight of Etemenanki.  Speiser was the Anchor Bible Genesis commentator and a leading Assyriologist;  he treats the confusion of tongues as "purely speculative" ground.  Page numbers are those of the 1967 collected reprint;  the article first appeared in Orientalia 25 (1956): 317–323.

1. 2a.

   Page 59:  “Thus far, then, each item in the biblical narrative proves to have its appropriate Mesopotamian antecedent: the solemn preparation of the bricks (nilbᵉnā lᵉbēnīm), the building of the stage tower (ʿîr ûmigdal), and the reference to the 'head in the heavens' (wᵉrōʾšô baššāmayim).  So much detailed correspondence, and particularly the out-of-the-way reference to the bricks, adds up to convincing proof that the underlying source was textual as opposed to monumental.  To that extent at least biblical tradition cannot be charged with fanciful invention.” ↩ ↩

Ross, Marcus R. et al.  “Human History from Adam to Abraham:  Integrating Paleoanthropology with a Young-Age Creation Perspective.”  Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism 9:66–87.  2023.  Three young-earth scientists place every hominin fossil after the Flood and ask where Babel then falls.  The one young-earth paper that names Seely's objection, grants its force, and states the cost of each answer.

1. 3a.

   Page 76:  “One possibility is that the Tower of Babel may be a later innovation that took place only in Mesopotamia and involved only H. sapiens. The putatively earlier and globally distributed remains of non-sapiens people could be traces of pre-Babel dispersals of specific family groups or clans.”  “A second possible explanation is that all globally-distributed hominin remains are indeed post-Babel and that the setting of the Babel story is much more remote than archaeologists have considered.” ↩ ↩

2. 3b.

   Page 76:  “We acknowledge here that these observations raise significant questions about the nature of the Babel description in Genesis, which appears to be firmly rooted in the architectural practices known from Mesopotamian city states (see Walton 1995, Seely 2001), and the relationship of these distant people (who are unquestionably not H. sapiens) to the Tower builders.” ↩

3. 3c.

   Pages 76–77:  “Given the importance of the biblical evidence of universality, both in Genesis 11 specifically and as a theme throughout chapters 1-11, we prefer the second explanation to the first. … The advantages of the first explanation are considerable, however, particularly in the possibility of accounting for the takeover of H. sapiens, and we therefore remain open to being corrected by future studies.” ↩

4. 3d.

   Page 76:  “The disadvantage of this model is its poor accounting of the seemingly universal description in the Babel account. … The biblical text certainly appears to present the circumstances as involving all the people in the world at that time.” ↩

5. 3e.

   Page 76:  “Thus, the peculiarly Mesopotamian building techniques of fired mud brick and asphalt mortar must have been rediscovered at a later period, and it is these subsequent civilizations that are the focus of currently archaeological investigation.” ↩

The count and the arithmetic are this article's own.  Levels:  the Eridu Temple Sounding has 19 numbered levels, XIX to I,⁵⁹ grouped by pottery as Crawford summarises Oates,⁶⁰ and above them lies at least one Early Dynastic building phase, the palace and probable earlier ziggurat that Amar-Sin levelled,⁵⁹ for 20 levels in all.  Constructions:  nine Ubaid buildings (XVII-XV and XI-VI), five Uruk-period platform phases (V-I) and the Early Dynastic phase, for 15.  The years available, Y, are the Babel date minus 2112 BC, Ur-Nammu's accession on the Middle Chronology.  Years per level are Y / 20 and years per construction Y / 15.  Checks:  2358 - 2112 = 246, and 246 / 20 = 12.3, 246 / 15 = 16.4;  2247 - 2112 = 135, giving 6.75 and 9.0;  2242 - 2112 = 130, giving 6.5 and 8.67;  2178 - 2112 = 66, giving 3.3 and 4.4;  2500 - 2112 = 388, giving 19.4 and 25.9;  2707 - 2112 = 595, giving 29.75 and 39.7;  2767 - 2112 = 655, giving 32.75 and 43.7;  2428 - 2112 = 316, giving 15.8 and 21.1.  Seder Olam's AM 1996 on the traditional Jewish era, which puts creation in 3761 BC, runs from the autumn of 1766 BC to the autumn of 1765 BC;  Ussher's creation is 243 years earlier, at 4004 BC, which is why the same AM year is 2008 BC on his scale.  Osgood's horizon leaves levels XI to I and the Early Dynastic phase, 12 levels, after Babel, and 388 / 12 is about 32 years each.  The compression figure is rough.  About 3,500 years is a round conventional span for Eridu's sequence, from its first level in Ubaid 1 to the end of the Early Dynastic period about 2350 BC;  counted from the start of the southern Ubaid, about 6500 BC on radiometric dates, it is over 4,000.  Either way, fitting it into the Septuagint's 600 to 650 years is a compression by five or more.  The Babel dates in the first column are those printed by each writer, or computed from the begetting ages of each text as in When Was the Tower of Babel? ↩ ↩

The arithmetic is this article's own, from the begetting ages of Genesis 11:10-16.  Shem fathers Arpachshad "two years after the flood".  Masoretic:  Arpachshad 35, Shelah 30, Eber 34, so Peleg is born 2 + 35 + 30 + 34 = 101 years after the Flood, lives 30 + 209 = 239 years, and dies 340 years after it.  Samaritan:  135, 130 and 134, so 401;  Peleg lives 130 + 109 = 239, so 640.  Septuagint:  Arpachshad 135, Kainan 130, Shelah 130, Eber 134, so 531;  Peleg lives 130 + 209 = 339, so 870.  The 2166 BC anchor for Abraham's birth counts back from Solomon's fourth year, 966 BC:  480 years to the Exodus in 1446 BC (1 Kings 6:1), 430 years in Egypt to Jacob's arrival in 1876 BC (Exodus 12:40), then Jacob 130, Isaac 60 and Abraham 100 (Genesis 47:9, 25:26, 21:5).  From Peleg's birth to Abram's the begetting ages are 30, 32, 30, 29 and 130 on the Masoretic text, 130, 132, 130, 79 and 70 on the Samaritan, and 130, 132, 130, 79 and 130 on the Septuagint, taking Terah's age at Abram's birth as 130 from Genesis 11:32 and 12:4 where the text allows it.  That is 352, 942 and 1,132 years from the Flood to Abram, which puts the Masoretic Flood at 2518 BC, the Samaritan at 3108 BC and the Septuagint at 3298 BC, so Peleg's life runs 2417-2178, 2707-2468 and 2767-2428 BC.  The Samaritan text cannot take Terah 130, because its Genesis 11:32 gives Terah 145 years.  Ussher's anchor, Abraham born 1996 BC, puts the Masoretic Flood at 2348 BC and Peleg's life at 2247-2008 BC. ↩ ↩

Kitchen, K. A.  On the Reliability of the Old Testament.  Eerdmans.  2003.  A conservative Egyptologist's survey of the Old Testament against the external evidence.  Chapter 9 section B tabulates every Genesis 10 name by the century of its earliest external attestation and builds a three-phase literary history from the counts.  Kitchen is not a young-earth writer;  his method dates the list's final form to the first millennium BC and he says so.

1. 6a.

   Page 447:  “The Table of Nations with early roots had its first form in the early second millennium, its full form in the late second, and was finally updated in the early first (a text history like that of the patriarchal narratives).” ↩ ↩

If Indo-European began at Babel in year TB, two lineages attested in years dX and dY have had Lb = (dX - TB) + (dY - TB) years.  The speed-up k is the lineage length the stated rate needs to produce the observed S, divided by Lb;  below 1 the pair fits.  For Hittite and Vedic under a Babel at 2242 BC, Lb = 792 + 942 = 1,734 years.  At the fastest millennium rate the needed length is 4.25 millennia, so k = 4.25 / 1.734 = 2.45;  at the Cornish rate it is ln 0.212 / ln 0.556 = 2.64 millennia, k = 1.52.  For the gamma columns the needed length is beta x (S^(-1/alpha) - 1), with the fitted shape alpha and scale beta, divided by a factor that makes the gamma model reproduce the faster of the two fastest millennium-scale calibrations:  on the disjoint fit 10.53 / (1.757 x 1.734) = 3.45, and on the all-pairs fit 4.80.  Under the Septuagint's 2767 BC, Lb = 2,784 years and the factors are 0.95, 1.53, 2.15 and 2.99.  Code babel-ie.ts;  output ie-babel-speedup.tsv. ↩ ↩

This is the article's construction from young-earth inputs;  no young-earth writer has made it.  The inputs:  people at Babel, about 25,000 from Osgood or 1,000 from Carter and Hardy;  Babel languages, about a dozen from Duursma or at least 78 from Hodge;  founders per lineage = people / languages / 2, because splitting Proto-Indo-European in two at Babel gives the root pair the most time, which gives 6.4, 160, 1,042 or 1,667.  Bromham and colleagues' loss slope, b = 0.12, makes the loss rate at population N, relative to a calibration lineage at Nc, (N / Nc)^-b;  the upper 95% bound, 0.184, was also run.  Each lineage grows exponentially from N0 at Babel to Na at its texts, with Na of 10,000, 100,000 or a million and Nc of 100,000, 360,000 or a million, and the multiplier is capped at Bromham's smallest population, 200.  For exponential growth over T years the effective length is (N0/Nc)^-b x T x (1 - (Na/N0)^-b) / (b ln(Na/N0)), and the code checks this closed form against numerical integration to one part in a million.  The central case, Na = 100,000 and Nc = 360,000, gives a mean multiplier of 1.76 for 160 founders, 1.99 for 6.4 and 1.55 for 1,042.  Hittite and Vedic then need, under the Masoretic date, 2.45 / 1.76 = 1.39 at one rate and 1.97 with gamma;  under the Septuagint, 0.87 and 1.22;  with the 550-year shift under the Masoretic date, 0.85 and 1.20, and under the Septuagint 0.62 and 0.88.  If 21% of divergence comes in bursts at splits, the time-dependent part falls by up to a factor of 0.79, giving 1.10 and 1.56 for the Masoretic case and 0.69 and 0.96 for the Septuagint.  Over all the scale assumptions, with 160 founders, the Masoretic date and b = 0.12, the residual runs 1.09 to 1.83 at one rate and 1.54 to 2.58 with gamma, and at b = 0.184, 0.70 to 1.51 and 0.99 to 2.13;  holding every lineage at 160 people for the whole interval gives 0.86 to 1.13 and 1.21 to 1.60.  Code babel-ie.ts;  output ie-babel-popgrowth.tsv, 5,040 rows. ↩ ↩

This comparison is this article's own, from the figures in Out of Africa or Out of Babel? and When Was the Tower of Babel?  Out of Africa or Out of Babel? reports Sankararaman and colleagues' 2012 recombination estimate of 1,805 to 2,043 generations since Neanderthal gene flow into the European line.  Counted back from AD 2026 at 25 years a generation, Answers in Genesis's Babel of 2242 BC is about 171 generations ago, the earliest Masoretic Babel counted back from Solomon, 2417 BC, about 178, the earliest Septuagint Babel, 2767 BC, about 192, and the Septuagint Flood, 3298 BC, about 213.  The measured count is 10.6 to 12.0 times the first, 10.2 to 11.5 times the second, 9.4 to 10.7 times the third and 8.5 to 9.6 times the fourth.  At 20 years a generation, just below the shortest average interval reported there for any living population, 20.1 years, the Septuagint Flood is about 266 generations ago and the factor is still 6.8 to 7.7. ↩ ↩

Wenham, Gordon J.  “Genesis 1–15.”  Word Biblical Commentary 1:230–242.  Word Books.  1987 (edition of 2014).  The standard evangelical critical commentary.  Reads 11:1-9 as one tightly built composition (parallel panels and a palistrophe hinged on verse 5), takes "the whole earth" as all the inhabitants of the world, the chapter order as topical, and the story as mockery of Babylonian temple boasts rather than as dependent on Enuma Elish.  Wenham does not argue a young-earth chronology.  Page numbers are the 1987 edition's, which the 2014 reissue reprints.

1. 10a.

   Page 238:  “'The whole earth,' here, as in 9:19, denotes all the inhabitants of the world.” ↩

Seely, Paul H.  “The Date of the Tower of Babel and Some Theological Implications.”  Westminster Theological Journal 63(1):15–38.  2001.  Dates the tower from five details in the text (Shinar, a city, baked brick, bitumen mortar, a ziggurat) to 3500-2400 BC on conventional archaeology, then argues that mankind was already dispersed and speaking many languages long before, so the story cannot be the origin of all languages.  Seely accepts that the text means all mankind;  his solution is divine accommodation.  The fullest archaeological dating of the tower in print, and the paper the young-earth side has to answer.

1. 11a.

   Page 20:  “there has been universal agreement from the beginning right up to the present that Gen 11:1 means that every human being on earth was speaking the same language until God 'confused the language' at the tower of Babel.” ↩ ↩

Augustine.  “The City of God, Book 16.”  Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series 2.  Translated by Marcus Dods.  c. 426 (edition of 1887).  The classic Christian reading of Genesis 10-11:  literal, historical, global, with seventy-two languages counted from the Table of Nations and Hebrew as the original tongue.  Augustine already saw that Genesis 10 lists languages before Genesis 11 explains them, and answered that the narrator doubles back.

1. 12a.

   Book 16, chapter 4:  “But though these nations are said to have been dispersed according to their languages, yet the narrator recurs to that time when all had but one language, and explains how it came to pass that a diversity of languages was introduced.” ↩

Chaffey, Tim.  “Did Humanity Really Disperse from Babel?”  Answers 20.  Dec 3, 2025.  Answers in Genesis's current popular statement.  Estimates about seventy languages from the seventy names of Genesis 10, doubts that migdal implies a ziggurat, and warns readers against identifying Babel's tower with Nebuchadnezzar's Etemenanki.

1. 13a.

   Section Babel in History:  “Unfortunately, our archaeological knowledge of this period of human history is woefully lacking. Given the biblical narrative of events after the flood, this should be expected since humanity did not really settle anywhere until Babel.” ↩

Wieland, Carl.  “Towering change.”  Creation 22(1):22–26.  Dec 1999.  A popular magazine article that states the young-earth "stem language" model most creationist readers know:  Babel made a few dozen unrelated languages, one per clan, and each then diversified into a family by ordinary change.  It predicts about 8 to 20 families with no links between them, and cites no linguist for the count.

1. 14a.

   Section Diagram caption, (C) Genesis Orchard:  “At Babel, the family groups were each programmed suddenly and supernaturally with a different language. Each of these created languages has gone on to diversify into many separate languages, which are all related to each other—each group has a 'common ancestor' language.” ↩ ↩

2. 14b.

   Section What about Babel?:  “A prediction from all of this would be that, given the large number of languages in the world today, it should be possible to group them together into 'families' like the Indo-European family of languages. But there should be no links between one 'family' and another.” ↩

3. 14c.

   Section What about Babel?:  “Thus, estimates of the number of different 'language families' vary, and are difficult. But they are generally in the vicinity of some 8 to 20 (commonly 12 or 13). That fits very comfortably with the descriptions in Genesis.” ↩

Sarfati, Jonathan.  Refuting Compromise:  A Biblical and Scientific Refutation of "Progressive Creationism" (Billions of Years) as Popularized by Astronomer Hugh Ross.  Master Books.  2004.  Creation Ministries International's book-length answer to Hugh Ross.  Its section on Babel and the days of Peleg holds that the confusion reprogrammed existing grammar and vocabulary to produce the major language families, that "earth" in 10:25 means the people of the earth, and that Babel may fall anywhere in Peleg's lifetime.

1. 15a.

   Page 302:  “The obvious effect was to produce the major language families, from which modern languages have developed.”  “And if Eber named Peleg prophetically, as with Methuselah, then Babel could have occurred late in Peleg's lifetime, allowing even more time for the population to increase.” ↩ ↩

Ham, Ken.  “How Many Languages?”  Answers with Ken Ham, radio transcript, volume 149.  Apr 26, 2023.  A one-minute broadcast script.  Cited because it is Answers in Genesis's most widely heard statement of how many languages Babel made, and because it gives a number its own writers contradict.

1. 16a.

   Section transcript:  “Well, language scientists say they came from fewer than one hundred original language families. … But, at Babel, he divided this language, creating about one hundred language families—and that's how many language families exist today!” ↩

Oller, John W. Jr.  “More Than PIE.”  Answers 3(2).  2008.  An article in Answers in Genesis's Babel issue by a professional linguist, the most credentialed young-earth writer on the subject.  It gives 6,912 languages in 94 families from the 2005 Ethnologue, holds that Babel made radically distinct languages and that 4,000 years suffice for today's diversity, and predicts that the count of families will never fall below the Genesis 10 names.

1. 17a.

   Section Babel—Key to Unlocking Language Families:  “Also, we can make a testable prediction: the number of families will be reduced in the future to no fewer than the groups named in Genesis 10 where the Table of Nations appears.” ↩

2. 17b.

   Section Babel—Key to Unlocking Language Families:  “Because God does all things well, nothing half-heartedly or without complete effectiveness, the languages created at Babel will almost certainly turn out to be radically distinct from each other.” ↩

Hodge, Bodie.  Tower of Babel:  The Cultural History of Our Ancestors.  Master Books.  2013.  The one book-length young-earth treatment.  Counts the names of Genesis 10 (14 from Japheth, 39 from Ham, at least 25 from Shem) as a minimum of 78 language families made at Babel, which have since grown into today's languages.

1. 18a.

   Page number not available.  “minimum number of language families (that is a tally of those listed in Genesis 10 subtracting Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, and Peleg)”. ↩

Custance, Arthur C.  “Noah's Three Sons:  Human History in Three Dimensions, Part II:  A Study of the Names in Genesis 10.”  The Doorway Papers, volume 1.  Zondervan.  1975.  The book that supplies most of the popular creationist identifications of Genesis 10 names with modern peoples and places, traced by consonant skeletons through later names.  Custance held the gap theory rather than a young earth, but his Table of Nations is the one Morris, Cooper, Grigg and Hodge repeat.  Cited by chapter and the website's own page markers.

1. 19a.

   Section Volume 1 index page, abstract:  “the tenth chapter of Genesis, the Table of Nations, is a statement about the origins of the present world population, and of how these descendants of the three brothers spread out over the earth.” ↩

Carter, Robert W. et al.  “An overview of the independent histories of the human Y chromosome and the human mitochondrial chromosome.”  Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, 133–151.  Creation Science Fellowship.  2018.  A young-earth conference paper by three creationist geneticists.  Its genetics belongs to the Y-chromosome article;  here it matters for two statements about Genesis 10:  that the Y tree need not have sixteen branches for Noah's sixteen grandsons, and that the Table was "a one-off documentation of the early post-Flood world".

1. 20a.

   Page 147:  “The Table of Nations (Genesis 10) was a one-off documentation of the early post-Flood world, with about 4,0000 years of history since.  Much more work needs to be done before we can claim to precisely identify any of the biblical patriarchs.”  "4,0000" is the authors' misprint, presumably for 4,000. ↩

Carter, Robert W.  “Can we place the sons of Noah on the Y chromosome tree?”  Creation Ministries International.  Oct 29, 2024.  A web article by CMI's geneticist.  States that the Table traces male lines and is therefore a record of Y-chromosome descent, rejects the popular continent map as wrong and racist in origin, argues that the three lines overlap across most of their range, and ends by warning against pegging lineages to places.  The most careful young-earth statement about what Genesis 10 does and does not predict.

1. 21a.

   Paragraph 1:  “It appears to describe all the people groups that spread out from Babel.  It might, on the other hand, describe all the people groups known to a later biblical writer long after the Babel dispersion ... Importantly, the Table of Nations traces the male lines only.  Thus, it is also a record of Y chromosome descent.  A quick glance at the tree, however, informs us that it is far from complete.”  The first paragraph of the body, under figure 1. ↩

2. 21b.

   Section The distribution of Y chromosomes according to the Table of Nations, paragraph 1:  “When first learning about the Table of Nations, many people conclude that Japheth settled Europe, Ham settled Africa, and Shem stuck around in the Middle East (figure 4).  Problem is, this is entirely wrong! ... Instead, the Table of Nations shows a complex pattern of migration, with the descendants of the three sons of Noah overlapping across most of their range (figure 5).” ↩

Morris, Henry M.  “The New Defender's Study Bible, notes on Genesis 11:1-9.”  Institute for Creation Research, icr.org.  World Publishing.  2006.  Morris's verse-by-verse notes as the Institute for Creation Research posts them.  The most specific young-earth statement of the mechanism (God altering each family's speech apparatus), the count (possibly seventy), the tower (the prototype of all ziggurats) and the aftermath (each family briefly a cave-dwelling hunter-gatherer band).

1. 22a.

   Verse 11:9:  “Each for a time would have to live by hunting and gathering, residing in caves or temporary shelters.” ↩

Tomkins, Jeffrey P.  “Out of Babel, Not Africa.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Feb 16, 2015.  A short news piece from the Institute for Creation Research on Creanza and colleagues' 2015 comparison of phoneme and genetic variation.  It is the only young-earth use found of the phoneme-diversity debate, and it reads the absence of a phoneme founder effect as evidence for separate origins at Babel.

1. 23a.

   Paragraph 1:  “Newly published research combining genetic, language, and demographic data challenges the idea of a single lineage of languages and human populations evolving out of Africa. Instead, the data supports the idea that multiple people groups have independent origins—a condition one would predict if the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel happened as described in the Bible.” ↩

Jeanson, Nathaniel T.  “Y-Chromosome-Guided Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Americas.”  Answers Research Journal 18:347–375.  2025.  A young-earth geneticist's analysis of Native American mitochondrial lineages, read against his Y-chromosome tree.  Cited here for one sentence that states how his model maps radiocarbon ages onto the time after Babel.

1. 24a.

   Page 347:  “In YEC terms, "15,000 radiocarbon years ago" likely corresponds to the very early post-Babel time period, not more than a few thousand years ago.” ↩

Sibley, Andrew.  “Dating the Tower of Babel events with reference to Peleg and Joktan.”  Journal of Creation 31(1):80–87.  2017.  The only young-earth journal paper devoted to the date of Babel.  Surveys Jubilees, Josephus, Seder Olam Rabbah, Ussher and recent creationist writers, and prefers the Masoretic text with Seder Olam's 340 years after the Flood, at Peleg's death, on the argument that Joktan's thirteen sons had to be grown men at the dispersion.  Does not test the date against archaeology.

1. 25a.

   Section Abstract:  “The preferred solution of this paper is to follow the Masoretic Text and the Seder Olam Rabbah commentary that places the Babel event 340 years post-Flood at Peleg's death.” ↩

Answers in Genesis.  “Bible Timeline.”  answersingenesis.org.  n.d.  Retrieved Oct 10, 2026.  An unsigned table of dates with no method stated.  Its rows from Creation (4004 BC) to the divided monarchy (975 BC) are Ussher's dates, and its last three (722, 586 and 4 BC) are the conventional ones;  the Babel row, 2242 BC, is neither.

1. 26a.

   Section table:  “Tower of Babel”.  The row reads "Tower of Babel / 2242 BC", between "The Flood / 2348 BC" and "Abraham / 1996 BC". ↩

George, A. R.  “A Stele of Nebuchadnezzar II.”  Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection (CUSAS 17), 153–169.  CDL Press.  2011.  Edition of the Schøyen stele (MS 2063) that shows Nebuchadnezzar II before a seven-storey Etemenanki, with an appendix translating his four-column foundation cylinder for the tower.  The king's own words on the materials, the unfinished top and the conscripted labour.  George is the leading authority on Babylon's topography and temples.

1. 27a.

   Page 167:  “whose four walls he raised in bitumen and baked brick to a height of thirty cubits on the outside, but which he did not finish (to) the top—I set to work on finishing E-temen-anki (to) the top so that it vied with the heavens.”  Nebuchadnezzar II speaking of his father Nabopolassar's work and his own, in the Etemenanki cylinder (Nbk 17). ↩

2. 27b.

   Page 167:  “all the teeming people of the world, whom my lord Marduk had consigned into my possession, I conscripted for labour in the building of E-temen-anki and imposed corvée-duty on them.” ↩

George, A. R.  “The Tower of Babel:  archaeology, history and cuneiform texts.”  Archiv für Orientforschung 51.  2005.  A review article on Hansjörg Schmid's publication of the 1962 excavation of Etemenanki's core, by the leading authority on Babylon's temples.  Reconstructs the tower's three building phases, argues from Esarhaddon's own measurement that the 91 m tower stood by the early seventh century BC, and traces its history back into the second millennium and forward to its clearance under Alexander's successors.  Printed in AfO 51 (2005/2006): 75–95;  the page numbers cited here are those of the author's posted text, which is paginated differently.

1. 28a.

   Page 20:  “almost no original building inscriptions have yet been recovered from pre-Sargonid Babylon, not because disproportionately few were written but because the structures in whose foundations they were deposited lie mostly inaccessible beneath the water table.” ↩

CDLI (Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative).  “Year Names of Sharkalisharri.”  CDLI wiki.  2019.  The CDLI's list of the year formulas of the Akkadian king Šar-kali-šarri, from the data of Marcel Sigrist and Peter Damerow, each with its source tablet.  Formula j, on the tablet RTC 118, holds the earliest known mention of Babylon.

1. 29a.

   Section formula j:  “In the year in which Szarkaliszarri laid the foundations of the temples of the goddess Annunitum and of the god Aba in Babylon and took prisoner Szarlag(ab) the king of Gutium (RTC 118)”.  The transliteration writes Babylon ka2-dingir{ki}, "gate of god". ↩

Lambert, W. G.  “Babylonian Creation Myths.”  Mesopotamian Civilizations 16.  Eisenbrauns.  2013.  The definitive edition of Enuma Elish and related texts by the scholar who spent his life on them.  Tablet VI gives the gods' building of Babylon and its ziggurat;  the volume also re-edits K 3657, the tablet George Smith once took for a Babylonian Tower of Babel.

1. 30a.

   Page 301:  “This text was first brought to public notice by George Smith and W. St. Chad Boscawen in 1876 as a possible parallel to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.  Since King in 1902 showed that this was a misconception, the text has been very generally neglected.”  “The work begins with dissatisfaction over 'the father of all the gods.'  One being in particular has cause for complaint, as the people of Babylon, burdened with hard labour, were preventing him from sleeping by their lamentation.”  On the tablet K 3657, which Lambert edits as "The Toil of Babylon". ↩

Frame, Grant.  “Sargon II 043 (the Dūr-Šarrukīn cylinder inscription).”  The Royal Inscriptions of Sargon II, King of Assyria (721–705 BC), RINAP 2, Oracc online edition.  Eisenbrauns.  2021.  The critical edition of Sargon II's account of peopling his new capital with deportees of many languages, with Frame's note on the idiom "one mouth" and K. Lawson Younger's literal reading of it.  The one Assyrian text whose vocabulary stands close to Genesis 11:1.

1. 31a.

   Lines 72–74:  “People from the four (quarters of the world), (speaking) foreign language(s) (and of) diverse speech, those who had dwelt in (both) mountain(s) and (low) land(s), as many as the 'Light of the Gods' (Šamaš), the lord of all, shepherded, whom I had carried off as booty by the power of my staff at the command of the god Aššur, my lord, I made act in concert and (re)settled (them) inside it (Dūr-Šarrukīn).  I commissioned native Assyrians, masters of every craft, as overseers (and) commanders to instruct (the settlers) in correct behavior (and how) to revere god and king.” ↩

“Seder Olam Rabbah.”  Sefaria.  c. 160 (edition of 1904).  The classical rabbinic chronology from creation to the Second Temple, traditionally attributed to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta of the second century AD, in the Hebrew of the Warsaw edition of 1904.  Chapter 1 counts 340 years from the Flood to the dispersion and argues from Joktan that "in his days" means the end of Peleg's life.

1. 32a.

   Chapter 1:  “מן המבול עד הפלגה ש"מ שנה, נמצא נח חיה אחר הפלגה עשר שנים, אבינו אברהם היה בפלגה בן מ"ח שנה, אמר רבי יוסי נביא גדול היה עבר שקרא שם בנו פלג ברוח הקודש, שנאמר כי בימיו נפלגה הארץ וגו' (שם י כה), אם בתחלת ימיו, והלא יקטן אחיו היה קטן ממנו והוליד י"ג משפחות ונתפלגו, ואם באמצע ימיו והלא לא בא לסתום אלא לפרש, הא אינו אומר כי בימיו נפלגה הארץ אלא בסוף ימיו”.  This article's literal English translation:  From the Flood to the Dispersion, 340 years.  It follows that Noah lived ten years after the Dispersion, and Abraham our father was 48 years old at the Dispersion.  Rabbi Yose said:  Eber was a great prophet, for he named his son Peleg by the Holy Spirit, as it is said, 'for in his days the earth was divided' (Gen 10:25).  If at the beginning of his days:  but was not Joktan his brother younger than he, and he begot thirteen families and they were dispersed?  And if in the middle of his days:  but Scripture comes not to obscure but to explain.  So it says 'in his days the earth was divided' only of the end of his days. ↩

“Manetho.”  Loeb Classical Library 350.  Harvard University Press.  Translated by W. G. Waddell.  1940.  The standard edition and translation of the fragments of Manetho's history of Egypt, with the Book of Sothis in an appendix.  Waddell explains that the Book of Sothis survives only through the ninth-century chronicler Syncellus and is not Manetho's work.

1. 33a.

   Page 239:  “the total of years from the first king and founder of Egypt, Mestraim, is 700 belonging to 25 kings, i.e. from the general cosmic year 2776, in which the Dispersion took place in the 34th year of the rule of Arphaxad and the 5th year of Phalec.”  Page 233:  “the 534 years from the Flood to the Building of the Tower, the Confusion of Tongues, and the Dispersion of the Peoples”.  Page xxviii:  “The Book of Sothis begins with the reign of Mestraim, Anno Mundi 2776 … i.e. 534 years after the Flood”. ↩

Hill, Carol A.  “A Time and a Place for Noah.”  Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 53(1):24–40.  2001.  An old-earth geologist places Noah in Jemdet Nasr Mesopotamia about 3000 BC and reads the one language of Genesis 11:1 as Sumerian before the rise of Akkadian.  The main old-earth "local Babel", stated in its own words.

1. 34a.

   Page 33:  Hill dates the first Semitic scribal names, at Fara and Abu Salabikh, to about 2600-2500 BC. ↩

Leichty, Erle.  “Esarhaddon 001 (Nineveh A prism).”  The Royal Inscriptions of Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (680-669 BC), RINAP 4.  Eisenbrauns, on Oracc.  2011.  The edition of Esarhaddon's main prism, whose copies are dated to the eponymy of Atar-ili, 673 BC.  Column iii reports the defeat of Teušpâ the Cimmerian and of Išpakāia the Scythian with the Manneans, the first royal-inscription attestations of the peoples Genesis 10 calls Gomer and Ashkenaz.

1. 35a.

   Column iii, lines 59-61:  “I scattered the Mannean people, undisciplined Gutians, and its army;  I put to the sword Išpakāia, a Scythian, an ally who could not save himself.”  The transliteration writes the Scythian as URU.as-gu-za-a-a;  the Nineveh B prism has KUR.áš-gu-za-a-a. ↩

Westermann, Claus.  Genesis 1-11:  A Commentary.  Augsburg.  Translated by John J. Scullion.  1984.  The standard critical commentary, translated from the 1974 German.  Reads the chapter as a Priestly list with Yahwistic insertions, grades every name by its attestation, and treats the "sons" as peoples rather than persons.  Its absolute dates for Sargon and Hammurabi are the old ones and are not used here;  its grading of the names is the baseline this article starts from.

1. 36a.

   Page 523:  “The list of the five Phoenician cities in Gen 10:17b, 18 is one of the most reliable documents in the chapter.  All the names can be identified with certainty.” ↩

Agranat-Tamir, Lily et al.  “The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant.”  Cell 181(5):1146–1157.e11.  2020.  Genome-wide data for 73 new individuals from five sites of the Bronze Age southern Levant, about 2500-1000 BC, analysed with earlier data from nine sites in Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.  All model as local Neolithic Levantine ancestry plus a Zagros or Caucasus-related share that grows over time, and the sites called Canaanite are closer to each other than to any other population.  It gives no admixture date in generations.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 37a.

   Section Summary:  “We show evidence that different "Canaanite" groups genetically resemble each other more than other populations.” ↩

Feldman, Michal et al.  “Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines.”  Science Advances 5(7):eaax0061.  2019.  Genome-wide data from ten people buried at Ashkelon in the Late Bronze Age, the early Iron Age and the later Iron Age.  The early Iron Age four carry a European-related ancestry, best modelled as about 43 per cent from Bronze Age Crete, that is gone within two centuries.  Small sample;  the 43 per cent has a standard error of 19.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 38a.

   Section Results, final paragraph of the section on genetic discontinuity:  “The best supported one (χ^2 P = 0.675) infers that ASH_IA1 derives around 43% of ancestry from the Greek Bronze Age "Crete_Odigitria_BA" (43.1 ± 19.2%) and the rest from the ASH_LBA population.” ↩

Novotny, Jamie, and Joshua Jeffers.  “Ashurbanipal 011 (Prism A).”  The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (668-631 BC), Assur-etel-ilani (630-627 BC), and Sin-sarra-iskun (626-612 BC), Part 1, RINAP 5/1.  Eisenbrauns, on Oracc.  2018.  The critical edition and translation of Ashurbanipal's Prism A, whose copies are dated 644 to 642 BC.  Column ii reports the submission of Gyges of Lydia and the Cimmerian wars, and carries the king's own statement that no earlier Assyrian king had heard of Lydia, which fixes the earliest Mesopotamian attestation of the name Genesis 10:22 gives as Lud.

1. 39a.

   Column ii, line 95:  “(As for) Gyges, the king of the land Lydia — a region on the opposite shore of the sea, a remote place, the mention of whose name none of the kings, my ancestors, had (ever) heard”. ↩

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages.  Cambridge University Press.  Edited by Roger D. Woodard.  2004.  The standard reference on the languages of the ancient world, one chapter per language by a specialist:  Piotr Michalowski on Sumerian, Gernot Wilhelm on Hurrian, John Huehnergard and Christopher Woods on Akkadian and Eblaite, Calvert Watkins on Hittite, Woodard on Greek.  Each states when its language is first attested and how securely.

1. 40a.

   Page 218:  “mid-third millennium”.  “c. 2400 BC”.  Huehnergard and Woods, "Akkadian and Eblaite", on the first attestation of Akkadian and the date of the Old Akkadian and Eblaite texts. ↩

2. 40b.

   Page 20:  “We have to wait for about four hundred years for our next archaic texts from Ur, dated approximately 2800 BC … the notation of a few morphological elements and phonetic glosses provides convincing evidence that the language of the texts is indeed Sumerian.”  “The next larger groups of texts from Sumer are the Early Dynastic III texts from Fara (ancient Shuruppak), Abu Salabikh, Nippur, and Adab from around 2500 BC. … now for the first time we have evidence for an extensive written poetic tradition.”  From Michalowski's chapter on Sumerian. ↩

Lazaridis, Iosif et al.  “Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans.”  Nature 548(7666):214–218.  2017.  Genome-wide data for 19 Bronze Age individuals, ten Minoans from Crete, four Mycenaeans from mainland Greece and others from south-western Anatolia.  Minoans and Mycenaeans share at least three-quarters of their ancestry, with a small northern addition in the Mycenaeans.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 41a.

   Section Abstract:  “We show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and most of the remainder from ancient populations like those of the Caucasus and Iran.  However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter-gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia”. ↩

Lazaridis, Iosif et al.  “The genetic history of the Southern Arc:  A bridge between West Asia and Europe.”  Science 377(6609):eabm4247.  2022.  A genome study of 727 new ancient individuals from Anatolia, the Balkans, the Aegean, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Armenia and Iran across about 11,000 years, from David Reich's laboratory.  Finds almost no steppe ancestry in Bronze Age Anatolia where the oldest Indo-European languages were spoken, and dates admixtures by counting generations from the decay of linked DNA segments.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 42a.

   Figure 5, caption, panel F:  “C14-dated Bronze-to-Iron Age individuals from Armenia admixed 52.2±8.0 generations (1460±224 years) prior to their average date of 1119BCE, or ~2579BCE (mid-3rd millennium BCE), assuming a generation length of 28 years”. ↩ ↩

This article's arithmetic on Lazaridis's count ⁴².  52.2 ± 8.0 generations before 1119 BC is, at 28 years, 1,462 ± 224 years, about 2580 BC with a range of 2805 to 2357 BC;  at 25 years, 1,305 ± 200 years, about 2425 BC with a range of 2625 to 2225 BC;  at 20 years, 1,044 ± 160 years, about 2165 BC with a range of 2325 to 2005 BC.  The Masoretic dispersion window, about 2247 to 2008 BC, lies wholly after the 28-year range, is reached by the young edge of the 25-year range, and contains the 20-year centre.  The Septuagint window, about 2767 to 2428 BC, contains the 28-year centre.  The 20-year generation is shorter than the 28 ± 4 years the same paper measures. ↩

Campbell, Lyle.  “How Many Language Families are there in the World?”  Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca "Julio de Urquijo" 52(1–2):133–152.  2018.  A region-by-region list of the language families that approach a consensus among specialists, by the leading skeptic of long-range groupings.  It finds about 406 independent families, 162 of them isolates and 94 extinct, and leaves out unclassified languages, pidgins, creoles and sign languages.  By its own definition it counts what cannot be shown to be related, not what is known to be unrelated.

1. 44a.

   Page 133:  “How many language families are there in the world? Surprisingly, most linguists do not know. Estimates range from one (according to supporters of Proto-World) to as many as about 500. … let me report the answer here: 406 independent language families (including language isolates). However, this number is far from straightforward or conclusive, as we shall see.” ↩

Duursma, K. J.  “The Tower of Babel account affirmed by linguistics.”  Journal of Creation 16(3):27–31.  Dec 2002.  The fullest young-earth linguistic case found.  It takes about twenty families from the lumpers' classification, holds that Babel was a miracle making about a dozen languages, and uses glottochronology's rate to set a 10,000-year horizon on reconstruction.  It is also the only young-earth source found that proposes faster word loss in isolated post-Babel groups.

1. 45a.

   Section Opening paragraphs:  “Secular linguists are puzzled by the existence of twenty or so language families in the world today. The languages within each family (and the people that speak them) have been shown to be genetically related, but few genetic links have been observed between families.” ↩

2. 45b.

   Section Language families:  “If the percentage of word loss described above is correct, we expect to see many similarities, still, between all languages in each family after only 5,000 years since Babel. However, the absence of any contact between languages in one family, over such a period, could result in greater word loss … Also, some languages have a much quicker word loss, for cultural reasons.” ↩

Campbell, Lyle, and William J. Poser.  Language Classification:  History and Method.  Cambridge University Press.  2008.  The standard handbook on how language relationships are proved, by two historical linguists, and the classification standard Glottolog names as its own.  It accepts the comparative method and rejects multilateral comparison, glottochronology as a test of relationship, and global etymologies, on statistical grounds.  It is the strongest mainstream witness that no family older than about 8,000 years is demonstrated and that one origin of language can never be shown.

1. 46a.

   Page 243, section 9.4:  “The Nostratic hypothesis has received considerable attention in recent years … It is better known than most other proposed macro-families, but it remains controversial. Most historical linguists either reject it (see Campbell 1998, 1999; Ringe 1995a; Trask 1999; Vine 1991) or ignore it.” ↩

2. 46b.

   Page 366, note 3:  “while perhaps most linguists believe it is possible that there was a single original human language from which all others have developed, most further believe it is impossible on the basis of extant evidence ever to be able to show that this is the case. This means for some scholars that not only is monogenesis a possibility, so is polygenesis, but that we will never know for sure which is right.” ↩

Nichols, Johanna.  “The Origin and Dispersal of Languages:  Linguistic Evidence.”  The Origin and Diversification of Language, Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences 24, 127–170.  California Academy of Sciences.  Edited by Nina G. Jablonski and Leslie C. Aiello.  1998.  A chapter by a leading typologist that defines the "stock" as the oldest grouping the comparative method can prove, puts the oldest stocks at about 6,000 years, and explains that ceiling by vocabulary loss.  It then models how fast stocks multiply and finds that one ancestor would need at least 72,000 to 132,000 years to yield the world's stocks.  Every input of that model is calibrated on the mainstream ages of known families.

1. 47a.

   Page 128:  “After 6000 years of separation, two languages are expected to exhibit only 7% shared cognates; and 7% represents the lowest number of resemblant items that can safely be considered distinct from chance … Hence the 6000-year age of the oldest securely reconstructable language families is also the age after which, on binary tests, the incidence of cognates slips below the level of significance.” ↩

Hammarström, Harald.  “Linguistic diversity and language evolution.”  Journal of Language Evolution 1(1):19–29.  2016.  A review by the editor of Glottolog that counts 424 families including isolates and tabulates them by continent.  It explains why the comparative method cannot see past about 10,000 years and notes that the density of families does not follow the age of settlement:  South America is as diverse as New Guinea, and Africa much less so.

1. 48a.

   Page 23:  “An estimate of time-depth is possible thanks to a number of calibration points, either historical, inscriptional or archaeological (in the rare event that one can convincingly argue a link between an archaeological entity and a (proto-)language). The deepest families recognized as 'demonstrated' in, for example, Hammarström et al. (2015) are expected not to exceed 10,000 years. Unless there is a breakthrough in the way language families are demonstrated—that goes beyond basic vocabulary—this time limit cannot be improved upon: if languages share too little vocabulary we would not accept they are related while if languages share a lot of vocabulary, we do not think the relation is old.” ↩

Sagart, Laurent et al.  “Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(21):10317–10322.  2019.  A Bayesian dating of 50 Sino-Tibetan languages on cognate-coded basic vocabulary.  Its four calibrations are all written texts no younger chronology disputes, Old Chinese, Old Tibetan, Tangut and Old Burmese, yet the root comes out about 7,184 years old.  The date is an extrapolation of a rate learned on branches no older than 2,800 years.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 49a.

   Section Results, Tree Topologies and Dating:  “The mean root age estimated with the relaxed-clock model is at 7184 B.P., with 95% highest posterior density interval (HPD) [5093–9568] B.P.” ↩ ↩

Heggarty, Paul et al.  “Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages.”  Science 381:eabg0818.  2023.  A Bayesian dating of 161 Indo-European languages on the IE-CoR cognate database, coded by more than 80 specialists, with 52 ancient languages dated from their texts as calibrations and a model that lets the data decide which ancient languages are ancestors.  It finds a root about 8,120 years before AD 2000, and reports its own sensitivity runs, one of which, on older data with forced ancestry, gives 4,997.

1. 50a.

   Section Results:  “Our main analysis (Fig. 2) produced an estimated date for the root of the Indo-European language family that is too early to be compatible with the Steppe hypothesis: ~8120 yr B.P., with a 95% credible region of 6740 to 9610 yr B.P. [Date estimates are reported here as a median date before present, followed by the 95% credible region (highest posterior density, or HPD), all rounded to the nearest decade, and taking the "present" for modern languages as 2000 CE.]” ↩ ↩

Chang, Will et al.  “Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis.”  Language 91(1):194–244.  2015.  A Bayesian dating of Indo-European that forces eight attested ancient languages, such as Latin and Vedic Sanskrit, to be the ancestors of their 39 modern descendants, so the rate of change is learned from observed change.  Calibrated on dated texts only, it gets a root about 5,950 years before AD 2000;  on Bouckaert's data without the constraints it reproduces 7,580.  It is the clearest case of one modelling choice moving the root by 1,600 years.  Mirror:  Escholarship.org

1. 51a.

   Page 220, figure 5:  “A1: Narrow dataset 5950 7190–4870”.  The median root age, then the 95% HPD interval, in years before AD 2000. ↩ ↩

Zhang, Menghan et al.  “Phylogenetic evidence for Sino-Tibetan origin in northern China in the Late Neolithic:  Supplementary Information.”  Nature 569.  2019.  The supplement to a Bayesian dating of 109 Sino-Tibetan languages on 949 root-meanings.  Its eight calibrations all come from written history or recorded migrations, none from radiocarbon, and the root comes out about 5,871 years before 1950.  Its lower 95% bound is the only dated family root found that reaches into a Masoretic Babel window.

1. 52a.

   Page 9, section 2.4:  “The average time estimation for the divergence of the Sinitic and TB languages was 5,871 years BP (95% Highest posterior density (HPD): 4,183 – 7,817 years BP). In all the examined models, their estimations including average root ages and 95% HDP ranges were below 9,000 years (see Extended Data Fig. 5).” ↩ ↩

“Visible Language:  Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond.”  Oriental Institute Museum Publications 32.  Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.  Edited by Christopher Woods.  2010.  The catalogue of a museum exhibition on the first writing systems, with chapters by specialists:  Woods on Mesopotamia, Elise V. MacArthur on Egypt, Edward L. Shaughnessy on China.  It separates the first writing from the first text securely in a known language, which is the distinction the attestation count turns on.

1. 53a.

   Page 119:  “Tomb U-j, which dates to ca. 3320 bc, is a rectangular, mudbrick tomb with twelve interconnected chambers”.  From MacArthur's chapter on the Egyptian writing system. ↩

Hittite, dated 1450 BC, and Early Vedic, 1300 BC, share S = 0.212 of 132 meanings.  At the fastest millennium-scale rate, r = 0.694, L = ln 0.212 / ln 0.694 = 4.25 millennia, and the common ancestor sits at (-1450 - 1300 - 4250) / 2 = -3500, that is 3500 BC, with a bootstrap range of 3118 to 3961 BC.  At the Cornish rate, 0.556, it is 2695 BC;  at the median, 0.779, 4486 BC;  at the slowest, 0.894, 8322 BC.  With loans set aside as missing and the matching fastest rate, 0.726, it is 3777 BC.  The modern comparisons, from the same code:  Spanish and Russian 21.8%, English and Latin 21.8%, Attic Greek and Latin 26.5%, Lithuanian and Russian 35.3%. ↩

This is the article's computation;  Morris did not apply his gaps to language.  With Babel at Morris's 2358 BC plus 1,000 years, 3358 BC, the Hittite (1450 BC) and Vedic (1300 BC) lineages have Lb = 1,908 + 2,058 = 3,966 years.  The lineage lengths needed to produce S = 0.212 are 2.64 millennia at the Cornish rate, 4.25 at the fastest millennium rate, 5.99 on the disjoint gamma fit and 8.32 on the all-pairs fit, so k = 0.67, 1.07, 1.51 and 2.10.  At 2358 + 5,000 = 7358 BC, Lb = 11,966 years and k = 0.22, 0.36, 0.50 and 0.70.  Same formulas as babel-ie.ts. ↩

This comparison is this article's own.  The earliest Septuagint Babel is 2767 BC, Peleg's birth on the Septuagint's numbers.  The lower ends of the 95% intervals for the family roots are 6,740 years before AD 2000 for Indo-European in Heggarty and colleagues' main analysis,⁵⁰ about 4740 BC;  4,870 years before AD 2000 in Chang and colleagues' narrow dataset,⁵¹ about 2870 BC;  and 5,093 years before present for Sino-Tibetan in Sagart and colleagues' relaxed-clock run,⁴⁹ about 3100 BC whether the present is taken as AD 1950 or 2000.  All three are older than 2767 BC.  Zhang and colleagues' Sino-Tibetan interval runs down to 4,183 years before present,⁵² about 2200 BC, which is younger than every Septuagint Babel date. ↩

Ross, Hugh.  “New Research Confirms Postflood Dispersal of Humanity.”  Reasons to Believe.  Nov 5, 2023.  A web article giving Ross's current date for the Flood and Babel, and reading the peopling of Europe, Asia and Australia 50,000 to 40,000 years ago as the Babel dispersal.

1. 57a.

   Section Dispersal of Humanity:  “Genesis 10–11 makes clear that Noah's Flood predates— by at least several generations—humans' first efforts to colonize regions beyond East Africa, the Near East, and the Middle East. On this basis, it seems likely that Noah's Flood occurred prior to 40,000 years ago, most probably earlier than 45,000 years ago.” ↩

Ross, Allen P.  Creation and Blessing:  A Guide to the Study and Exposition of Genesis.  Baker.  1988.  An evangelical exposition that reworks Ross's two 1980-81 Bibliotheca Sacra studies of Genesis 10.  Reads the chapter as a segmented genealogy in which "sons" and "brothers" can mean dependent tribes and allies, counts seventy names, and in a footnote allows that Moses used an older skeleton list and added the Nimrod and Canaan material.  The clearest conservative statement that the Table is partly a political classification.

1. 58a.

   Page 33:  “One could argue that Moses used the old skeleton list and added the material about Nimrod, the founding of the great empires, the Canaanite boundaries, and the cliché list of tribes.  This hypothesis would explain the difference in style ... but would not require a late date for the compilation.”  Footnote 12. ↩

Safar, Fuad et al.  Eridu.  State Organization of Antiquities and Heritage, Baghdad.  1981.  The final excavation report on Eridu by its Iraqi and British excavators.  Its Temple Sounding gives a sequence of superimposed temples from a one-room shrine on virgin sand to a Late Uruk temple, beneath the Ur III ziggurat.  Its absolute dates for the Ur III kings are about 60 years lower than the Middle Chronology now used.

1. 59a.

   Section front matter:  “The sequence of plans recovered from the Temple Sounding starting as a simple one-roomed shrine in Level XVII just above virgin soil and ending as a huge and elaborate temple of the protoliterate period in Level I provides a vivid illustration of the evolution of religious architecture in Mesopotamia. Nowhere else has such a complete architectural and ceramic sequence been recovered for this period.” ↩

2. 59b.

   Page 47:  “It was probably the kings of the first dynasty of Ur or an unknown governor a little earlier in the late Early Dynastic II Period who built that Palace, and very likely they built a Ziggurat and other constructions on the acropolis, which disappeared in the levelling of the surface undertaken by Amar-Sin.” ↩

Crawford, Harriet.  “The Term "Hajji Muhammad":  A Re-evaluation.”  Beyond the Ubaid:  Transformation and Integration in the Late Prehistoric Societies of the Middle East, 163–168.  Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.  Edited by Robert A. Carter and Graham Philip.  2010.  A chapter by a specialist in early Mesopotamia that re-examines the Ubaid 2 pottery style first defined at Eridu.  It restates Joan Oates's division of the Eridu levels into four Ubaid phases and notes the gap in the building sequence between levels XV and XI.

1. 60a.

   Page 164:  “According to Oates (1960), the pottery can be divided into four phases: levels XIX–XV = Eridu/Ubaid 1; XIV–XII = Hajji Muhammad/Ubaid 2; XII–VIII = Ubaid 3; and VII–VI = Ubaid 4. What is very clear is that there is an undoubted break in the architectural sequence. Three buildings of indeterminate status were recovered from levels XV, XVI, and XVII in the lower part of the sequence, and there is then an absence of building remains until level XI, where part of a monumental building, generally considered to be a temple, was recovered. This is the first of a series of six buildings so defined.” ↩