Babel, TOWER OF. According to the story in Genesis xi., the descendants of Noah journeyed from the east till they came to the plain of Shinar (the Hebrew form of the native name Sumir—or Sungir, as it was pronounced in the allied dialect of Accad—the southern half of pre-Semitic Babylonia), and there they impiously began to build a tower of burned bricks and bitumen, whose top might reach unto heaven. But Jehovah confounded the language of the builders, so that they could not understand each other, and scattered them over the face of the earth, wherefore the tower was called Babel, or 'confusion,' from the Hebrew balbel, 'to confound.' This etymology, however, is an example of the paronomasia so frequent in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament; Babel is really the Assyrian Bab-ili, 'the gate of God,' which is merely a Semitic translation of the old Accadian (or rather Sumirian) name of the town Ca-dimira, where Ca- is 'gate,' and dimira, 'God.' There appears to be no reference to the story in Berossus, and no certain representation of it has been found on any of the Babylonian gems, but George Smith discovered some fragments of a cuneiform text affording a marvellously close parallel to the account in Genesis. According to this version, certain men under a leader, 'the thought of whose heart was evil,' and who had 'repudiated the father of all the gods,' began to build at Babylon a 'mound' or hill-like tower, but the winds blew down their work, and Anu 'confounded great and small on the mound,' as well as their 'speech,' and 'made strange their counsel.' It is Bel, 'the father of the gods,' whose anger is stirred up against the impious builders; but it is the god Anu who destroyed them, and is accordingly called 'king of the illustrious mound.' The builders of the Tower of Babel intended to scale the sky, like the giants and Titans of Greek mythology, whose assault on heaven and discomfiture by Zeus may be but an echo of the old Babylonian tale—conveyed to Greece by the Phoenicians. Chaldean tradition assigned the building of the tower and the subsequent confusion of languages to the time of the autumnal equinox, and it is possible that the mythical hero Etana of the Izdubar legends, who, according to an obscure fragment, builds a city in defiance of the gods, may have been the leader 'the thought of whose heart was evil.'
With reference to the site of the Tower of Babel, nothing more is certain than that it was somewhere in Babylon. It is usually supposed to be represented by the great pile of Birs Nimroud, which stood in Borsippa, the suburb of Babylon, 8 miles distant, and was dedicated to Nebo and called 'the Temple of the Seven Lights' or planets. Sir Henry Rawlinson discovered that it consisted of seven stages of brickwork on an earthen platform, each stage being of a different colour. Its north-west, south-east, north-east, and south-west sides are 643, 643, 420, and 376 feet long respectively, and its ruins still rise 153 feet above the level of the plain. It had long stood unfinished when Nebuchadnezzar undertook to restore and finish it. Schrader thinks 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 spoken in the plain of Mesopotamia being sufficient to account for the localisation of the story of the confusion of tongues in that country. Another site proposed is at the ruins now called Amram, within the city of Babylon itself. The mound here is 1100 yards in length and 800 in breadth. See Sayce's edition of George Smith's Chaldean Account of Genesis (1880); vol. i. (1882) of Lenormant's Les Origines de l'Histoire d'après la Bible; and Sayce's Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments (3d ed. 1886).