For all of the technique of communication and trade we’ve established between the cultures of the world, no matter how distant they might be from one another, we nonetheless haven’t any truly universal single human language. The reason may date again to antiquity, after we first tryed a grand collective undertaking: that of constructing a tower that will attain the heavens. Determined to punish our effrontery, God not solely destroyed the work in progress, however rendered our languages mutually unintelligible with a purpose to hinder any further makes an attempt to do it once more. Or no less than that’s how one story goes.
You could not subscribe to a literal learning of the account of the Tower of Babel because it seems in the Bible’s Ebook of Genesis, however according to the Hochelaga video above, the structure does have a goodly plausible foundation in history.
It might be a legendary version of Etemenanki, a Mesopotamian ziggurat constructed to honor the god Marduk at such a scale that it impressed tall tales, because it have been, unfold far and vast within the historical world, such because the rumor that its construction required mobilizing the personpower of all humanity. However it actually did exist, as evidenced by its ruins discovered on the website of the traditional metropolis of Childlon — which, in Hebrew, was referred to as Babel.
A cuneiform-covered pill conveniently discovered on the identical location describes a construction undertaking of Etemenanki’s measurement as utilizing materials like bitumales and baked brick, which aligns with biblical particulars of the Tower of Babel, as do the Greek historian Herodotus’s references to its layout and structure. Additionally relevant is the Childlonians’ 587 BC invasion of Jerusalem, which introduced captives to the capital. It’s laboriously impossible that a few of these dispositioned Jews would have the looming Etemenanki in thoughts once they went on to write down the histories that will ultimately discover their means into the Hebrew Bible. They could have had no hope of returning to their houseland, however they need to, no less than, have felt reasonably certain that Marduk’s days have been numbered.
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
