Hamburg/Schorndorf (kath.net/idea) First, a contemporary building plan for the biblical tower of Babel has been discovered. The scientific magazine 'Geo' (Hamburg) reports that the Babylonian ruler Nebukadnezar II (604-562 B.C.) had tried to rebuild the fallen tower. An inscription from a stele gives information about the construction workers: "I was mobilized from all lands everywhere, every man and every ruler."This points to evidence that there could have been a Babylonian confusion of langauges, as it says in Genesis, written in the 1st Book of Moses, Chapter 11. The tower is said to have a lateral length of 91.5 meters and had been about 90 meters tall.
At the top of the seven story of the building works (in Babylonian 'Ziggurat') there is to have been a Temple for the main deity of Babylon, Marduk. The stele is in the possession of the Norwegian businessman Martin Schøyen. Although its existence has long been known, the inscription was only officially published in the past year.
Biblical Archaeology: No new knowledge
This revelation contains no new knowledge about the biblical tower, says Archaeologist Peter van der Veen (Schorndorf near Stuttgart). He published a doctoral dissertation about biblical archaeology at the University of Mainz.
Structures of the kind described by Moses, were already present three millennia before Christ. According to ancient sources, the Akkadian King Scharkalischarri around 2,200 B.C. is to have rebuilt a tower that was destroyed earlier.
Also known are towers from the time of the King Hammurabi of Babylon, in the 18th century before Christ, who was famous for his legislation. This is probably the tower which Moses in the 15th century probably knew about, and came to his idea to write about the beginnings of humanity, said
Van der Veen.
The tower of Nebukadnezar, who lived 900 years later, could not have been the precursor of the biblical tower. Nebukadnezar tried to copy one of these earlier towers in order to put himself at the stature of Hammurabi.
The evidence on the stele indicates, that the Babylonian stele, that the Babylonian ruler took many captives in war from numerous lands and used them as forced labor. "There was certainly here a great variety of languages being spoken. They had nothing to do with Moses' account, which pointed to the confusion of languages denoting God's punishment for human arrogance," said van der Veen.
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