The city of Babylon, which means the "Gate of God", was founded in ancient times on the banks of the Euphrates. It was one of the largest cities of the Ancient World and was the capital of Babylonia - a kingdom that existed for one and a half millennia in the south of Mesopotamia (the territory of modern Iraq).
The architecture of Mesopotamia was based on secular buildings - palaces and religious monumental structures - ziggurats. The powerful cult towers called ziggurat (holy mountain) were square and resembled a stepped pyramid. The steps were connected by stairs, along the edge of the wall there was a ramp leading to the temple. The walls were painted black (asphalt), white (lime) and red (brick).
Jan il Vecchio Bruegel
According to the biblical tradition, after the Flood, humanity was represented by one people speaking the same language. From the east, people came to the land of Shinar (in the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates), where they decided to build a city (Babylon) and a tower high to the sky in order to "make a name for themselves."
Jan Collaert, 1579
The construction of the tower was interrupted by God, who created new languages for different people, because of which they ceased to understand each other, could not continue building the city and the tower, and scattered throughout the land of Babylon.
The tower stood on the left bank of the Euphrates on the plain of Sahn, which literally translates as "frying pan". It was surrounded by houses of priests, temple buildings and houses for pilgrims who flocked here from all over the Babylonian kingdom. The description of the Tower of Babel was left by Herodotus, who thoroughly examined it and, perhaps, even visited its top.
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… Babylon was built like this … Lies on a vast plain, forming a quadrangle, each side of which is 120 stades (meters) in length. The circumference of all four sides of the city is 480 stades (meters). Babylon was not only a very large city, but also the most beautiful city I know. First of all, the city is surrounded by a deep, wide and full of water moat, then there is a wall 50 royal (Persian) cubits wide (26.64 meters), and 200 (106.56 meters) high.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563
If the Tower of Babel existed, what did it look like and what did it serve? What was it - a mystical journey to heaven to the abode of the gods? Or maybe a temple or an astronomical observatory? The scientific history of the search for the Tower of Babel began with several pieces of painted bricks found at the site of the Babylonian kingdom by the German architect and archaeologist Robert Koldewey. The rubble of a brick bas-relief was a good enough reason for Kaiser Wilhelm II and the newly founded German Oriental Society to generously fund the excavation of the ancient city.
Robert Koldeway
On March 26, 1899, Robert Koldewey solemnly began excavations. But only in 1913, due to the fact that the water table dropped, archaeologists were able to begin to study the remains of the legendary tower. At the bottom of deep excavations, they freed the remaining part of the brick foundation and several steps of the staircase from under the layers.
Marten van valckenborch I
Since then and to this day, an irreconcilable struggle has continued between the supporters of various hypotheses, who in different ways represent the shape of this building and its height. The most controversial is the location of the stairs: some researchers are sure that the steps were outside, while others insist on placing the stairs inside the tower.
The tower mentioned in the Bible was probably destroyed even before the era of Hammurabi. It was replaced by another, which was erected in memory of the first. The Tower of Babel was a stepped eight-tier pyramid, each tier of which had a strictly defined color. Each side of the square base was 90 meters long.
Marten van Valckenborch, 1595
The height of the tower was also 90 meters, the first tier had a height of 33 meters, the second - 18, the third and fifth - 6 meters each, the seventh - the sanctuary of the god Marduk was 15 meters high. By today's standards, the building reached the height of a 25-storey building.
Calculations allow us to say that about 85 million raw bricks from a mixture of clay, sand and straw were used for the construction of the Tower of Babel, since there are few trees and stone in Mesopotamia. Bitumen (mountain resin) was used to join the bricks.
Marten van Valckenborch, 1600
Robert Koldevey managed to unearth in Babylon the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which were not erected by this legendary queen, but were built by order of Nebuchadnezzar II for his beloved wife Amytis, an Indian princess who yearned for the green hills of her homeland in dusty Babylon. Gorgeous gardens with rare trees, fragrant flowers and coolness in the sultry city were truly a wonder of the world.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon
In 1962, an expedition led by architect Hans-Georg Schmidt continued to investigate the tower's ruins. Professor Schmidt created a new model of the building: two side staircases led to a wide terrace located 31 meters above the ground, the monumental central staircase ended on the second tier at a height of 48 meters. Four more flights of stairs led up from there, and at the top of the tower stood a temple - the sanctuary of the god Marduk, lined with blue tiles and decorated with golden horns at the corners - a symbol of fertility. Inside the sanctuary were a gilded table and bed of Marduk. The ziggurat was a shrine that belonged to the entire people, it was a place where thousands of people flocked to worship the supreme deity Marduk.
Professor Schmidt correlated his calculations with data on a small clay tablet discovered by archaeologists. This unique document contains a description of a multi-tiered tower in the Babylonian kingdom - the famous temple of the supreme deity Marduk. The tower was called Etemenanki, which means "the house where heaven meets earth." It is not known exactly when the initial construction of this tower was carried out, but it already existed during the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC). Now on the site of the "temple-skyscraper" there is a swamp overgrown with reeds.
Cyrus, who conquered Babylon after Nebuchadnezzar's death, was the first conqueror to leave the city intact. He was amazed at the scale of Etemenanki, and he not only forbade anything to be destroyed, but ordered to build a monument on his grave in the form of a miniature ziggurat - a small Babel tower.
During its three-thousand-year history, Babylon was destroyed three times to the ground and each time rose again from the ashes until it completely fell into decay under the rule of the Persians and Macedonians in the 6th-5th centuries BC. The Persian king Xerxes left only ruins from the Tower of Babel, which Alexander the Great saw on his way to India. He intended to build it again. “But, - as Strabo writes, - this work required a lot of time and effort, for the ruins would have had to be removed by ten thousand people for two months, and he did not realize his plan, as he soon fell ill and died”.
Ruins of Babylon today
The Tower of Babel, which in those days was just a miracle of technology, brought glory to its city. This ziggurat was the tallest and latest of its kind, but by no means the only high-rise temple in Mesopotamia. Along the two mighty rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, colossal shrines stood in a long line.
The tradition of building towers was born among the Sumerians in the south of Mesopotamia. Already seven thousand years ago, the first stepped temple was built in Eridu with a terrace only one meter high. Over time, architects learned to design taller buildings and developed construction technology to achieve the stability and strength of the walls.