Tower in Stages, from an Assyrian Bas-relief.

The actual site of the Tower of Babel, beyond the mere fact that it was somewhere in Babylon, has not yet been settled. It is generally considered to be represented by the great pile of Birs Nimrud, which stood in Borsippa, the suburb of Babylon, and was dedicated to Nebo and called “the Temple of the Seven Lights” or planets. This ruin has been examined by Sir Henry Rawlinson; details of his operations here are given in the “Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,” vol. xviii., and Rawlinson’s “Ancient Monarchies,” p. 544. Sir Henry discovered by excavation that the tower consisted of seven stages of brickwork on an earthen platform, each stage being of a different colour. This is explained by the fact that it was devoted to the seven planets. The height of the earthen platform was not ascertained, but the first stage, which was an exact square, was 272 feet each way, and 26 feet high, the bricks being blackened with bitumen; this stage is supposed to have been dedicated to the planet Saturn. The second stage was a square of 230 feet, 26 feet high, faced with orange-coloured bricks; supposed to have been dedicated to Jupiter. The third stage, 188 feet square, and 26 feet high, faced with red bricks, was probably dedicated to Mars. The fourth stage, 146 feet square, and 15 feet high, was probably dedicated to the Sun, and is thought by Sir H. Rawlinson to have been originally plated with gold. The fifth stage is supposed to have been 104, the sixth 62, and the seventh 20 feet square, but the top was too ruinous to decide these measurements. These stages were probably dedicated to Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. Each stage of the building was not set in the centre of the stage on which it rested, but was placed 30 feet from the front, and 12 feet from the back. The ruin at present rises 154 feet above the level of the plain, and is the most imposing pile in the whole country. According to Nebuchadnezzar it had been built to the height of 42 cubits by “a former king,” who however had not completed its summit, and it had long been in a ruinous condition when Nebuchadnezzar undertook to restore and finish it. Prof. Schrader imagines that the long period during which it had remained an unfinished ruin caused the growth of the legend which saw in it a monument of the overthrow of human presumption, the diversity of languages in Babylonia being sufficient to account for the localization of the confusion of tongues in the country.

Sir Henry Rawlinson now proposes to place the Tower or tul ellu at the ruins now called Amrán, within the city of Babylon itself. Here he thinks were the temple of Anu, on the site of the ruined Tower, a chapel dedicated to Nebo, an altar of Merodach, the royal palace (now represented by the mound of the Kasr), and the hanging gardens, all enclosed by a common wall. The quarter of Babylon thus enclosed he would identify with the Calneh of the Bible, principally on the ground that the Septuagint rendering of Isaiah x. 9 is, “Have I not taken the region above Babylon and Chalanne where the tower was built?”

A third site has been claimed for the Tower on the Babil or Mujellibeh mound on the north side of Babylon. This represents the famous temple of Belus or Bel, whose great festival marked the beginning of the year and the vernal equinox. But there is no evidence to support this third opinion.

In the Babylonian and Assyrian sculptures there are occasionally representations of towers similar in style to the supposed Tower of Babel; one of these is given on the stone of Merodach Baladan I., opposite p. 236 of Mr. Smith’s “Assyrian Discoveries;” another occurs on the sculptures at Nineveh, representing the city of Babylon; this tower, however, cannot represent the Borsippa pile, since it consists of only five stages.

Besides the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire from heaven may also have been known to the Accadians. We learn from Genesis xiv. that the cities of the plain were among the conquests of Chedor-laomer and his allies, and there is some reason for thinking that the history of Chedor-laomer’s campaign may have been derived from the Babylonian state archives. At all events Amraphel or Amarpel, the king of Sumir, is mentioned first, although Chedor-laomer was the paramount sovereign and the leader of the expedition. The expedition must have taken place during the period when, as we learn from the inscriptions, Babylonia was subject to the monarchs of Elam, though subordinate princes were ruling over the states into which it was divided at the time. Though the name of Chedor-laomer has not been found, Laomer or Lagamar appears as an Elamite god, and several of the Elamite kings bore names compounded with Kudur “a servant,” as Kudur-Nankhunte, “the servant of the god Nankhunte,” Kudur-Mabug, “the servant of Mabug,” and the like. Arioch, king of Ellasar, which probably stands for al Larsa, “the city of Larsa,” has the same name as Eri-Acu (“the servant of the moon-god”), the son of the Elamite monarch Kudur-Mabug, who reigned over Larsa during his father’s lifetime, and was eventually overthrown by the Cossæan conqueror Khammuragas.

The text which perhaps relates to the destruction of the guilty cities is a bilingual one, much mutilated, and runs as follows:—

Here the fragment breaks off. It is possible that the person referred to in line 17 was the pious man who like Lot escaped the destruction that befell his neighbours.