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The
Tower of Babylon
According to Herodotus, a famous traveller and historian back
in 450BC, Babylon surpassed in splendour any city in the world.
It's outer walls were wide and tall and the inner walls only slightly
less impressive. Rising above all temples and fortresses within
the city was the Temple of Marduk, known as the Tower of Babel.
This mountain like temple was said to almost touch the Heavens.
This temple is likely to be the one that was mentioned in the Bible,
Genesis II, where Man wants to build a temple into the sky and God
confuses the single language and gives each his own tongue.
The temples in Babylon, also known as ziggurats were build in a
stepped pyramidal shape. Each ziggurat seems to have been dedicated
to a single god which means there were a lot of ziggurats in a city
like Babylon. The one dedicated to Marduk, one of the most important
gods was to be the biggest ziggurat of all.
Archeologists have found the remains of a ziggurat nearly a hundred
meters wide at each of its four sides. King Nebuchadnezzer II had
the tower raised to it's largest height of almost a hundred meters
and covered in blue tiles. The terraces may have been planted with
trees and other plants, giving the Temple, known to the Bayloneans
as Etemenanki a place in the Hanging Gardens.
Building ziggurats was a big job. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids,
the Babyloneans did not have access to stone to build these structures,
but used mud bricks, for nearly everything they built. Bitumen a
pitch like substance was used to 'glue' the bricks together and
provide a waterproof coating.
It is assumed that after Xerxes conquered the city around 478BC
the tower started to deteriorate. The mud brick ziggurats were prone
to damage from rain and earthquakes and if not maintained would
waste away rather quickly.
In 460 BC, some twenty years after being abandoned, Herodotus writes:
"It has a solid central tower, one furlong square, with a second
erected on top of it and then a third, and so on up to eight.
All eight towers can be climbed by a spiral way running around
the outside, and about halfway up there are seats for those who
make the journey to rest on."
A painting of the
tower by Bruegel
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