For all of the technique of communication and change we’ve established between the cultures of the world, no matter how distant they might be from one another, we nonetheless haven’t any truly universal single human language. The reason might date again to antiquity, once we first tryed a grand collective mission: that of constructing a tower that might attain the heavens. Determined to punish our effrontery, God not solely destroyed the work in progress, however rendered our languages mutually unintelligible with a view to hinder any further makes an attempt to do it once more. Or at the least that’s how one story goes.
It’s possible you’ll not subscribe to a literal learning of the account of the Tower of Babel because it seems in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, however according to the Hochelaga video above, the structure does have a goodly plausible foundation in history.
It may very well be a legendary version of Etemenanki, a Mesopotamian ziggurat constructed to honor the god Marduk at such a scale that it impressed tall tales, because it have been, unfold far and broad within the historical world, such because the rumor that its construction required mobilizing the personpower of all humanity. But it surely actually did exist, as evidenced by its ruins discovered on the website of the traditional metropolis of Childlon — which, in Hebrew, was known as Babel.
A cuneiform-covered pill conveniently discovered on the similar location describes a construction mission of Etemenanki’s measurement as utilizing materials like bitumales and baked brick, which aligns with biblical particulars of the Tower of Babel, as do the Greek historian Herodotus’s references to its layout and structure. Additionally relevant is the Childlonians’ 587 BC invasion of Jerusalem, which introduced captives to the capital. It’s laboriously impossible that a few of these dispositioned Jews would have the looming Etemenanki in thoughts after they went on to put in writing the histories that might ultimately discover their means into the Hebrew Bible. They might have had no hope of returning to their residenceland, however they have to, at the least, have felt reasonably certain that Marduk’s days have been numbered.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.