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The Tower of Babel: archaeology, history and cuneiform texts

Such is the fame of the myth of the Tower of Babel related in Genesis 11 that the publication of a new monograph on the building generally thought to have inspired the myth is an important event. It is necessarily an occasion for the academic disciplines that deal with the ancient Near East — archaeology, ancient history and Assyriology — to present their subject to the wider world. Stemming from the author's excavations on the structure's core and foundations in 1962, Schmid's magnificent book on the ziqqurrat or temple-tower of Babylon is consequently much more than a final report of the kind conventional in Near Eastern archaeology. Based on the evidence of texts as well as the results of excavation, it is a history of the study and representation of the building in all its aspects, from biblical myth to mediaeval fantasy to archaeological problem. The first chapter presents myth and fantasy, discussing the classical and biblical traditions of the tower, the reports of early European travellers in Mesopotamia, the imaginative depictions of mediaeval and Renaissance European painters and engravers, and the history of modern enquiry into the ruined temple towers of Assyria and Babylonia up to the first scientific excavations (for the impact of the tower on mediaeval and later artists see now Albrecht 1999). Chapter 2 turns to more reliable evidence, presenting the E-sangil Tablet, a famous cuneiform document copied out by a scribal apprentice called Anu-b∂l·unu in 229 BC, and quoting from Friedrich Wetzel's preliminary accounts of his excavations of the foundations of Babylon's ziqqurrat in 1913. It then examines in detail the reconstructions of the ziqqurrat of Babylon put forward on the basis of this evidence by subsequent scholars, from Koldewey and Dombart to Martiny and Busink. A turning point was the publication in 1938 of Wetzel's final report of the excavations, supplemented by F. H. Weissbach's authoritative edition of the E-sangil Tablet (Wetzel and Weissbach 1938). This generated a rash of further reconstructions, from von Soden to Siegler; at the same time archaeological investigation of ziqqurrats at other Mesopotamian sites increased modern understanding of the historical development of these buildings across three millennia. At the end of the chapter Schmid observes how little modern scholars agreed on such vital matters as the date of the ruined building excavated by Wetzel and the date of composition of the text later copied by Anu-b∂l·unu. Worse was the …