Etemenanki
Based on Wikipedia: Etemenanki
Alexander the Great demolished it. Elephants trampled its ruins. And somewhere beneath the Iraqi desert, about ninety kilometers south of Baghdad, its foundations still lie buried—the remains of what may have been the actual Tower of Babel.
The structure was called Etemenanki, a Sumerian name meaning "Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth." It was a ziggurat, which is essentially a step pyramid, though calling it that undersells its ambition. This was a building designed to pierce the sky, to create a physical ladder between the realm of mortals and the domain of Marduk, the chief god of Babylon.
A Tower Built and Rebuilt Across Millennia
No one knows exactly when Etemenanki was first constructed. The best scholarly guesses place its origins somewhere between the fourteenth and ninth centuries before the common era—a span of five hundred years that speaks to how fragmentary our knowledge is. What we do know is that the building described in ancient sources, the one that captured imaginations and possibly inspired biblical authors, was not the original structure but a reconstruction. And then another reconstruction. And another.
The Etemenanki was not built once. It was built over and over again.
In 689 BCE, the Assyrian king Sennacherib sacked Babylon completely. He didn't just conquer the city—he razed it, claiming to have destroyed the great ziggurat in the process. It took eighty-eight years for the city to recover. The restoration began under the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, continued under Nabopolassar, and reached its zenith under his son Nebuchadnezzar II, the same Babylonian ruler who would later destroy Jerusalem's temple and carry the Jews into exile.
This pattern—destruction followed by ambitious rebuilding—repeats throughout Etemenanki's history. The tower's origin may stretch back to the reign of Hammurabi, the famous lawgiver, but each successive ruler who touched it left their mark, tearing down and building up, making it grander than before.
What Did It Actually Look Like?
We have two main sources for understanding Etemenanki's appearance, and they don't entirely agree.
The first is Herodotus, the Greek historian often called the "Father of History" (though some prefer "Father of Lies" given his tendency toward embellishment). Writing in the mid-fifth century BCE, Herodotus described a tower of solid masonry about two hundred meters in length and breadth at its base. He claimed it rose in eight stages, with an external path winding around all the towers to reach the summit. At the top sat a spacious temple containing a richly adorned couch and a golden table—but no statue. According to the Babylonian priests Herodotus spoke with, a single woman chosen by the god Marduk occupied this chamber each night.
There's just one problem: Herodotus never explicitly says he visited Babylon himself. His account contains multiple inaccuracies that suggest he was working from secondhand reports, perhaps from travelers or merchants who had seen the structure but hadn't studied it carefully.
The second source is more reliable but harder to access. A cuneiform tablet from the city of Uruk, dated to 229 BCE but copied from an older text, gives precise measurements. According to this "Esagila tablet" (named after the temple of Marduk with which the ziggurat was associated), the tower stood seven stories tall with a height of ninety-one meters—roughly the height of a modern thirty-story building. Its base was square, also measuring ninety-one meters on each side.
These dimensions were confirmed by German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, who excavated the site after 1913 and found the mudbrick foundations exactly where the tablet said they would be.
The Problem of Physics
But here's where things get complicated. Modern engineers have looked at those ninety-one-meter measurements and raised their eyebrows. The compression stress on a mudbrick structure of that height would have been two to three times greater than comparable buildings from the same period. Raw earth brick, no matter how skillfully made, has limits.
Recent scholarship suggests the ancient scribes may have been exaggerating—or recording idealized plans rather than actual measurements. A more realistic estimate puts the ziggurat closer to fifty-four meters tall, with an additional twelve meters for the temple at the summit, giving a total height of sixty-six meters. Still enormously impressive, but not quite reaching the heavens.
This debate matters because it speaks to a fundamental question: were the ancient Babylonians attempting something genuinely impossible, or were they master builders working at the very edge of what their technology allowed?
The Tower in Its Own Words
The most vivid description of Etemenanki comes not from outside observers but from the Babylonians themselves. Foundation cylinders—ceremonial inscriptions buried in a building's base—were discovered in the 1880s. One of them, from King Nabopolassar, reads like a combination of prayer, construction report, and royal boast:
At that time my lord Marduk told me in regard to Etemenanki, the ziggurat of Babylon, which before my day was already very weak and badly buckled, to ground its bottom on the breast of the netherworld, to make its top vie with the heavens.
Nabopolassar describes commissioning mattocks, spades, and brick molds made from ivory, ebony, and rare musukkannu wood. He summoned a "vast workforce levied from my land" to shape mud bricks "without number" and mold-baked bricks "like countless raindrops." Bitumen and asphalt were floated down the Arahtu River "like a mighty flood."
What follows is remarkable. The king describes personally participating in the construction—rolling up his royal robes, bowing his neck to Marduk, and carrying bricks and earth on his own head. He made his firstborn son Nebuchadnezzar carry earth mixed with wine, oil, and resin chips alongside the common workers. His younger son was given a golden soil-basket and "bestowed on my lord Marduk as a gift."
This wasn't mere physical labor. It was ritual theater, a king humbling himself before his god while simultaneously demonstrating his power to command such a project. The foundation contained gold, silver, and gemstones. Representations of the king carrying a soil-basket were placed throughout the platform. Every element was consecrated through "the craft of exorcism, the wisdom of Ea and Marduk."
Alexander's Unfinished Business
By the time Alexander the Great conquered Babylon in 331 BCE, the Etemenanki had already suffered significant decay. Alexander—ever ambitious, ever eager to surpass the achievements of the past—ordered repairs. But when he returned to the city eight years later, in 323 BCE, he found that nothing had been done.
Alexander's solution was characteristically bold: demolish the entire structure to prepare for a complete rebuilding from scratch. But he died that same year, at age thirty-two, and the reconstruction never happened.
The Babylonian Chronicles record subsequent attempts to rebuild Etemenanki, each beginning with the laborious task of removing debris from the previous iteration. One particularly dramatic account describes the Seleucid crown prince Antiochus I (the empire that succeeded Alexander's in this region) arriving to make a sacrifice and begin reconstruction. He stumbled on the rubble and fell. Enraged—whether at his own clumsiness or at the state of the sacred site—he ordered his elephant drivers to destroy what remained.
After that, ancient sources fall silent. The Etemenanki disappears from history.
The Tower of Babel Connection
Many scholars believe Etemenanki inspired the biblical story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. The parallels are striking: both involve a massive tower in Babylon, both represent human ambition reaching toward heaven, both involve the use of bricks and bitumen.
The biblical account, of course, presents the tower as a cautionary tale. Humanity, united by a single language, decides to build a tower "with its top in the heavens" to make a name for themselves. God, seeing this, confuses their language and scatters them across the earth. The very name "Babel" is explained through a Hebrew pun on the word for "confused."
The Babylonians themselves had a rather different interpretation. For them, the ziggurat was not an act of hubris but of devotion—a temple that quite literally provided a foundation connecting heaven and earth, a dwelling place fit for the king of the gods.
The Oldest Image
In 2003, scholars made a remarkable discovery in the Schøyen Collection, a private assemblage of manuscripts and artifacts. Carved on a black stone was what appears to be the oldest known representation of Etemenanki. The "Tower of Babel Stele," as it has been named, dates to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, between 604 and 562 BCE.
The relief shows the tower's high first stages with paired flights of steps, five further stepped stages rising above, and the temple crowning the structure at the summit. A floor plan is included, depicting buttressed outer walls and inner chambers surrounding a central cella—the sacred inner sanctum where the god was thought to dwell.
Another stele, possibly found during Koldewey's 1917 excavations (though its authenticity is debated), contains an inscription in Nebuchadnezzar's voice: "Etemenanki Zikkurat Babibli—Ziggurat of Babylon—I made it, the wonder of the people of the world, I raised its top to heaven, made doors for the gates, and I covered it with bitumen and bricks."
Wonder of the people of the world. That phrase captures something essential about Etemenanki—it was meant to be seen, meant to inspire awe, meant to be talked about by travelers who would carry its legend across the ancient Near East.
Ruins Upon Ruins
Today, almost nothing remains above ground. The site lies about ninety kilometers south of Baghdad, in a region that has seen war and instability for decades. The mudbrick foundations that Koldewey excavated have weathered and eroded. The great stairs, the triple gate, the sacred procession road—all reduced to archaeological traces.
Some elements of Babylon have been reconstructed. The Ishtar Gate and a section of the procession road can be seen in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, reassembled from original glazed bricks that Koldewey shipped to Germany. But the ziggurat itself is beyond reconstruction. There is simply too little left.
What survives is the idea—the image of a tower rising toward heaven, built and destroyed and built again, inspiring scripture and legend, representing both the ambitions and the limitations of human civilization. The Babylonians called it the Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth. Whether or not its top ever truly vied with the heavens, its story has outlasted the structure by thousands of years.
The Zoning Connection
There's an unexpected thread connecting ancient Babylon to modern urban planning debates. The Etemenanki represents perhaps the most ambitious vertical construction project of its era—a civilization's determination to build upward, to concentrate resources and prestige in a single towering structure at the city's heart.
Today, many cities have moved in the opposite direction, embracing what urban planners call "downzoning"—regulations that limit building heights and densities, often banning the kind of ambitious vertical construction that characterized ancient Babylon. The Great Downzoning, as some scholars call it, saw nearly every Western city impose restrictions on densification within a few decades of the mid-twentieth century.
The contrast is striking. Ancient Babylon concentrated its religious, political, and cultural power in a structure designed to scrape the sky. Modern cities often treat tall buildings as threats to neighborhood character, view preservation, or quality of life. The Babylonians asked: how high can we build to honor our gods? Many modern cities ask: how can we prevent building from going too high?
Whether this represents progress or retreat depends on your perspective. But looking at the ruins of Etemenanki, one thing is clear: the urge to build upward is as old as civilization itself. So is the knowledge that even the mightiest towers eventually fall.