The Tower of Babel is the tower described in Genesis 11:1–9, where a united humanity speaking one language builds a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens” in the land of Shinar, and God responds by confusing their language and scattering them across the earth. Historians connect the story to Etemenanki, the great ziggurat of the god Marduk at Babylon, whose foundations were excavated by German archaeologists between 1899 and 1917.
The story is only nine verses long, yet it has become shorthand for human ambition, divine judgment and the origin of languages. It is also a rare case where a biblical narrative can be set beside a real, measured building, with cuneiform records, a Greek eyewitness-style description and excavated foundations. That makes Babel a useful test of how ancient texts, archaeology and alternative readings, including Billy Carson's, fit together.
What Genesis 11 actually says
Genesis 11:1–9 tells a short, self-contained story in which humanity's one shared language is broken into many. In the NRSV translation, “the whole earth had one language and the same words.” As people migrate, they settle on a plain in the land of Shinar, the Hebrew Bible's name for southern Mesopotamia. They say, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly,” and the narrator adds that “they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar” (11:3).
Then comes the plan: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (11:4). The Lord, Yahweh in the Hebrew, comes down to see the city and the tower, observes that “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them,” and says, “Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech” (11:7). The building stops, the people are scattered, and the city is named Babel, “because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth” (11:9).
Two details are worth noticing. The text never says the tower was destroyed, and the wrongdoing is never named, so readers have argued for pride, for resisting the command to fill the earth in Genesis 9:1, or for concentrating power in one city. And the divine speech in 11:7 is plural, “let us go down,” the same grammatical feature found in Genesis 1:26, which is explored in the article on [who the Elohim were](/who-were-the-elohim-the-plural-god-of-genesis-and-the-anunnaki-question).
What does the name Babel mean?
Genesis explains the name with a Hebrew pun: Babel sounds like the verb balal, “to confuse” or “to mix.” That is wordplay, not etymology. In Akkadian the city was Bab-ilim, “gate of the god” or “gate of the gods,” a proud title that the Hebrew writer turned against the city. Hebrew uses the same word, Bavel, for Babylon throughout the Bible, so ancient readers heard this as a story about Babylon.
Etemenanki: the real tower behind the story
Etemenanki was the ziggurat, or stepped temple tower, of Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, and it is the building most scholars see behind the Tower of Babel. Its Sumerian name means “House of the foundation of heaven and earth.” It stood beside Esagil, Marduk's principal temple, at the religious centre of the city.
Its dimensions are recorded in the Esagil tablet, a cuneiform text now in the Louvre (AO 6555). The surviving copy was written in 229 BCE and gives a base roughly 91 metres square and a height of roughly 91 metres, rising in stepped stages to a shrine at the top. The base figure agrees with the excavated foundations. It is one of many practical documents in the cuneiform record, covered in [the Sumerian tablets explained](/the-sumerian-tablets-explained-what-they-are-and-what-they-say).
The tower had been repaired many times; its final great rebuilding was the work of the Neo-Babylonian kings Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigned from 604 to 562 BCE. Royal building inscriptions from this work speak of raising the tower's top toward the heavens, language that sits remarkably close to Genesis 11:4. A carved stone monument now in the Schøyen Collection (MS 2063), often called the Tower of Babel stele and published by the Assyriologist Andrew George in 2011, shows Nebuchadnezzar standing beside a stepped tower, with an inscription naming Etemenanki. This is the same king who captured Jerusalem and deported much of Judah's elite to Babylon.
What Herodotus described and how the tower disappeared
Herodotus left the most famous outside description of the tower in his Histories, Book I, chapter 181. In the precinct of Zeus Belus, the Greek rendering of Marduk under his title Bel, “lord,” stood a solid tower with further towers stacked on it, eight in all, climbed by an ascent winding around the outside. At the top was a temple with a richly covered couch and a golden table, but no statue. Whether Herodotus saw Babylon in person is debated.
The tower did not survive antiquity. Strabo and Arrian say the Persian king Xerxes damaged Babylon's great sanctuary in the 480s BCE, though historians debate how much, and that Alexander the Great ordered the ruins cleared so the tower could be rebuilt. Alexander died at Babylon in 323 BCE, and the rebuilding never happened. Over the following centuries the fired bricks were carried off for reuse.
The image most people picture today comes from much later. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting The Tower of Babel, dated 1563 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, shows a round tower modelled loosely on the Roman Colosseum, nothing like a ziggurat, yet it became the standard picture of Babel.
What archaeology has found at Babylon
Archaeology has found the foundations of Etemenanki, not a standing tower. Robert Koldewey excavated Babylon for the German Oriental Society from 1899 to 1917, and his team identified the ziggurat's square footprint, roughly 91 metres per side, along with remains of its sun-dried mud-brick core, the outer casing of baked brick, and a great stairway on its south side. Brick robbers had long since removed almost everything above ground.
The finds make one detail of Genesis stand out. Genesis 11:3 says the builders used “brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.” That accurately describes Babylonian construction, where stone was scarce and fired brick set in bitumen was the prestige material. The verse explains it as if to readers who would expect stone, which fits a writer from the hill country of Canaan describing a foreign technique.
Babylon became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019.
How ziggurats differ from pyramids
A ziggurat is a solid, stepped platform of brick that raised a shrine toward the sky; it had no interior rooms and was not a tomb. The best preserved is the ziggurat of Ur, built under King Ur-Nammu around the 21st century BCE and excavated by Leonard Woolley. Others stood at Eridu and at Nippur, the city of the god Enlil, and one of the most complete survivors is Chogha Zanbil in south-western Iran, built by the Elamite king Untash-Napirisha in the 13th century BCE.
Ziggurats are often lumped together with Egyptian pyramids, but Egypt's pyramids are stone royal tombs with internal passages and chambers. The engineering debates there are covered in [how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built](/how-was-the-great-pyramid-of-giza-built-evidence-theories-and-open-questions).
Is there an older Sumerian version of the story?
There is a Sumerian text that contains the same core idea, a single human language changed by a god, but it has no tower. The epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, probably composed around the 21st century BCE and known from later copies, includes a passage often called the spell of Nudimmud. It describes a time when all peoples addressed the god Enlil in one tongue, and says that Enki, lord of wisdom, changed the speech in their mouths and brought contention into it.
Samuel Noah Kramer called this a Sumerian version of the “Babel of tongues.” Scholars still disagree over whether the passage describes a past event or a hoped-for future unity, but it shows the motif is far older than Genesis. Enki's role here fits his wider character as the clever, sometimes subversive god of wisdom, described in [the Sumerian gods and goddesses explained](/sumerian-gods-and-goddesses-explained-anu-enlil-enki-inanna-and-the-pantheon).
When and why Genesis 11 was written
Most critical scholars assign the Babel story to the strand of Genesis traditionally called J, the Yahwist source, and date its written form to the first millennium BCE. Many connect its present shape to the era when Judah fell under Babylonian power, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BCE and the exile that followed.
Read in that setting, the story is pointed theology: Babylon called itself the gate of the gods, and the Hebrew writer answers that it is really named for confusion, its tower left unfinished by the God of Israel. The prophets share the theme. Jeremiah 51:53 warns, “Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify her strong height, from me destroyers would come upon her.”
Babylon's own story told it differently. Tablet VI of the Babylonian creation epic has the Anunnaki gods mould bricks for a year and raise Esagil, Marduk's temple, in Babylon, which is set out in [the Enuma Elish explained](/the-enuma-elish-explained-seven-tablets-of-creation). Babylon credited its sacred complex to the gods; Genesis presents a similar project as human overreach.
Where the ancient-astronaut reading comes from
The modern ancient-astronaut reading of Babel goes back mainly to Zecharia Sitchin, who in The 12th Planet (1976) argued that the Hebrew word shem in Genesis 11:4, normally translated “name,” referred to a sky vehicle, and read the tower as a launch structure within his larger narrative of Anunnaki spaceports. Hebrew scholars and Assyriologists do not accept this: shem means “name” or “renown” in hundreds of biblical passages, and no cuneiform text describes Etemenanki as anything but a temple tower. The reading remains influential in alternative-history circles, and it sits alongside the other claims surveyed on the [Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki).
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson treats the Tower of Babel as more than a moral fable. In his interpretation, the story preserves a memory of an Anunnaki intervention in human affairs, a moment when the beings Mesopotamian texts call gods deliberately divided humanity's language to limit what people could achieve together. He presents this as his reading, not as a mainstream conclusion.
The textual hooks for this kind of interpretation are real, even though their meaning is contested. Genesis 11:7 has the divine speaker say “let us go down.” The Sumerian spell of Nudimmud has a named god, Enki, changing human speech. And Babylon's own epic credits the Anunnaki with building Marduk's temple in the city. Mainstream scholars read these as literary features: a plural of divine address, a shared Near Eastern motif and a city's founding myth. Carson reads them as a pattern pointing to real beings; his broader case is laid out in the 4BK TV series [Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed](/watch/anunnaki-ancient-secrets-revealed).
Watch, read and go deeper
For a verse-by-verse look at Genesis and other biblical passages through Billy Carson's lens, see the [Bible Study](/watch/bible-study) series on 4BK TV. His Anunnaki interpretation of Mesopotamian history, including Babylon and its gods, is developed in [Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed](/watch/anunnaki-ancient-secrets-revealed). The wider [Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki) gathers the related articles on Mesopotamian texts and gods in one place.
Frequently asked questions
Was the Tower of Babel a real building?
Genesis 11 is not a historical record, but it is widely thought to draw on a real building: Etemenanki, the ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon. Its dimensions are recorded on the Esagil tablet, and Robert Koldewey's team excavated its foundations between 1899 and 1917.
Where was the Tower of Babel located?
Genesis places it in the land of Shinar, the biblical name for southern Mesopotamia, in the city of Babel, which is the Hebrew name for Babylon. Babylon lies beside the Euphrates in modern Iraq, south of Baghdad.
How tall was the Tower of Babel?
Genesis gives no measurements. For Etemenanki, the Esagil tablet, in a copy dated 229 BCE, gives a base of roughly 91 metres square and a height of roughly 91 metres. The base matches the excavated foundations; the height is debated.
Who built the Tower of Babel?
In Genesis the builders are unnamed people of the generation after the flood; later tradition, including Josephus, blamed Nimrod. Historically, Etemenanki was rebuilt many times, and its final grand form was the work of the Babylonian kings Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE.
Is there a Sumerian story about the confusion of languages?
Yes. The Sumerian epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, probably composed around the 21st century BCE, includes a passage in which the god Enki changes the speech of humanity, which had once addressed Enlil in a single language. It contains no tower, and scholars debate whether it describes the past or a hoped-for future.
Sources and further reading
- Genesis 10–11, in the New Revised Standard Version or Robert Alter's The Hebrew Bible (2018)
- Herodotus, The Histories, Book I, chapters 181–183
- Robert Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon (English translation, 1914)
- Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour (eds.), Babylon: Myth and Reality (British Museum Press, 2008)
- Andrew R. George, Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection (2011)
- Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (University of Oxford)
- Samuel Noah Kramer, “The ‘Babel of Tongues’: A Sumerian Version,” Journal of the American Oriental Society (1968)
- Zecharia Sitchin, The 12th Planet (1976), as the source of the ancient-astronaut reading
