Etemenanki: The Babylon Ziggurat Behind the Tower of Babel

Etemenanki was the great ziggurat, or stepped temple tower, of the god Marduk at Babylon in Mesopotamia. Rebuilt on a vast scale by the kings Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II between about 610 and 560 BC, it rose in seven stages to a height recorded as about 90 metres. Most historians believe that this tower, seen by Judean exiles in Babylon, lies behind the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

What is a ziggurat?

A ziggurat was a massive stepped platform of brick, built in Mesopotamian cities from the late 3rd millennium BC onwards. Its core was usually made of sun-dried mud brick, encased in a thick skin of baked brick set in bitumen to protect it from rain.

Ziggurats were not tombs and had no inner rooms. They raised a shrine high above the city, symbolically closer to the gods. One of the best-preserved examples is the Ziggurat of Ur, built around 2100 BC, but almost every major Mesopotamian city had one.

Etemenanki means “House, foundation platform of heaven and earth” in Sumerian. It stood in its own walled precinct in the centre of Babylon, just north of the Esagila, the main temple of Marduk, the city’s chief god.

Religious role

Under the Neo-Babylonian kings Marduk was the head of the Babylonian pantheon, and Babylon presented itself as the centre of the world. In the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, the gods themselves build Esagila for Marduk at Babylon after his victory over the sea goddess Tiamat. Etemenanki, rising beside that temple, gave visible form to this claim.

The exact rituals performed on the tower are not well documented. One common view is that the shrine on its summit was a place where the god could descend to meet his worshippers, rather than a site for large public ceremonies, which took place mainly in the Esagila and along Babylon’s Processional Way.

Early history

When Etemenanki was first built is uncertain. Babylon became a major city under Hammurabi in the 18th century BC, and a ziggurat probably existed there by the later 2nd millennium BC, but no early building phase has been securely identified.

The tower suffered when the Assyrian king Sennacherib sacked Babylon in 689 BC. His successors Esarhaddon (reigned 681–669 BC) and Ashurbanipal reversed his policy and began restoring Babylon’s temples, including work on Etemenanki. Their efforts were interrupted by war, and the tower seems to have remained unfinished.

The great rebuilding

After winning Babylon’s independence from Assyria in 626 BC, Nabopolassar made the restoration of Etemenanki a central project of his reign. In a foundation inscription he states that Marduk commanded him to make the base of the tower firm in the underworld and to make its top rival the heavens. He describes the use of baked bricks and bitumen.

His son Nebuchadnezzar II completed the work. His inscriptions boast that he raised the top of Etemenanki and summoned labourers from across his empire, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, to build it. The rebuilding of the tower was part of a wider transformation of Babylon that also produced the Ishtar Gate and the city’s huge double walls, discussed in Nabopolassar and the Rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

A carved black stone stele in a private collection, published by the Assyriologist Andrew George in 2011, shows Nebuchadnezzar standing beside a stepped tower with seven stages. Its inscription names Etemenanki, and it is the only known ancient image that can be securely linked to the tower.

Size and appearance

The main written description is the Esagila Tablet, a cuneiform text copied in 229 BC from an older original and now in the Louvre in Paris. It gives the dimensions of Etemenanki in Babylonian units. Converted to modern measures, the base was about 91 metres (300 feet) square and the total height about the same, divided into seven stages that grew smaller towards the top.

The German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, who excavated Babylon between 1899 and 1917, found the base of the tower. It measured about 91 metres on each side, confirming the figure in the tablet. He also found traces of a great stairway projecting from the south face, which climbed to the upper levels.

Little else survived, because the bricks had been removed in antiquity. Reconstructions of the upper stages, including the model in the Pergamon Museum, are therefore informed guesses based on the texts, the base and comparisons with other ziggurats. The top stage is thought to have carried a shrine to Marduk, probably faced with blue glazed bricks.

Herodotus and the Greeks

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, described the sanctuary of “Zeus Belus” (Marduk) at Babylon. He wrote of a solid tower one stade (about 180 metres) square, with eight towers stacked one above another and a spiral path climbing around the outside. At the top, he said, stood a temple with a great couch and a golden table, where a woman chosen by the god spent the night.

Historians disagree about whether Herodotus visited Babylon himself. His measurements are larger than those found by archaeologists, and his number of stages differs from the Babylonian text, though he may have counted the top shrine as an eighth level. Even so, his account shows that the tower was famous in the Greek world.

Decline and destruction

Under Persian rule after 539 BC Babylon remained an important city, but Etemenanki seems to have been neglected. Later Greek authors claim that Xerxes I damaged Babylon’s temples after a revolt in the 480s BC, but modern historians doubt that he destroyed the tower.

When Alexander the Great arrived in Babylon in 331 BC, he resolved to rebuild the sanctuary. Greek historians such as Arrian and Strabo report that he ordered the ruined tower cleared as the first step, a task that proved enormous. The work stopped after his death in Babylon in 323 BC.

Under the Seleucid kings the rubble was removed and the baked bricks reused. Over the following centuries local people carried off more bricks for building. By the time Koldewey arrived, the tower had been reduced to its outline, a square hollow that often fills with groundwater.

The Tower of Babel

The Book of Genesis (11:1–9) tells how, after the Flood, humanity spoke one language and settled in the land of Shinar, the biblical name for southern Mesopotamia. The people decided to build “a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven”. God confused their language so that they could not understand one another, and scattered them over the earth. The city was named Babel.

In Hebrew “Babel” is the name of Babylon. The story links it to the verb balal, “to confuse”, but this is a wordplay; the Akkadian name Bab-ili means “gate of god”. The detail that the builders used baked brick and bitumen matches Mesopotamian building practice exactly.

Scholars date the composition of the story in different ways, and some think it is older than the Neo-Babylonian rebuilding. Many argue, however, that the image of the great unfinished tower took on new meaning for Judeans deported to Babylon in the 6th century BC, as described in Babylonian Exile. To them, Etemenanki would have been a powerful symbol of Babylonian pride.

The story had a long afterlife. Jewish, Christian and Islamic writers retold and expanded it, and medieval and Renaissance artists painted the tower many times, usually as a European building under construction. The word “babel” entered English as a term for a confused noise of voices, and the tower reappeared in modern culture, from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) to debates about language and translation.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Tower of Babel was never built. No tower matching the biblical story has been found, but Etemenanki was a real and enormous structure in the city the Bible calls Babel.

Myth: Etemenanki was a palace or tomb. It was a solid temple platform with a shrine on top, not a building with interior rooms.

Fact: the painting is not the tower. The famous image of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563), now in Vienna, is based on the Roman Colosseum and 16th-century building methods, not on Mesopotamian architecture.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 689 BC: Sennacherib sacks Babylon; the sanctuary is damaged.
• c. 680–650 BC: Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal begin restoring Babylon’s temples.
• c. 610 BC onwards: Nabopolassar rebuilds Etemenanki on a new scale.
• c. 605–560 BC: Nebuchadnezzar II completes the tower.
• 5th century BC: Herodotus describes the tower of the god Bel.
• 331–323 BC: Alexander the Great orders the ruined tower cleared for rebuilding.
• 229 BC: The Esagila Tablet with the tower’s dimensions is copied.
• 1913: Koldewey’s team excavates the base of the ziggurat.

Why it matters

Etemenanki was one of the largest structures of the ancient world and the religious heart of Babylon at its height. Through the story of the Tower of Babel it became one of the most enduring images in Western culture, a symbol of human ambition and the diversity of languages.