The Tower of Babel story is iconic. Featured in the Book of Genesis, it explains how different languages came to be across the world. But what are its origins?Join Tristan Hughes and Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones in this special episode of The Ancients - recorded live at the London Podcast Festival - as they delve into the biblical roots of the myth and uncover the real archeological remains that inspired the fable. They explore how ancient ziggurats influenced depictions of the tower, discuss the intersection between history and faith and discover how age-old texts and modern archaeology combine to unravel the mysteries behind the story of the Tower of Babel.Presented by Tristan Hughes. The producer is Joseph Knight, audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey at https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK.Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound.
Chapter 1: What is the Tower of Babel story?
It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, we're exploring the captivating story of the Tower of Babel. Famous from the Bible, the Tower of Babel features in the Book of Genesis, with its story explaining how different languages came to be across the world.
But, as with so many famous myths from ancient times, there usually is a historical basis to them, at least some sort of historical influence. And that is the case with the Tower of Babel, because archaeology has revealed a real-life influence for this tower and its story, another great structure that dominated the skyline of ancient Babylon, a ziggurat.
Chapter 2: How does archaeology relate to the Tower of Babel?
The Tower of Babel is a great story where archaeology and the Bible have combined with thrilling effect. Now, to explain the story of the Tower of Babel and the real influences behind this story, well, I was delighted to welcome back Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones to the show, one of our favourite ancients guests of all the time, a fantastic speaker.
Now, this was a very special episode because it's the first one we have ever done in front of a live audience. That's right, we had a sell-out crowd at the London Podcast Festival a few months ago for this event, and hopefully we'll be doing more like it in the future, both across the UK and further abroad too. The US, Canada, Australia, let's see. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
For now, enjoy this special episode of The Ancients in front of a live audience as we explore the captivating story of the Tower of Babel. Lloyd, good to see you.
How are you doing?
Very good. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. We've probably all heard the name Tower of Babel. It's one that, of course, is linked closer to the Bible, but it's also one that has an archaeological tale to it too.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's all too easy to kind of skirt over the relationship between the text of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the history and archaeology of ancient Iraq. But I think with the Tower of Babel, the two do begin to align themselves.
And in fact, when archaeologists first started to go to the Middle East, to Iraq, part of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, they kind of went with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other, you know, and they were determined that whatever they dug up was going to map on to the Bible. And so when early archaeologists in the late 1840s, 1850s to the 70s were wandering around,
Iraq, obviously they could see these remains of these enormous mud brick structures that are still surviving. So almost immediately archaeologists began to say, ah, we have discovered the Tower of Babel. And there were many contenders. in fact, in the first sort of hundred years of archaeology in that part of the world for the actual tower.
I don't think it's ever really, we know what it was, but I don't think it doesn't exist any longer. So what we've got now, of course, is just the text really to go with. And I've luckily have it here by my side.
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Chapter 3: What are ziggurats and their significance?
And said one to the other, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
But the Lord came down, that's an interesting one, the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built. And the Lord said, look, they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose now will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there.
so that they will not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel because the Lord confused the language of the earth and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth. There ends the first lesson.
So essentially it's a text which recounts a kind of divide between God and humans. God and let us come down, God and the others who are in heaven, are afraid that these mortals, are going to gain power over him so he's very scared that these human beings have got the nonce to build cities to communicate ideas to one another So will he be redundant in the long run? That's essentially the story.
So he confuses them with multiple languages so that they can no longer communicate and therefore none of these plans will ever come to fruition.
And this is a story that also, just to set the context and the background there right from the beginning, this also happens, it's very early on in the story of the Bible, at least the Bible that we have today, isn't it?
We're just ten chapters in. Ten chapters. Two of those chapters are on the Adam and Eve story. We've got the chapters about the flood just before this, and then we're into the Tower of Babel. So this is very early on in the structure of the Hebrew Bible.
The next question is, it has to be, was it real?
So, a couple of contenders then, as I say. I think it is real. I think whatever the tower was, there's no doubt that the Jewish, Hebrew scribes were recording the presence of ziggurats, okay? And they are dotted all across. Yeah, so what is this? So a ziggurat is essentially, it's a step pyramid, okay?
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Chapter 4: Which ziggurats were considered candidates for the Tower of Babel?
Surely they should have realized this earlier, those early archaeologists going out there. No, because, don't forget, the...
The work on language was only slowly developing. So we didn't know what the Babylonians called Babylon. So we have to wait certain generations until all the pieces get put together. There's an interesting thing as well, isn't it? Because for us, the story of the separation of languages and the kind of gobbledygook that comes out of it.
We're scattered across the face of the earth and no longer can we understand each other. For us in English, babble, babble, works really well, doesn't it? Because you're babbling on about something. It means we're incoherent, we don't know. But actually, that has nothing to do with the naming at all. But it is a deliberate play on an ancient Hebrew word, bilbel, which means to babble. in fact.
So it's all built into the Hebrew already. So they were playing with Babylon and Babylon as well, which luckily in English we've inherited.
Lloyd, you're dishing out facts here and there. This is why we get you on. Well, let's then focus our chat on Babylon. And you mentioned the ziggurats, and you've got another passage there. You reaching out for that forces me now to ask you, what have you reached out for?
I've reached out here for an inscription from the reign of King Nabopolassar. So who is Nabopolassar? Nabopolassar is the king who restores power to Babylon at the beginning of the 7th century BC. Babylon was razed to the ground by the Assyrians. Nasty, wicked Assyrians. The Assyrians came down like a wolf from the fold and all of that. They really lay waste to Babylon.
In a kind of new nationalist movement at the beginning of the 17th century, Nabalapalasa, Babylonian born and bred king, establishes a new dynasty, and he begins a revitalization campaign for the city of Babylon, and he begins to glorify it. You'll probably know his son better. His son was Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar II. And between them, Nabalapalasa and Nebuchadnezzar
beautify this city on a scale that had never been seen before.
Because Babylon at that time, this is the most populated or seems the richest, the wealthiest to their kings. It's the center of the world.
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Chapter 5: What was the role of Babylon in ancient history?
And the Book of Genesis supposedly set 3000 BC, which begs the question, yeah.
How can it possibly be the ziggurat when we're talking a book set in 3000 BC, but now we're at 700 BC? Well, the truth of the matter is this, of course. The book of Genesis, like many of the early Pentateuch in the Bible, so Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, these were all very late compositions of the Hebrew Bible.
The order in which we get the books of the Hebrew Bible is not the order in which they were written. The books of Genesis, the book of Genesis and the others, the Exodus story of Moses and so forth, These were all written by Jews in exile in Babylon. In the middle of the sixth century, Jerusalem fell and the Babylonians were taken en masse into captivity.
Certainly when I say en masse, all of the elites, the elite Jews, so the king, his family, the priests, the scribes, those who had the knowledge of Hebrew history and Hebrew ritual were suddenly taken to this new city. And in fact, we know more now about the Jewish settlement in Babylon than we ever did. So back in the 1990s, we discovered a big hoard of cuneiform documents written in Akkadian.
And they are all from Jewish families who have settled in Babylonia. And in fact, they all come from one particular area just outside Babylon, which is called Al Yehud, Jew town, Jewish town. It was like a ghetto for Jewish settlers there. And while many of them seem to have maintained something of the Hebrew faith, whatever that was at the time, many of them became completely Babylonianized.
They marry Babylonian women, they take Babylonian names, or at least they take Babylonian and Hebrew names. So we see a lot of assimilation going on. So this is giving us a new picture of this exile in Babylon because otherwise what we're dealing with is things like the books of Jeremiah, the books of Ezekiel, the prophets who talk about the Babylonian exile of the Jews and how traumatic it was.
And indeed it was traumatic for them. ripped away from their homeland, ripped away from their God, but they actually, it seems now, that some people coped a lot better than others. So some people assimilated, some people couldn't quite assimilate very easily. So if we were to just look at, say, the evidence that we find in the book of Psalms, very famously, Psalm 119,
37, by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept, and our tormentors, the Babylonians, said to us, sing us some songs of Zion. How can we sing these songs when we are in a foreign land? It's a Babylonian period psalm. It was written during the exile. It's all about how can we talk about God when we are no longer in his presence? Because
When the Jerusalem temple was destroyed, as far as the Jews believed, God had disappeared. God was absent from their lives. So they were in this foreign place without their God anymore. So if we only had the Psalms and the Hebrew Bible to go on, we would think this is a whole people in trauma.
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Chapter 6: How did the Babylonian religion influence the Tower of Babel story?
And that must have been the Jewish experience in Babylon. So do you think that's, is Babylon cosmopolitan? So cosmopolitan. So, you know, the Jews who came there and, you know, only had their bit of Hebrew to go with, suddenly we're hearing, you know, Akkadian, bits of Hittite, Hurrian, Greek, Persian, all of this mix was going on in Babylon as multicultural as London is today, essentially.
That's what we need to try to get into our minds. And I think that was kind of unnerving the Jewish elite, the scribes and so forth as well, they didn't feel comfortable with any of that. And I think that gets filtered into this story as well.
So that altogether leads ultimately to the creation of this story, but it must have taken a bit of time to create at the same time. So often with so many things in ancient history, we think, okay, here's one part, here's one influence, here's another influence, and bam, it must have happened straight away.
But I'm guessing to then create that story, it takes a bit of time in its own right to develop.
I guess so. I mean, we don't really know the process by which the scribes created the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible. But certainly the story of the Tower of Babylon is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So, you know, it's canonical by the first century BCE, certainly.
But it has a life well beyond even that, because Babylon rears its head again in the Greek New Testament as well. And this is where it begins to perhaps have more relevance to the modern world, you know, because this is how we kind of know it more. So, you know, the book of Revelation.
Yes, let's do this now, because this is... I don't even know how to describe this. It's... Yes, confusing. Confusing and mind-blowing, the Book of Revelation.
So sometime, imagine Ephesus, 90 CE. So about 90 CE, first at the end of the first century in Ephesus, there's a man called John, probably not the author of the Gospel of John, but possibly from the school of thought of John. He's living on an island of Patmos. He's been exiled there, a little Greek island today. But he...
lived for a long time and knows Christians who are based in Ephesus, big, big city in Asia Minor. And the Ephesian Christians are, like many of the churches of Asia Minor, are
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Chapter 7: What evidence supports the existence of the Tower of Babel?
They use it constantly. Absolutely. Then, of course, there's another afterlife to this, too. Because by the time we get into the late Middle Ages and into the early 16th century... Renaissance time. Yeah, yeah. And especially during the European Reformation. The image of Babylon is once more reactivated by the Protestant reformers.
So now the second Rome, papal Rome, is also cast as another Babylon as well. So the papal throne is the throne of Satan, for instance. The great whore is now the pope and so forth. And this all comes to a head in two particular ways, this kind of utilization of Babylon in this way, in Christian understanding. In the Sermon of Martin Luther, but also in Northern European art of this period.
Because from about the 1540s up until the 1580s, there is a plethora of images, paintings and also prints, of what else but the Tower of Babel. It becomes one of the most important art subjects in Northern European painting. And many of you will probably know that Bruegel the Elder, Peter Bruegel the Elder in particular, created three versions of the Tower of Babel.
The best known today is a large painting that he created in 1567, which is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
If you Wikipedia the Tower of Babel, that's normally the image which also comes up.
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Chapter 8: How does the timeline of Genesis relate to historical events?
Yeah, which comes up straight away. And it's really fascinating, you know, because Bruegel himself trained as an artist in Rome. So when he returns home and he wants to paint this antique scene of the Tower of Babel, he has Rome in his mind straight away. So his Tower of Babel is round. It's not a square ziggurat. It's round, but on seven layers, like a kind of wedding cake, really.
And it's kind of unfinished. It's got a big split in it. It's full of arches that go around. And of course, what's that based on? Well, it's based on the Colosseum. So he sees the ruins of the Colosseum, and he thinks, OK, this must be the Roman Babel. And this is what he paints.
And it's really fascinating the way he does it as well, because first of all, just as in Genesis, it's a work of hubris by humans, because the scale of it is enormous. When you look at the painting, the city of Babylon around, which is his Antwerp, it's tiny, tiny diminutive little figures, vast. And it's unfinished.
And even the bits that have been finished have been finished so long ago that they've started to crumble and they're being patched up while they haven't even started the beginning of the end of the top of the tower yet. So it's constant work in progress as a way, man laboring away with his own vanities to build this project.
And in the front of it is a figure of a king with his crown on, the king of Babylon, the king of Rome, the pope. So all of this comes together perfectly in this visualization of what a corrupt monarchy, a corrupt state, a defunct religion, and a wicked urban center is all about. So that image that we have of Babylon and the tower just keeps on going, keeps on going.
Let's talk about keeping on going just before we completely wrap up. Shall we talk about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 2? Feels a bit different, doesn't it? But there is a link here.
Yeah, of course. So Adam Douglas, in his genius, when he thought about this idea that how can we communicate together, because we're all living in a Babel world, unless you put the hours in and learn another language. But he came up with the idea of the Babelfish. So it's a little silver fish which you can just insert in your ear, and that will give you the power to understand anybody.
So it's the reverse of the Tower of Babel effect, and he calls it the Babel fish, of course. And it's no coincidence, isn't it, that language learning sites and stuff are still called Babel or Babel today. So that kind of legacy is absolutely still with us today.
I mean, this has been fantastic. We've gone from the Book of Genesis, then Babylon, exploring the archaeology, and then the later legacy of the whole story of the Tower of Babel. But it is interesting. I wanted to do this topic, one, because it's a name that we've all probably heard of, but we don't know too much about. But two, because it is a story also of archaeology as well.
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