The Tower of Babel: archaeology, history and cuneiform texts
By Andrew George
Archiv fuer Orientforschung, Vol.51 (2005/2006)
Introduction: Such is the fame of the myth of the Tower of Babel related in Genesis 11 that the publication of a new monograph on the building generally thought to have inspired the myth is an important event. It is necessarily an occasion for the academic disciplines that deal with the ancient Near East — archaeology, ancient history and Assyriology — to present their subject to the wider world. Stemming from the author’s excavations on the structure’s core and foundations in 1962, Schmid’s magnificent book on the ziqqurrat or temple-tower of Babylon is consequently much more than a final report of the kind conventional in Near Eastern archaeology. Based on the evidence of texts as well as the results of excavation, it is a history of the study and representation of the building in all its aspects, from biblical myth to mediaeval fantasy to archaeological problem.
…Schmid’s book is in many ways a model report of an archaeological excavation, giving a full account of relevant scholarship and previous research in neighbouring disciplines as well as western Asiatic archaeology, and addressing with considerable insight and ingenuity the potential of a building ruined to its foundations nevertheless to yield important clues for the reconstruction of its superstructure. In using ancient documentary evidence, however, the author has sometimes relied on out-of-date scholarship, and this undermines some of his hypotheses concerning, especially, the building’s history. The rest of this article will survey the documentary evidence, as it now stands, for the temple tower of Babylon, and reconsider its history and archaeology in the light of this evidence.
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