These fragments are so remarkable that it is most unfortunate we have not the remainder of the tablet.

In the first part we have the anger of Bel, the father of the gods, at the sin of those who were building the walls of Babylon and the mound of tower or palace. This mound is termed “the illustrious,” and the god Anu who destroyed the builders is accordingly called Sar-tuli-elli, “the king of the illustrious mound.” Since the Accadian name of the month Tisri, our October, was “the month of the illustrious mound,” it would appear that the construction of it was believed to have taken place at the time of the autumnal equinox. The builders were punished by the deity, and the walls that had been set up in the day were destroyed at night. Prof. Delitzsch has drawn attention to a possible reference to this legend in an Accadian hymn in which the poet says to Merodach, “found during the day, destroy during the night.” It is plain from the first lines that the whole attempt was directed against the gods; in fact, that like the giants and Titans in Greek mythology, whose assault on Zeus is probably but an echo of the old Babylonian tale, conveyed to Greece through the hands of the Phœnicians, the builders of the Tower of Babylon intended to scale the sky. They were, however, confounded on the mound, as well as their speech (tammasle). It is interesting to find the very same word signifying “to confound” used in the Babylonian as in the Hebrew account, namely bâlal, or rather bâlâh. We may also notice that the Hebrew writer once (Gen. xi. 7.) adopts the polytheistic language of the Accadian scribe; the Lord being made to say “Let us go down, and there confound their language.”

View of the Birs Nimrud, the supposed site of the Tower of Babel.

The last column shows that the winds finally destroyed the impious work of the Babylonians. This fully accords with the legend reported by Alexander Polyhistor. For a time Babylon was given over to the god of lawlessness; but at last the gods repented of the evil they had done, and order was once more restored. The shrine mentioned in the sixteenth line of the first column may receive some light from the fact that the Accadian name of Nisan or March was “the month of the upright altar,” or “of the altar of Bel,” and that Nisan corresponded with the vernal equinox just as Tisri did with the autumnal equinox.

View of the Babil Mound at Babylon, the site of the Temple of Bel.

The etymology of the name of Babel from balbel, “to confound,” suggested in Genesis is one of those “popular etymologies” or plays on words of which the Old Testament writers are so fond. Thus, for instance, the name of Joseph is connected first with ’âsaph “to take away,” and then with yâsaph “to add” (Gen. xxx. 23, 24.), and the name of the Moabite city Dibon is changed into Dimon by Isaiah (xv. 9) to indicate that its “waters shall be full of blood,” Hebrew dâm. Babel is the Assyrian Bab-ili “the gate of God” (or, as it is occasionally written in the plural, Bab-ili “Gate of the gods”), which was the Semitic translation of the old Accadian name of the town Ca-dimirra with the same meaning. This is not the only instance in which the original Accadian names of Babylonian cities were literally translated into Semitic Babylonian after the Semitic conquest of the country. It is possible that the name had some reference to the building of the Tower. Babylon was first made a capital by Khammuragas, the leader of the Cossæan dynasty, a position which it never afterwards lost; but the first antediluvian king of Chaldea, Alorus, according to Barosus, was a native of the place.