Etemenanki

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A traveler coming up the processional way from the Ishtar Gate, between walls glazed blue and set with striding lions, would have seen it before anything else: a mountain of brick rising in stages out of the flat alluvium, square at the base and stepped back toward a single high room at the top. It had a name that was also a claim. The Babylonians called it Etemenanki, in the old Sumerian É.TEMEN.AN.KI — the House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth — and they meant the words to be taken at full weight. The tower stood at the center of Babylon, beside Esagila, the temple of Marduk, and it was understood to fasten the city, and through the city the whole world, to the sky.

What survives of it now is a rectangular depression in the ground south of the modern village, often holding water, its outline traced by the robbed-out trenches where foundation brick once lay. The structure that drew exiles’ eyes and Greek tourists’ notes is gone almost completely. But it left a long shadow, longer than the building itself, because among the peoples who saw it was one that carried the memory home and made of the great tower of Babylon a parable.

A tower beside the temple of Marduk

A ziggurat is not a temple in the way a Greek or a modern reader expects. It has no interior to enter at ground level, no nave, no congregation. It is a solid mass of brick built up in receding terraces, with a small shrine on the summit, and its purpose is structural in a cosmic sense: to raise a meeting place between the god and the city as high above the plain as labor could lift it. The form belonged to southern Mesopotamia from deep antiquity — the earliest staged platforms rose at Eridu and at Ur, where Ur-Nammu’s terraced tower to the moon-god Sin still stands in part — and by the time the Babylonians raised theirs to its famous height the idea was already two thousand years old. The ziggurat was the cosmic mountain in mud brick, the bond, as one survey of the form puts it, between heaven and earth.

Etemenanki belonged to Marduk, the city-god of Babylon, who in the Babylonian account of creation had risen to kingship over the gods by defeating the salt-sea, Tiamat, and dividing her body to make the sky and the earth. Having done so, in the poem, Marduk built Esagila as the seat of his rule and the center of the ordered world, and beside it the temple tower rose. The placement was the meaning. If Esagila was the house the god kept on the ground, Etemenanki was the axis driven up through it — the foundation, the temen, joining the underworld through the apsu, the freshwater deep over which Enki presided, up through the city to the heaven of the sky-god Anu. It stood, in the Babylonian frame, at the exact center of the world.

The antiquity of the specific structure is uncertain. A tower of some kind stood at Babylon long before the Neo-Babylonian kings, and the Assyrian king Sennacherib, sacking the rebel city in 689 BCE, seems to have wrecked it along with the rest of Babylon. Its rise to the height that made it famous belongs to the dynasty that threw off Assyrian rule and made Babylon imperial again. Nabopolassar, founder of the Neo-Babylonian line, recorded on foundation cylinders that he found Etemenanki fallen into ruin and undertook to rebuild it as a dwelling fit for the gods. His son Nebuchadnezzar II, who took the throne in 605 BCE, carried the work to completion, and left inscriptions boasting that he had made its top vie with the heavens. The labor was enormous and the boast, by the standards of the genre, modest enough: a man who could deport a nation and wall a capital had the means to raise a tower.

The building inscriptions preserve the king’s own framing of the work, and it is worth noting how it differs from the way a later tradition would read the same act. Nebuchadnezzar does not present the raising of the tower as defiance of heaven but as service to it — as the repair of a fallen house so that Marduk might have a worthy dwelling, the king labeling himself the god’s appointed restorer and recording that he set the building’s head in the heavens at the god’s command. The reaching toward the sky is, in the Babylonian frame, an act of piety, the opposite of presumption. Babylon was not even alone in its claim: at neighboring Borsippa stood a second great ziggurat, Ezida, the tower of the god Nabu, son of Marduk, which Nebuchadnezzar also rebuilt and which later confusion would sometimes mistake for the tower of Babel itself. The Mesopotamian landscape was studded with such mountains of brick, each binding its city to its god, and Etemenanki was simply the greatest of them, the one at the imperial center.

Reconstruction of Etemenanki, after the architectural study of Hansjörg Schmid (1995). Drawing by Jona Lendering, released to the public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

Seven stages and the high room

The clearest ancient description of the building’s proportions is not Greek but Babylonian. A cuneiform tablet from Uruk, copied in 229 BCE from an older original and now in the Louvre — the document scholars call the Esagila Tablet — sets out the dimensions of Etemenanki stage by stage. It gives the tower a square base measuring some ninety meters on each side, and a height the text renders as roughly the same: a cube of brick, in the bald arithmetic of the tablet, rising through seven receding stages to a temple at the summit. Modern reconstructions, working from the foundation trenches that survive, tend to lower the figure — a ziggurat core of around fifty-four meters, with the high temple adding perhaps another twelve — but the seven-stage scheme and the summit shrine are consistent across the evidence. The whole was built of unbaked mud brick in the core and faced with baked, bitumen-set brick on the outside, the standard Mesopotamian technique: a perishable mountain wearing a hard skin.

The ascent was by stair. A great triple stairway climbed the south face — one central flight and two flanking it — to a landing partway up, from which the upper stages were reached. At the summit stood a single high temple, and here the documentary record meets the famous and unreliable account of Herodotus, who saw Babylon in the mid-fifth century BCE, after the building’s prime. Herodotus reports a tower of eight stages climbed by a spiral way running round the outside, with seats set halfway up for those resting on the climb. In the highest tower, he writes, there is a great shrine, and in it a great couch richly covered, with a golden table beside it. There is no image set there; and no one passes the night there except, he was told by the Chaldean priests of Bel, a single Babylonian woman chosen by the god — for the god, they said, comes there himself.

The detail is the kind of thing a tourist carries away and a priest may have told with a straight face or a sly one. Herodotus’s eight stages and spiral ramp do not match the Babylonian tablet’s seven stages and triple stair, and his account is most likely secondhand. But the bare shape of the thing — the empty summit shrine without a cult statue, the couch, the conviction that the god descended to that high room — sits well with what the ziggurat was for. The summit temple was not a place where the god was kept, as the statue of Marduk was kept down in Esagila. It was a place where the god might come.

What the god came down for was, above all, the turning of the year. At the akitu, the New Year festival held in the spring month of Nisannu, the order of the cosmos was renewed and the kingship reconfirmed. Over eleven days the statue of Marduk was taken from Esagila and carried in procession out the Ishtar Gate and along the processional way to a festival house beyond the walls, and brought back again, the whole circuit re-enacting the god’s victory over chaos and his enthronement. At the heart of the festival the king himself entered Esagila, and before the god underwent a humbling: stripped of his regalia, struck on the cheek by the high priest, made to kneel and declare that he had not sinned against the city, then restored and crowned anew. The reigning king, in the Babylonian phrase, “took the hand” of Marduk — grasped the god’s hand to lead the statue in procession — and by that gesture held his throne for another year. A king who could not take Marduk’s hand was, in the eyes of the city, no king. Etemenanki presided over all of it, the brick axis at the center around which the renewed year turned.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Tower of Babel,” 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

Ruin, and a tower in another people’s memory

The tower’s decline tracks the city’s. After a Babylonian revolt against Persian rule early in the fifth century BCE, the king Xerxes is reported to have slighted Babylon’s sanctuaries, and Etemenanki suffered with them; by the time Herodotus or his sources looked, it may already have been past its best. When Alexander the Great took Babylon in 331 BCE he found the great ziggurat a ruin, and he resolved to rebuild it. The first step was to clear the fallen brick, and the scale of the task is recorded: ten thousand men were set to carry away the rubble, a labor estimated to need months. Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE before the clearing was finished and the rebuilding never began. His successors let it lie. What the spade later found at the bottom of the cleared pit was not a tower but its absence — the foundation trenches scoured down to the water table, the brick long since carried off by Babylonians of later centuries to build their own houses, until only the rectangular ghost of the plan remained. The German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, excavating Babylon in the early twentieth century, identified that ghost and confirmed the mud-brick construction from the foundations. Today the site is a shallow, often water-filled depression, a wetland where the House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth once stood.

The site of Etemenanki at Babylon, the foundations now a water-filled pit. Photograph by Marjon Verburg, 2012, released CC0 (Wikimedia Commons).

But the building had a second afterlife, in the memory of a people who had been brought to Babylon against their will. When Nebuchadnezzar broke Jerusalem in 587 BCE and carried its elite into exile, the Judeans were settled in the heart of the empire, within sight of its towers. They would have seen Etemenanki, or its near-twin at Borsippa, rising over the plain; they would have known the akitu procession and the boast of a top that reached the sky. And in the book of Genesis, compiled and edited in large part during and after that exile, there stands a story that reads like the great ziggurat seen from below and from outside the frame.

The eleventh chapter of Genesis tells of a people who came to a plain in the land of Shinar — Sumer — and said to one another, let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered. They built with brick for stone and bitumen for mortar, the exact materials of Mesopotamian construction and not of the Judeans’ own stone-building homeland. The tower in the Hebrew is a migdal. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, and confused their language so that they could not understand one another, and scattered them over the earth; and the place was called Babel. The name in Hebrew is the name of Babylon, Bāḇel, the gate of the god in Akkadian — but the storyteller hears in it the Hebrew verb bālal, to confuse, and turns the proud city’s name into a pun on the confusion of tongues. Scholars who study the parallel — and it is a parallel, a tracing of resemblance rather than a proven line of descent — read the passage as a polemic shaped by exiles who had stood under the towers of Babylon and recast their builders’ claim to bind heaven and earth as an act of hubris that heaven came down to scatter. The ziggurat the Babylonians built to fasten the world to the sky became, in the telling of a people they had conquered, the monument to a presumption undone.

The afterlife of that telling outran every brick. Greek and Roman writers preserved their own memories of the tower — the priest Berossus, writing the Babylonians’ history in Greek for a Hellenistic audience, and Herodotus before him, kept the building alive on the page after it had fallen on the ground. But it was the Genesis story that did the lasting work. The Tower of Babel became one of the most painted subjects in European art, fixed for the modern imagination above all by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose two surviving versions of 1563 imagine a spiraling, Colosseum-like mountain of arches collapsing under its own ambition — an image owing more to Roman ruins than to any Babylonian ziggurat, but answering the story’s emotional logic exactly. The confusion of tongues entered the language of the West as a figure for the breakdown of common understanding, so that “a babel of voices” needs no explanation in English, and the linguists who study how the world came to speak so many mutually unintelligible languages still reach, half in irony, for the same name. None of this required that anyone remember the actual ziggurat, or know that its name meant the foundation of heaven and earth, or that a king once climbed it to take the hand of his god. The building was forgotten and the parable was not.

Two structures of meaning sit on the same patch of ground, then, irreconcilable and both true to their own logic. In one, the tower is the temen, the foundation-pin of the cosmos, the place the king takes the god’s hand and the year is born again. In the other, the same height is the measure of a fall, and the babble of the world’s languages is what came of trying to climb it. The brick that carried the first reading is gone to the water table. The second reading, needing no brick, outlasted the city that provoked it and traveled into the scriptures of half the world, so that the name of Babylon’s proudest building survives most widely not in Akkadian at all but as a byword, in a dozen tongues, for the very confusion the story says was its punishment. The House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth is a wetland in Iraq; the Tower of Babel is everywhere.

→ Related: Babylon · Marduk · Babylonia · The Sumerians · Eridu · Ur · Nineveh · Ishtar · Gilgamesh · Berossus · Cyrus The Great · Persepolis · Chaldeans · Tiamat · Enki · The Assyrians