Where Was the Tower of Babel?

Woolley, C. Leonard.  Ur Excavations V:  The Ziggurat and its Surroundings.  British Museum and University Museum, Pennsylvania.  1939.  The excavation report on the ziggurat of Ur.  Measures Ur-Nammu's tower, records its burnt-brick casing laid in bitumen, and describes the older terraces beneath it, back to one Woolley assigned to the Uruk period.  Woolley's belief that the core holds a First Dynasty ziggurat is stated by him as an assumption.

1. 1a.

   Pages 98–99:  “The casing of the Ziggurat, the wall proper, is of burnt bricks … many of which are stamped on one face with the name of Ur-Nammu; the stamped face is always laid underneath. The mortar is bitumen.” ↩ ↩

2. 1b.

   Page 99:  “It can safely be assumed that the ultimate core was the older Ziggurat, that dating to the First Dynasty of Ur; it was impossible to prove this without doing irreparable damage to what is the best-preserved example of a ziggurat in Iraq”. ↩

3. 1c.

   Page 6:  “It would seem that there are here remains of an older terrace, the terrace of a Ziggurat of the Uruk period, differently orientated to those of later times.” ↩

4. 1d.

   Page 98:  “In ground-plan (Pl. 79) the Ziggurat is a rectangle 62.50 m. by 43.00 m., situated with its angles orientated to the points of the compass”. ↩

5. 1e.

   Page 1:  “Below the First Dynasty Ziggurat terrace lay the ruins of an older structure of similar character.” ↩

Answers in Genesis.  “What Did the Tower Look Like?”  Answers.  2008.  An unsigned magazine sidebar.  States the young-earth answer to the absence of any excavated Babel:  the work was stopped early, so nothing remains to find.

1. 2a.

   Section body:  “Studying the oldest buildings from the area, archaeologists assume the Tower at Babel looked like a ziggurat.”  “If the plans at Babel were so grand, why don't we find any remains today? It seems likely that God frustrated their work in the early stages, while they were still laying out the city and constructing brickworks.” ↩ ↩ ↩

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. 3a.

   Page 2:  “The oldest structure was a tower of mud brick measuring about 65 m square at its base, which had suffered heavy damage. Superimposed on this core was a mantle of more mud brick anchored into the older structure with timber beams and measuring about 73 m square at its base. The brickwork of this mantle and the older core had later been cut back below ground to about 60 m square; the residual shelf of compressed mud brick (the so-called 'Tonbettung') then served as a partial platform for a more durable mantle of baked brick measuring about 91 m square at its base.”  George summarising Schmid's 1962 excavation of the core. ↩

2. 3b.

   Page 9:  “On this evidence Esarhaddon's ziqqurrat occupied the same base area as the building in its final version, with base 91 m square, and cannot have been the mud-brick tower of 73 m square.” ↩

3. 3c.

   Page 7:  “Sennacherib claimed to have torn down ziq-qur-rat libitti u eperī 'a ziqqurrat of brick and earth' along with other sanctuaries during his sack of Babylon in 689 BC … The debris was dumped in the river.”  Page 8:  “it is safe to assume that, at the very least, Sennacherib's wreckers rendered the tower unusable but it seems improbable that they went so far as to level it completely.” ↩

4. 3d.

   Page 19:  “The history of E-temen-anki in the second millennium is a history of almost total silence. … The inscriptions buried as foundation deposits by earlier builders surely lie hidden deeper in the older structures, amid almost a hectare of mud brick.” ↩

5. 3e.

   Page 20:  “In the absence of any hard evidence Schmid proposes very reasonably that a ziqqurrat was first built by a king of Hammurapi's dynasty (1894-1595)”.  Page 21:  “At all events, whether the originator of the 91 m tower reigned in the fourteenth, twelfth, eleventh or ninth century, its smaller precursors recede into the mid-second millennium, perhaps even into the Old Babylonian period, the time when Schmid surmises that a ziqqurrat was first built in Babylon.” ↩

6. 3f.

   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.” ↩ ↩ ↩

7. 3g.

   Page 27:  “Eventually most of its brickwork was cleared away and dumped very prominently more than one kilometre to the north-east, just inside the city wall. This final act in the building's history seems to have occurred some century and a half after Xerxes. Strabo and Arrian report a levelling of Marduk's sanctuary by Alexander the Great, in preparation for a rebuilding.”  “However, we cannot be sure beyond doubt that the event is correctly attributed to the reign of Alexander rather than one of his successors.” ↩

ZRS Ingenieure.  Emergency Conservation of the White Temple, Uruk, South Iraq.  Mar 21, 2023.  A project report by the engineers conserving the high terrace at Uruk for the German Archaeological Institute.  It gives the excavators' dates for the terrace and its White Temple and describes the bitumen waterproofing inside the terrace's mud-brick mass.  A conservation document, not an excavation report.

1. 4a.

   Section Project description:  “this earth block massif is characterised by millennia-old horizontal waterproofing techniques using bitumen mortar. One of the most valuable findings in Mesopotamia can still be found in remains on this Anu Ziqqurat, the so-called 'White Temple', built around 3500 BC, which is the world's first and only preserved temple on a ziqqurat”. ↩

2. 4b.

   Section Project description:  “the western corner of an approximately 4200-year-old man-made temple mound (made of approximately 11.5 million earth blocks!), the so-called Eanna Ziqqurrat.”  The Eanna ziggurat is Ur-Nammu's. ↩

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. 5a.

   Page 15:  “the narrative gives us five facts which enable us to date the event. One, the event took place in Shinar, at Babylon in particular (vv. 2, 9). Two, the event involved the building of a city with a tower (vv. 4, 5). Three, the tower was constructed of baked brick (v. 3). Four, the mortar used was asphalt (v. 3). Five, the tower was very probably a ziggurat”. ↩

2. 5b.

   Page 17:  “baked brick, though used occasionally for such things as drains or walkways, did not make an architectural appearance until c. 3500 B.C. and it was rarely used in architecture until c. 3100 B.C. Whether viewed in terms of breadth as at Chatal Huyuk with its dozens of unearthed buildings or in terms of depth as at Eridu with its eighteen successive building levels from c. 5000 to c. 2100 B.C., the archaeological data from the Near East universally testify that prior to c. 3100 B.C. the bricks used in architecture were unbaked.” ↩ ↩

3. 5c.

   Page 19, note 25:  “Ziggurats began as elevated temples and did not become 'true ziggurats' until c. 2100 B.c., after which they continued to be built or at least rebuilt until the fall of Babylon in the sixth century B.C.” ↩

4. 5d.

   Page 31:  “Creation science, therefore, has no scientifically sound basis for rejecting the dating of the tower of Babel sometime in the third millennium B.C. (or 3500 B.C. at the earliest)”. ↩

Walton, John H.  “The Mesopotamian Background of the Tower of Babel Account and Its Implications.”  Bulletin for Biblical Research 5:155–175.  1995.  An evangelical Old Testament scholar's case that the tower was a ziggurat built as a stairway for a god, that the builders were not disobeying a command to scatter, and that the event happened in southern Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC among a group that need not have been all mankind.  The most important Christian rival to the universal reading.

1. 6a.

   Page 171:  “1. Development of baked brick technology: Jamdet Nasr, ca. 3100 BC  2. Development of Ziggurat: Early Dynastic Period, ca. 2500 BC (earlier prototypes go back to the Late Uruk phase, ca. 3200 BC)  3. Development of Urbanization: Early Dynastic Period, ca. 2800 BC  4. Government by Ruling Assembly: Early Dynastic I, ca. 2900 BC”. ↩

2. 6b.

   Page 171, note 51:  “Though it is possible that this building project was attempted at Babylon, current evidence suggests that the city is not that ancient.” ↩

3. 6c.

   Page 175:  “It is of interest that Enki, the god of Eridu, is related to this myth, which may well represent the memory of an actual event from the late fourth millennium BC.” ↩

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. 7a.

   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. 7b.

   Page 47:  “the earliest settlement at Eridu was established on a sand dune which had at that time appeared on the edge of a sweet water lagoon (perhaps the abzu of Eridu).” ↩

3. 7c.

   Page 104:  “Preparatory to re-building, the walls of Temple VII were levelled to an average height of 120 cms. and the space between packed out with a harder and less sandy liben than that of which they themselves were constructed. The same liben was used to build a new platform”. ↩

4. 7d.

   Page 41:  “which appeared to represent three subsequent extensions of the platform upon which it stood, perhaps dating from the early Uruk period. … it was decided that our Al'Ubaid building should be designated 'Temple VI'.” ↩

5. 7e.

   Page 68:  “it was provisionally decided that the three concentric rectangles of liben representing three successive extensions of the Temple VI platform, should be attributed to the Early Uruk period. There was no conclusive archaeological confirmation of this attribution, since the character of the liben was not distinctive, and we neither found nor could expect to find any pottery or objects associated with it.” ↩

6. 7f.

   Page 79:  “at least a thousand years after it was built, it had been re-paved with broken bricks, bearing the stamp of a Larsa king. … the evidence in favour of its allocation to the Protoliterate eventually appeared overwhelming.”  Of the Temple I terrace. ↩

7. 7g.

   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.” ↩ ↩

8. 7h.

   Page 64:  “it seems that Ur-Nammu began the building of this ziggurat, but the bulk of the task was left to his grandson Amar-Sin (1987-1978 B.C.) to accomplish.”  Page 60:  “Judging from its remains, the ziggurat of Eridu was oblong, similar in shape and almost in size to the ziggurat of Ur-Nammu at Ur. Its length is estimated 61.8 m. and its width most probably 46.5 m.”  Safar's dates for Amar-Sin are about 60 years lower than the Middle Chronology's 2046-2038 BC. ↩

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. 8a.

   Page 26:  “Noah's descendant, Nimrod (Gen. 10:8-12), was the founder of Babel, Erech, and Calneh, all cities in the land of Shinar (the biblical counterpart of the cuneiform 'Sumer'). The 'tower of Babel' was located on the plain of Shinar, and may have been the ziggurat of ancient Babylon.” ↩

2. 8b.

   Pages 30–31:  “From the Ubaid Period onward, higher and more elaborate ziggurats were built. … During the Jemdet Nasr Period, ziggurats usually had only two or three stories, but in time they increased in both mass and height. The ultimate ziggurat was the one in Babylon, which at its zenith had seven stories”. ↩

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. 9a.

   Verse 11:4:  “This tower became the prototype of all the great ziggurats (stepped towers) and pyramids of the world.” ↩

2. 9b.

   Verse 11:8:  “an inscription purportedly made by Nebuchadnezzar (sixteen centuries after Nimrod) on the base of the remains of a tower in Borsippa (a Greek word possibly meaning 'tongue-tower'), some seven miles southwest of Babylon, claims that he (Nebuchadnezzar) was rebuilding the base of the ancient tower of Babel.” ↩

Whitcomb, John C.  “Babel.”  Creation 24(3):31–33.  2002.  A short popular article by the co-author of The Genesis Flood, reposted by Answers in Genesis.  Reads the tower as a Mesopotamian ziggurat temple-tower and Peleg's division as linguistic.

1. 10a.

   Section The Towers:  “But what happens when the Hebrew wording is translated literally? We then have 'a tower whose top [is] into heaven.' (cf. NKJV). And this is exactly what ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat temple-towers were for! The top compartment represented heaven. … The pyramids of Egypt and, much later, the great Mayan temples of Central America, reflected the design of the original Tower of Babel.” ↩

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. 11a.

   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.” ↩ ↩

Nissen, Hans J.  The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C.  University of Chicago Press.  Translated by Elizabeth Lutzeier and Kenneth J. Northcott.  1988.  A survey of early Mesopotamia by a director of the German excavations at Uruk.  It describes the high terrace of the so-called Anu Ziggurat, raised and refaced from the Ubaid period on, and the Late Uruk terrace that buried it, with the excavators' estimate of the labour.

1. 12a.

   Page 100:  “Research has, however, shown that a shrine in the form of a temple standing on a high terrace with steep sides, already existed during the Ubaid period, and that from that time on the terrace was always only repaired, given a new exterior, and raised.” ↩

2. 12b.

   Page 95:  “At the end of the Late Uruk period, an enormous terrace was constructed in the west of the holy district of Eanna, which completely covered up the more ancient shrine of the so-called Anu Ziggurat. The excavators of this terrace have calculated that its construction would have employed 1500 people working ten hours a day for five years.” ↩ ↩

Charvát, Petr.  Mesopotamia Before History.  Routledge.  2002.  A Czech archaeologist's survey of Mesopotamia from the first villages to the beginning of writing.  Its chapter on the Uruk culture counts the construction phases of the Anu terrace at Uruk and places the White Temple among them.

1. 13a.

   Page 126:  “An's ziggurat consists of a massive early core and a series of successive enlargements and rebuildings making up the total of fourteen phases of this structure, numbered from L or X (the early core) to the most recent A3 phase. From earliest times the building stood on a terrace of an irregular ground plan accessible by a ramp of which ten chronological phases have been identified (from L to B).” ↩

2. 13b.

   Page 127:  “Finally, Phase B's popularity has been assured by the famous 'White Temple', built on a bitumen-coated pedestal again in the south-west part of the terrace. … After the extinction of its functions the doors of the White Temple were immured and the whole area covered and infilled by large bricks, probably belonging to the A1 phase of the whole layout.” ↩

Carter, Robert A., and Graham Philip.  “Deconstructing the Ubaid.”  Beyond the Ubaid:  Transformation and Integration in the Late Prehistoric Societies of the Middle East, 1–22.  Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.  Edited by Robert A. Carter and Graham Philip.  2010.  The editors' introduction to a conference volume on the Ubaid period.  It sets out the conventional phases Ubaid 0 to 5 with their radiocarbon dates, and the shorter Ubaid of the northern regions, which took up southern styles only from Ubaid 3.

1. 14a.

   Page 2:  “Radiometric data suggest that the whole southern Mesopotamian Ubaid period, including Ubaid 0 and 5, is of immense duration, spanning nearly three millennia from about 6500 to 3800 b.c.”  “Using the traditional model, northern communities adopted southern Ubaid styles only in the Ubaid 3 and 4 periods, albeit perhaps continuing a process that had begun in the Ubaid 2 (Oates 1987b). Thus, for some areas, the Ubaid period runs only from about 5300 to 4300 b.c.” ↩

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. 15a.

   Section Footnotes, note 5:  “Some researchers have argued that the word implies that the structure was a pyramid or ziggurat, but this is too strong of a statement. … It would be more accurate to assert that while there are no clear examples in Scripture where migdal refers to a pyramid or ziggurat, the word was likely flexible enough in meaning that it could be used to describe these structures.” ↩

2. 15b.

   Section Have We Found the Tower?:  “the stele shows a neo-Babylonian tower that was built more than 1,500 years after the original tower at Babel, so they are almost certainly not the same tower. … By equating the tower described in Genesis 11 with Nebuchadnezzar's tower constructed well over a millennia later, Bible-believing Christians may be unwittingly promoting a position developed by liberal critics on unbiblical assumptions.” ↩

3. 15c.

   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.” ↩ ↩

The count and the arithmetic are this article's own.  Levels:  the Eridu Temple Sounding has 19 numbered levels, XIX to I,⁷ grouped by pottery as Crawford summarises Oates,¹¹ and above them lies at least one Early Dynastic building phase, the palace and probable earlier ziggurat that Amar-Sin levelled,⁷ 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? ↩

Osgood, A. John M.  “The Ark Landing, the Migration, and the Early Settling of Noah's Sons.  Part 1:  The Beginning and the Sons of Shem.”  Answers Research Journal 16:501–528.  2023.  The only young-earth paper that names an archaeological horizon for the dispersion (the end of Ubaid 2) and a culture for Nimrod (Uruk).  Treats the Chalcolithic cultures of Mesopotamia as contemporary sons of Shem and lowers Ur III and Hammurabi by three to four centuries.  Osgood is a physician who has written on Near Eastern chronology for creationist journals since the 1980s.

1. 17a.

   Section The Dispersion:  “Genesis 10:25 indicates that the dispersion from Babel occurred in the fourth generation, suggesting that Babel occurred somewhere close to 100 years after the Flood. I am here using the figures of the Masoretic text of the Bible.”  Section How Many People?:  “I have previously calculated in Over the Face of All the Earth that the possible population by the time of Babel (using Masoretic text figures) was close to 8,000 people, allowing family units at the dispersion of around 130 individuals on average (Osgood 2015, 37–40).”  Section The Sons of Shem—Their Early Settlements:  “The Uruk culture is a later arrival and addition which I will identify as clearly Hamitic and an identifier leading to the beginning of the Babel dispersion.” ↩

2. 17b.

   Section A Detailed Look at the Sons of Shem, 1. Ubaid 'Period' (Arphaxad):  “That the dispersion from the time of Babel occurred at the end of Ubaid 2, where we see the beginning of the northern Ubaid expansion, gains traction with the findings of Hajj Muhammad pottery (Ubaid Phase 2) at Tell Brak in the Habur region, suggesting that Ubaid southerners had now arrived there.”  “there is good reason to place as contemporary Ubaid 1–2, Susiana a–c, Samarra, Early Halaf, and pre-Halaf Hassuna 3 and to place them prior to and up to the earliest Uruk XIV–XIII levels, which witness the appearance of the Uruk culture in the Plains later than the Shemitic descendants.” ↩

3. 17c.

   Section Where Was Babel?:  “Hammurabi of the Old Babylonian Period (circa 1450 B.C.-revised) did some building there, and it was a functioning center during the Ur III Period before 1660 B.C. (revised).”  “Certainly, Borsippa stands out as one of the best possibilities for the original site of the Tower of Babel, but a guaranteed site is unlikely to be found.” ↩

Koldewey, Robert.  The Excavations at Babylon.  Macmillan.  Translated by Agnes S. Johns.  1914.  The excavator's own account of the German excavation of Babylon, translated a year after the German edition.  It describes Etemenanki as a robbed ruin with an unexcavated core, and reports that groundwater stopped every attempt to reach levels older than Hammurabi's dynasty.  Its BC dates follow the high chronology of 1913 and are about 700 years too early.

1. 18a.

   Page 183:  “Our Sachn, however, is no other than the modern representation of the ancient sacred precinct in which stood the zikurrat Etemenanki, "the foundation stone of heaven and earth," the tower of Babylon”.  “All the buildings consisted largely of crude brick, and only, as an exception, the very considerable crude-brick core of the tower in the south-west corner was enclosed in a thick wall of burnt brick, which has been removed deep down by brick robbers.”  Page 184:  “which led up to the tower from the south. The ruin is not yet excavated.” ↩

2. 18b.

   Page 186:  “In this were inscribed bricks of Esarhaddon (Fig. 116), with the statement that he built the zikurrat of Etemenanki. The two upper portions of the kisu must therefore belong to a later period, and the lower part of the main building to an earlier period, than that of Esarhaddon.” ↩

3. 18c.

   Page 239:  “Our excavations cut through the layers down to a depth of 12 metres below the surface, where the water-level stopped farther progress, although the ruins themselves continued lower. Thus the water must now stand at a higher level than in ancient times.”  Of the Merkes residential quarter. ↩

4. 18d.

   Page 242:  “Hammurabi stratum disappears below water-level.” ↩

5. 18e.

   Page 311:  “The existence of Babylon in prehistoric times, before the fifth millennium, is proved by flint and other stone implements. It is impossible to carry excavations down to that depth, owing to the rise in the water-level (p. 261). The earliest accessible ruins belong to the time of the first Babylonian kings (Hammurabi, circa 2500 B.C.), and lie yonder in Merkes (p. 240).”  Koldewey's "circa 2500 B.C." for Hammurabi is the high chronology of 1913;  the Middle Chronology now used puts Hammurabi at 1792-1750 BC.  His "before the fifth millennium" rests on stray finds, not on a dated layer. ↩

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. 19a.

   Page 241:  “The Babylonians understood Babel to mean 'the gate of the god.'  The Hebrews liked to suppose it to mean 'mixed up, confused.'  Here, as often in the OT, it is clear that the etymology offered is a popular one … The same is probably true of the Babylonians' own etymology 'gate of the god' (so Gelb).” ↩

2. 19b.

   Page 238:  “It is therefore usually surmised that Genesis is referring to an earlier structure, perhaps erected in the old Babylonian period, which fell into ruin under the Cassites.” ↩

Westermann, Claus.  Genesis 1–11:  A Commentary.  Augsburg.  Translated by John J. Scullion.  1974 (edition of 1984).  The standard form-critical commentary (German original 1974).  Rejects Gunkel's two-source split but treats the story as three primeval motifs joined by one author, and supplies the fullest mainstream statement of its Mesopotamian setting.  Westermann accepted Kramer's past-tense reading of the Sumerian Spell of Nudimmud, which later Sumerologists reject.

1. 20a.

   Page 544:  “Shinar means here, as in Gen 10, the whole of Mesopotamia; so Th. Jacobsen, S. Landersdorfer.” ↩

2. 20b.

   Page 547:  “It is therefore a suitable word to describe the huge Babylonian ziggurats.”  Of migdāl, following O. E. Ravn. ↩

Lawrence, Paul J. N.  “Making some sense of Babel and afterwards.”  Journal of Creation 32(1):106–113.  2018.  A young-earth paper that accepts the linguists' count of about 420 families and isolates and proposes that their proto-languages arose at Babel.  The reading in the camp most open to a test, because every family's internal diversity must then fit the time since Babel.

1. 21a.

   Section introduction, point 3(c):  “The location of this incident is placed in Shinar which may be the land inhabited by the Sumerians, i.e. southern Iraq (11:1). The city, of which the tower was a part, was Babel ('confused'), the Hebrew word for Babylon (11:9).” ↩

Charles, R. H.  The Book of Jubilees, or The Little Genesis.  A. and C. Black.  1902.  The standard English translation of the second-century BC Jewish retelling of Genesis, with Charles's marginal Anno Mundi dates.  Jubilees is the oldest datable reader of the Babel story.  Its chapter 10 gives the tower a building time, a height, a wind and a location that Genesis lacks;  its chapter 8 puts a division of the earth by lot at Peleg's birth.

1. 22a.

   Page 82:  “And they began to build, and in the fourth week they made brick with fire, and the bricks served them for stone, and the clay with which they cemented them together was asphalt which comes out of the sea, and out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinar.”  Jubilees 10:20. ↩

Josephus: Jewish Antiquities.  Translated by William Whiston.  Edited by Benedikt Niese.  1890.  Niese's Greek text, whose section numbers are used here, with William Whiston's English translation of 1737, quoted in its original spelling.  Book 1 chapter 4 is the oldest surviving expansion of the Babel story to name Nimrod as its builder and a second flood as his fear;  1.146 ties Peleg's name to the dispersion.  Section numbers are Niese's.  Mirror:  Penelope.uchicago.edu

1. 23a.

   Section 1.117:  “he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages; and causing, that through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another.  The place wherein they built the Tower is now called Babylon: because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before: for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, Confusion.” ↩

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. 24a.

   Book 16, chapter 4:  “This city, which was called Confusion, is the same as Babylon, whose wonderful construction Gentile history also notices.  For Babylon means Confusion.  Whence we conclude that the giant Nimrod was its founder”. ↩

Osgood, A. J. M.  “Where in the World Is the Tower of Babel?  Comments.”  Answers Research Journal 17:215–216.  2024.  A young-earth archaeologist's critique of Habermehl 2011 in the journal that published it.  Osgood argues that Shinar is Sumer, that no geologist supports a drowned southern plain, and that on the Masoretic text Babel lies no earlier than 2500 BC and near Babylon.

1. 25a.

   Section Under Water?:  “Now Habermehl (2011) then claims the area was under water, a statement I cannot find backed up by any geologist … The highest rise known (other than Noah's Flood) was up to the Quays of the very southern city of Ur as well as Eridu, as witnessed in the Sargonic annals.” ↩

2. 25b.

   Section Conclusion:  “While Babel may not have been on the exact site of later Babylon, there is clear historical and legendary connection to identify the Babel structure in Sumer somewhere close to the later Babylon.” ↩

Gelb, I. J.  “The Name of Babylon.”  I Studied Inscriptions from before the Flood:  Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11, 266–269.  Eisenbrauns.  Edited by Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura.  1955 (edition of 1994).  A short study of the city's name by a leading Assyriologist of the University of Chicago, first printed in the Journal of the Institute of Asian Studies in 1955.  It finds the oldest mention in a year name of Šar-kali-šarri, shows that the Ur III scribes read the name as Akkadian Bāb-ilim, and argues that "gate of god" is itself a popular etymology of an older Babil.  Reprinted in an evangelical reader on Genesis 1-11.

1. 26a.

   Page 267:  “The oldest occurrence of Babylon is found in a date of Sar-kali-Sarri (about 2224-2199 B.C.), referring to the laying of the foundations of the temple of Anunitum and Aba in KA-DINGIR KI.”  “The economic sources of the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (about 2100 B.C.) are full of references to a city spelled uniformly, as in the preceding Sargonic period, KA-DINGIR KI. … This form can hardly be anything else than Akkadian Bab-ilim.” ↩ ↩

2. 26b.

   Page 268:  “Such a name as Bab-ilim "Gate of God," does not fit into our knowledge of ancient oriental onomastics, and consequently we must raise doubts as to whether Bab-ilim actually represents the oldest form of this city. It may be argued with some force that the name Bab-ilim represents a secondary form due to popular etymology of some pre-Akkadian and pre-Semitic form. For this earlier name I would suggest the form Babil attested 15 times in the following Ur III texts:”.  Page 269:  “the existence of the forest of Babil in the area of Lagas”. ↩

3. 26c.

   Page 269:  “In conclusion, we may say that the existence of the forest of Babil in the area of Lagas presupposes the existence of the element babil which was used for several geographic names in Sumer. That element, whatever its meaning and ultimate origin, may have lain at the basis of the name of the city, which through a process of popular etymology appears as Bab-ilim in the earliest extant written sources.” ↩ ↩

Rohl, David.  Legend:  The Genesis of Civilisation.  Century.  1998.  The second volume of a popular series by an independent historian whose "New Chronology" lowers the dates of the second millennium.  It identifies Nimrod with Enmerkar of Uruk and the Tower of Babel with the Uruk-period temple platform at Eridu, and explains the name Babel as a confusion of two cities.  Rohl is not a creationist and does not defend Genesis's location.

1. 27a.

   Page 222:  “Now, just such a tower or platform was constructed at Eridu in the period we have assigned to Enmerkar (see Chapter Eleven). This 'prototype' of the ziggurat is acknowledged as the first great edifice to be built by humankind. Was the massive Uruk-Period temple platform at Eridu the source for the biblical story of the Tower of Babel?” ↩

2. 27b.

   Page 222:  “But this ziggurat dates from the Babylon I Period (NC — 1667-1362 BC) and no evidence has come to light which shows that a temple-tower existed in Babylon as far back as the Proto-[literate period]”.  NC is Rohl's own New Chronology. ↩

3. 27c.

   Page 223:  “During my research I came across the extraordinary fact that Eridu and Babylon once bore the same name. The two cities were both called Nun.ki ('Place of Nun') in the Sumerian language. Perhaps Moses (or whoever the Genesis writer was) simply mixed up two places with an identical Sumerian name and inadvertently located the prototype ziggurat at the city of Babylon when, in reality, it was an achievement of the much earlier city of Eridu.” ↩

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. 28a.

   Page 159:  “E-temen-anki 'House, Foundation Platform of Heaven and Underworld' and E-ur-me-imin-anki 'House that Controls the Seven Me's of Heaven and Underworld.'”  The Sumerian ceremonial names of the ziggurats of Babylon and Borsippa. ↩

2. 28b.

   Page 160:  “[In order to complete E-temenanki and E-ur-me-imin-anki to the top . . . ] I mobilized [all] countries everywhere, [each and] every ruler [who] had been raised to prominence over all the people of the world”.  “[E]-temen-anki and E-ur-me-imin-anki—I built their structures with bitumen and [baked brick throughout.]”  The damaged inscription on the stele itself;  square brackets mark George's restorations. ↩

George, A. R.  “Babylonian Topographical Texts.”  Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 40.  Peeters.  1992.  The critical edition of Tintir and the other Babylonian lists of the names, temples and quarters of Babylon, by the leading authority on the city's topography.  Its commentary dates when Babylon took the old name of Eridu and shows how differently the two names were written.

1. 29a.

   Page 39:  “Eridu    Babylon, the pleasant city;”.  Tintir Tablet I, line 21, one of the list's fifty-one names of Babylon. ↩

2. 29b.

   Page 251:  “Eridu is a name of Babylon in the lexical texts … The first certain use of Eridu as a name of Babylon is to be found in the Sitti-Marduk kudurru (BBSt 6 = V R 55, i 3), in which Nebuchadnezzar I is šakkanak(sagana) eri.du10, 'governor of Babylon' (not of Eridu …). Still not proven … are certain references from the Kassite period.” ↩

3. 29c.

   Page 253:  “As well as a name of Babylon, Eridu came to refer to the city's central religious quarter around E-sagil … the writing of the city name as eri/uru.du10, in which such an interpretation is explicit, does not appear until the second millennium; in the third the toponym is always written eridu(NUN)ki”. ↩

4. 29d.

   Page 5:  “At this time there may have also taken place in some literary circles a syncretism of Babylon with the ancient, but now much declined, city of Eridu, by which means the mythological traditions of the latter were adopted by the younger town … Babylon thus became the 'new' Eridu, or, to quote Tintir V 91, 'Eridu in which E-sagil [is built(?)].'”  Page 19:  “Suanna and Eridu are not attested as names of Babylon until Middle Babylonian times, and one suspects that they are as such products of the literary scholars of the Kassite period”. ↩

Reimer, Steve.  “The Tower of Babel:  An Archaeologically Informed Reinterpretation.”  Direction 25(2):64–72.  1996.  An evangelical reading in a Mennonite Brethren journal that ties Genesis 11 to the rise and collapse of Uruk in the late fourth millennium BC and makes the confusion of tongues the growth of ethnic communities rather than of languages.

1. 30a.

   Page 65:  “I propose that the biblical account of the Tower of Babel recorded in Genesis 11:1-9, accurately reflects a series of prehistorical events which culminated in the fall of the Uruk 'empire.'”  Page 70:  “If language is understood to mean specific spoken languages or dialects then the Uruk paradigm doesn't fit. If on the other hand, the confusion of languages is understood as the development of ethnic communities, then the transition from Uruk to Early Dynastic fits very well.” ↩

Habermehl, Anne.  “Where in the World Is the Tower of Babel?”  Answers Research Journal 4:25–53.  2011.  Argues from geography, geology and the name Šanhar that Shinar was north-east Syria, that southern Iraq was under a post-Flood sea until the Ice Age ended, and that the tower lies in the Upper Khabur triangle near Tell Brak.  The one young-earth paper that asks whether Babylon's site was dry ground a century after the Flood.  Its archaeology is answered in the Neolithic article.

1. 31a.

   Section Abstract:  “an analysis of history, geography, and geology, shows that Shinar cannot have been in the south, but rather was a territory in what is northeastern Syria today; and that the remnants of the Tower must be located in the Upper Khabur River triangle, not far from Tell Brak, which is the missing city of Akkad.” ↩

2. 31b.

   Section Distinguishing Between Babel and Babylon:  “The name Babylon—Akkadian Bab-ilim . . . 'gate of god'—was long thought to be merely a translation of an earlier Sumerian name Ka-dingirra. But the city's name is first found in the Akkadian form Bab-ilim, now believed to be a secondary spelling developed by popular etymology from an earlier name Babil, the meaning of which is unknown (Gelb 1955).”  Habermehl quoting Joan Oates, Babylon (1979), p. 60.  “Our conclusion here, however, is that Babel and Babylon are different places, and are not necessarily located anywhere near each other.” ↩

3. 31c.

   Section Geological Difficulties:  “Since the city of Al Hillah lies at an altitude of 26 m (85 ft) today (Al Hillah 2010), in the pre–Ice Age time this territory would have been about 4 m (13 ft) lower than current sea level. We could therefore postulate that the Babylon area would have been 76 + 4 = 80 m (249 + 13 = 262 ft) below the original post-Flood ocean level.” ↩

4. 31d.

   Section Implications of Locating Babel in the Khabur Triangle:  “there are no other currently known ziggurats near the Khabur triangle area at all; the nearest known ziggurat is the one at Tell al Rimah (Karana), about 130 km (80 miles) to the east (Dalley 1984, p. 22).” ↩

5. 31e.

   Section Would We Recognize the Babel Site:  “It does raise the question whether secular archaeologists today would even recognize the Tower of Babel site as being as ancient as it is, because its advanced technology would make them think it was an edifice from a more "advanced" civilization of later times.” ↩

Habermehl, Anne.  “Where in the World is the Tower of Babel?  A Further Reply.”  Answers Research Journal 17:439–441.  2024.  Habermehl's answer to Osgood's comments, holding that the southern delta formed in the Ice Age meltdown, so that Babylon and Sumer post-date it while Babel stood north of it, whatever date Babel is given.  Followed by a short rejoinder from Osgood. ↩

1. 32a.

   Section Editor's Note:  Osgood's rejoinder, printed after Habermehl's reply:  “I note that Habermehl has claimed privately that geologist Snelling agrees with her geological interpretation and claims, which I have verified privately is not the case.” ↩

Griffith, Ken, and Darrell K. White.  “An Upper Mesopotamian location for Babel.”  Journal of Creation 35(2):69–79.  2021.  Places Babel on the Çınar plain near Diyarbakır, Turkey, at the centre of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and of the wild founder crops, and reads a Babylonian chronicle as Sargon moving a northern "Babylon" south.  The third published young-earth location, and the one that compresses the most archaeology into the fewest years.

1. 33a.

   Section Sargon's conquest of a northern 'Babylon':  “Sargon of Akkad recorded his relocation of a city named 'Babylon' in the region of Diyarbakir, Turkey as part of his defeat of Subartu. … Given Pepi's place in the Memphite dynasties of Manetho, this places Sargon more than five centuries after the dispersion.” ↩

2. 33b.

   Section Site investigation:  “Afterwards, Subartu attacked Sargon in full force and called him to arms. Sargon set an ambush and completely defeated them. He overpowered their extensive army and sent their possessions into Akkad. He dug up the dirt of the pit of Babylon and made a counterpart of Babylon next to Agade.”  The authors' quotation of the Chronicle of Early Kings (ABC 20). ↩

3. 33c.

   Section Objections:  “Babel site C is a medium sized tel, only 276 m across, and about 16 m high, and it has no ziggurat.”  “While commentators since Ussher have assumed that the dispersion occurred in the year Peleg was born, we find it more likely that Babel was a rebellion against the territorial division in the year Peleg was born … the tower of Babel was constructed between the sixth and eighth generations, counting Shem as the first.”  “there may have been 3,000 adult men alive on Earth when the project began, and still fewer than 10,000 adult men at the dispersion.” ↩ ↩

4. 33d.

   Section Biological evidence:  “Archaeology and biology both suggest that the origins of human civilization and farming began between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the region of Diyarbakir, Turkey. For now, we will not be concerned with radiocarbon dating suggesting these sites are 10,000 years old.” ↩

5. 33e.

   Section Habermehl's Khabur Babel theory:  “all four of the sites she has identified date from the Halafian culture, which is younger than the PPNA.” ↩

Osgood, A. J. M.  “A Better Model for the Stone Age, Part 2.”  Ex Nihilo Technical Journal.  1988.  The second part of Osgood's young-earth model of the Stone Age, which assigns each Mesopotamian and Levantine archaeological culture to a nation of Genesis 10 and dates the whole Mesopotamian Chalcolithic between Babel and Abraham.

1. 34a.

   Section Population potential:  “then we would see approximately 12,500 male people alive at the time of Babel (excluding deaths from wars and disease) or a total of around 25,000 human beings”. ↩