Did Babel Tower ever exist?
Recent archeological findings suggest that the Babel Tower really existed.
According to genesis Book Babel tower was built using asphalt and bricks in place of mortar. Archeologists discovered bricks and asphalt in Babylon dating from Nebuchadnezzar time and these could be remnants from the Babel tower.
Nebuchadnezzar occupied Jerusalem and took Jewish people into slavery. During his period, the Babel tower was probably built, and ancient Jews took this story in the Old Testament.
Etemenanki was a ziggurat dedicated to Marduk in the ancient city of Babylon. It now exists only in ruins, located about 90 kilometres (56 mi) south of Baghdad, Iraq.
Etemenanki has been suggested as a possible inspiration to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מִגְדַּל בָּבֶל, Migdal Bavel) narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world’s peoples speak different languages.
According to the story, a united human race in the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar (שִׁנְעָר). There they agree to build a city and a tower tall enough to reach heaven. God, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.
Some modern scholars have associated the Tower of Babel with known structures, notably the Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk in Babylon. A Sumerian story with some similar elements is told in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.
Some scholars use internal and external evidence to offer 3500–3000 BC as a likely range for the date of the tower.
In Greek mythology, much of which was adopted by the Romans, there is a myth referred to as the Gigantomachy, the battle fought between the Giants and the Olympian gods for supremacy of the cosmos. In Ovid‘s telling of the myth, the Giants attempt to reach the gods in heaven by stacking mountains, but are repelled by Jupiter‘s thunderbolts.
Still another story, attributed to the Tohono O’odham people, Native Americans,holds that Montezuma escaped a great flood, then became wicked and attempted to build a house reaching to heaven, but the Great Spirit destroyed it with thunderbolts.
Do you like this topic? Find out more!