Was there a real Tower of Babel? This temple is the leading contender.
Many archaeologists believe the famed tower from the Book of Genesis may have had a real historical counterpart in ancient Mesopotamia.
For centuries, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel has been used to explain the origins of the world's different languages—and to point out the pitfalls of attempting to compete with God.
But did the tower really exist?
The answer could be yes—both archaeologists and historians believe the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis actually had a historical counterpart in ancient Mesopotamia: Etemenanki.
But though modern research has revealed plenty of potential evidence that such a structure not only existed but was known throughout the ancient world, the case for a real-life Tower of Babel is far from closed.
Here’s more about the tower’s chaotic history—and why it continues to intrigue modern researchers.
The Tower of Babel’s description in Genesis
Though tradition holds that the prophet Moses wrote Genesis and the other four books of the Jewish Torah, modern historians believe it was actually written by a variety of authors at different points in ancient history.
The book tells of a God who created Earth and humanity, then destroyed most of creation with a massive flood after humans proved corrupt, violent, and sinful. God spared Noah and his family, who wait out the flood on a custom-built ark.
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Chapter 11 of Genesis describes the aftermath of these events, portraying a planet with a single language and a unified people who move to the land of Shinar, thought to correspond to the territory of ancient Babylonia in southern Mesopotamia—modern-day Iraq.
Despite living in unity and harmony, ultimately human pride drives them to build a city with a tower that reaches all the way up to heaven. Furious, God comes to Earth and “confounds” the humans’ language. Now speaking a variety of languages—and no longer able to understand one another—the humans abandon the tower and city.
The account closes by mentioning that the city was named Babel (Babylon). The term is similar to the Hebrew verb balal, which means “to confound” or “to mix”—so similar that some scholars believe its use was part of a longstanding tradition of Hebrew wordplay.
Searching for the true Tower of Babel
Was part of the true tower left behind? That question motivated generations of explorers, historians, and Christian believers, and over the years various figures suggested a variety of possible locations for the one-time structure.
Many held that Aquar Quf, a Mesopotamian city that once served as the capital of one of ancient Babylonians’ most powerful dynasties, had inspired the biblical account. Others thought the ruins might be in a city now identified as Borsippa.
“In the Middle Ages, there would hardly have been visible remains of the [tower] of Babylon, meaning that it was difficult if not impossible to carry out the identification on the part of travelers who visited the region,” writes ancient historian Juan Luis Montero Fenollós.
Only one of those early explorers came close to finding the structure now most associated with the Tower of Babel.
Etemenanki emerges as the leading contender
Today, historians and archaeologists alike think the tower was inspired by the ziggurat of Etemenanki, whose ruins were rediscovered by German archaeologist Robert Koldewey in 1913.
The reason is simple, Andrew George, an emeritus professor of Babylonian at SOAS University of London, tells Nat Geo via email. “It was a tall tower in the city that in Greek was called Babylon, in Hebrew Babel,” he says. Despite the existence of similar buildings in ancient Mesopotamia, the building’s location in Babylon is key.
Though the building has long been destroyed, scholars have proven its existence through a combination of ancient written records—such as the writing of Greek historian Herodotus and a variety of cuneiform texts—and more modern archaeological research.
The building was a ziggurat, a kind of temple tower common in ancient Mesopotamia. These pyramid-like structures—whose name derives from the Akkadian word zaqārum, “to build high”—were erected in tribute to a city’s patron god. Their proximity to royal structures has led researchers to speculate that they existed to highlight connections between local royalty and city deities.
These structures were more than pretty pyramids. Linked to an on-the-ground shrine, the ziggurat was likely considered an important meeting place for both sky and earth deities. As a result, says George, such sites had “immense religious importance.”
Devoted to the powerful Mesopotamian god Marduk, Babylon’s patron deity, Etemenanki was likely an impressive structure. Early excavations at the site confirmed the building was built with sun-dried mud bricks and kiln-baked bitumen bricks and held together with mud as mortar.
Then in the 1990s, researchers working in trenches opened up by archaeologists nearly a century earlier discovered an intriguing stele covered in drawings and inscriptions about Etemenanki. The “Tower of Babylon Stele,” as it is now known, was a goldmine of information about the ziggurat, and researchers have even used its drawings to create a convincing model of the 90-meter-high (about 295 feet) temple it describes.
Etemenanki would have been a key structure within Babylon’s temple complex. It remains unclear when the Babylonians first built it, though George estimates it was constructed between 1500 and 1000 B.C.E.—timing that would align with the authorship of many Old Testament texts.
Contested evidence for the biblical tower
The Tower of Babylon Stele’s description of a ziggurat 90 meters high and 90 meters wide isn’t enough to prove what the building looked like in real life, George says. Though these were seen as the ideal dimensions for such a structure, “it is uncertain whether any of the ancient builders ever achieved this ideal.”
Ultimately, specifics about the building’s true extent and design over the centuries remain elusive.
The structure’s convoluted history makes it even harder to draw archaeological conclusions. Creating Etemenanki wasn’t a one-time task: The ziggurat was apparently destroyed and rebuilt multiple times thanks to the ravages of both time and repeat invasion.
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One of the last known chapters of its life was in 331 B.C.E., when Babylon and its ziggurat were captured by Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia. He ordered its remains to be destroyed to clear the way for a reconstructed ziggurat. But that project was abandoned after Alexander’s death in 323 B.C.E. Local looting and the ravages of time did the rest, George tells Nat Geo.
“Excavations later found mostly a hole in the ground where the baked brick foundations had once been,” he adds. “Because we only have this hole in the ground, and no superstructure, we lack concrete archaeological evidence for the building's structure, form and history.”
The site that once held Etemenanki is now a UNESCO-protected archaeological heritage site in modern-day Iraq.
Myth or history?
Though specifics about the ziggurat are tantalizingly difficult to find, it’s clear that such structures were a common sight in ancient Mesopotamia. So one question remains: Why would Genesis describe it as a tower and not a ziggurat?
Well, to Israelites new to the region, a towering ziggurat would be as unfamiliar as it was impressive. The use of the word “tower” to describe the ziggurat in Genesis could reflect their unfamiliarity with such structures, writes Old Testament scholar John Walton.
Given the lack of archaeological evidence to corroborate the biblical account, however, we may never know whether Etemenanki and the Tower of Babel were one and the same. Instead, many scholars see the story of Babel as part of a wider creation legend as the tale has parallels in the myths of other cultures too.
“Care must be taken to determine which stories handed down in Genesis belong in the realm of folklore (myth and legend) and which are actually historical,” George warns. “This is a very difficult task. In my view it is futile to seek archaeological corroboration of myth and legend.”
