Tower from earth to sky history. The Tower of Babel really existed

The city of Babylon, which means "Gate of God", was founded in ancient times on the banks of the Euphrates. He was one of largest cities The ancient world was the capital of Babylonia - a kingdom that existed for a millennium and a half in the south of Mesopotamia (the territory of modern Iraq).

The architecture of Mesopotamia was based on secular buildings - palaces and religious monumental structures - ziggurats. Powerful cult towers, called ziggurats (ziggurat - holy mountain), were square and resembled a stepped pyramid. The steps were connected by stairs, along the edge of the wall there was a ramp leading to the temple. The walls were painted black (asphalt), white (lime) and red (brick).

Jan il Vecchio Bruegel

According to the biblical tradition, after the Flood, humanity was represented by one people who spoke the same language. From the east people came to the land of Shinar (in downstream Tigris and Euphrates), where they decided to build a city (Babylon) and a tower as high as heaven in order to "make a name for themselves."

Jan Collaert, 1579

The construction of the tower was interrupted by God, who created new languages ​​for different people, because of which they ceased to understand each other, could not continue the construction of the city and the tower, and were scattered throughout the land of Babylon.

The tower stood on the left bank of the Euphrates in the Sahn plain, which literally translates as "frying pan". It was surrounded by the houses of priests, temple buildings and houses for pilgrims who flocked here from all over the Babylonian kingdom. The description of the Tower of Babel was left by Herodotus, who thoroughly examined it and, perhaps, even visited its top.

...Babylon was built like this ... It lies on a vast plain, forming a quadrangle, each side of which is 120 stadia (meters) long. The circumference of all four sides of the city is 480 stadia (meters). Babylon was not only very big city but also the most beautiful of all the cities that I know. First of all, the city is surrounded by a deep, wide and full of water moat, then there is a wall 50 royal (Persian) cubits (26.64 meters) wide and 200 (106.56 meters) high.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

If the Tower of Babel existed, what did it look like and what did it serve? What was it - a mystical way to heaven in the abode of the gods? Or maybe a temple or an astronomical observatory? scientific history The search for the Tower of Babel began with several pieces of painted bricks found at the site of the Babylonian kingdom by the German architect and archaeologist Robert Koldewey. The fragments of the brick bas-relief were good enough reason for Kaiser Wilhelm II and the newly founded German Oriental Society to generously fund the excavations of the ancient city.

On March 26, 1899, Robert Koldewey solemnly began excavations. But only in 1913, due to the fact that the groundwater level decreased, archaeologists were able to start exploring the remains of the legendary tower. At the bottom of deep excavations, they freed from under the layers the preserved part of the foundation made of bricks and several steps of the stairs.

Marten Van Valckenborch I

Since then, and to this day, an irreconcilable struggle continues between supporters of various hypotheses, representing the shape of this building and its height in different ways. The location of the stairs causes the most controversy: some researchers are sure that the steps were outside, others insist on placing the stairs inside the tower.

The tower referred to in the Bible was probably destroyed before the era of Hammurabi. To replace it, another was built, which was erected in memory of the first. The Tower of Babel was a stepped eight-tiered pyramid, each tier of which had a strictly defined color. Each side of the square base was 90 meters.

Marten van Valckenborch, 1595

The height of the tower was also 90 meters, the first tier had a height of 33 meters, the second - 18, the third and fifth - 6 meters each, the seventh - the sanctuary of the god Marduk was 15 meters high. By today's standards, the building reached the height of a 25-story building.

Calculations suggest that about 85 million mud bricks from a mixture of clay, sand and straw were used to build the Tower of Babel, since there are few trees and stones in Mesopotamia. Bitumen (mountain resin) was used to connect bricks.

Marten van Valckenborch, around 1600

Robert Koldewey managed to unearth in Babylon and the famous hanging gardens Semiramis, which were not erected by this legendary queen, but were built by order of Nebuchadnezzar II for his beloved wife Amitis, an Indian princess who, in dusty Babylon, yearned for green hills of their homeland. Magnificent gardens with rare trees, fragrant flowers and coolness in a sultry city, they were truly a wonder of the world.

In 1962, an expedition led by the architect Hans-Georg Schmidt continued to explore the ruins of the tower. Professor Schmidt created new model buildings: two side stairs led to a wide terrace located at a height of 31 meters from the ground, a monumental central staircase ended on the second tier at a height of 48 meters. Four more flights of stairs led up from there, and at the top of the tower stood a temple - the sanctuary of the god Marduk, lined with blue tiles and decorated in the corners with golden horns - a symbol of fertility. Inside the sanctuary were the gilded table and bed of Marduk. The ziggurat was a shrine that belonged to all the people, it was a place where thousands of people flocked to worship the supreme deity Marduk.

Professor Schmidt compared his calculations with data on a small clay tablet found by archaeologists. This unique document contains a description of a multi-tiered tower in the Babylonian kingdom - famous temple supreme deity Marduk. The tower was called Etemenanki, which means "the house where the heavens meet the earth." It is not known exactly when the original construction of this tower was carried out, but it already existed during the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC). Now on the site of the “temple-skyscraper” there is a swamp overgrown with reeds.

Cyrus, who took possession of Babylon after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, was the first conqueror to leave the city intact. He was struck by the scale of Etemenanki, and he not only forbade anything to be destroyed, but ordered that a monument be erected on his grave in the form of a miniature ziggurat - a small Tower of Babel.

During its three-thousand-year history, Babylon was razed to the ground three times and each time rose again from the ashes, until it completely fell into decay under the rule of the Persians and Macedonians in the 6th-5th centuries BC. The Persian king Xerxes left only the ruins of the Tower of Babel, which Alexander the Great saw on his way to India. He intended to build it again. “But,” as Strabo writes, “this work required a lot of time and effort, because the ruins would have to be removed by ten thousand people for two months, and he did not fulfill his plan, as he soon fell ill and died.”

The Tower of Babel, which in those days was just a miracle of technology, brought fame to its city. This ziggurat was the tallest and latest structure of its type, but by no means the only high-rise temple in Mesopotamia. Along the two mighty rivers - the Tigris and the Euphrates, colossal shrines stood in a long line.

The tradition of building towers was born among the Sumerians in the south of Mesopotamia. Already seven thousand years ago, the first stepped temple was built in Eridu with a terrace only one meter high. Over time, architects learned to design taller buildings and developed construction technology that made it possible to achieve stability and strength of walls.

In European painting, the most famous painting on this subject is Pieter Brueghel the Elder's "Babylon Pandemic" (1563). A more stylized geometric structure was depicted by M. Escher in an engraving in 1928.

Literature

Plot about tower of babel received wide comprehension in European literature:

• Franz Kafka wrote a parable on this subject called "The coat of arms of the city" (Emblem of the city)
• Clive Lewis, The Foulest Might novel
• Victor Pelevin, novel "Generation P"
• Neil Stevenson in Avalanche interesting version construction and significance of the Tower of Babel.

Music

It should be noted that many of the above songs contain the word Babylon in the title, but they do not mention the Tower of Babel.

Theater

Categories:

• ancient babylon
• Non-embodied ultra-tall structures
• Plots of the Old Testament
• Concepts and terms in the Bible
• Ziggurat
• tower of babel
• Genesis
• Jewish mythology

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See what the "Tower of Babel" is in other dictionaries:

And the confusion of languages, two legends about Ancient Babylon (combined in the canonical text of the Bible into a single story): 1) about the construction of the city and the confusion of languages, and 2) about the construction of the tower and the scattering of people. These legends are dated to the "beginning of history" ... ... Encyclopedia of mythology

TOWER OF BABYLON. Painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. a building that, according to biblical tradition (Genesis 11:1-9), the descendants of Noah erected in the land of Shinar (Babylonia) in order to reach heaven. God, angered by the plan and actions of the builders, ... ... Collier Encyclopedia

In the Bible, there is a legend dated to the beginning of the history of mankind (after the flood), when they built a city and a tower to heaven (the first great construction of people). If the city was built by settled residents who knew how to burn bricks, then the tower was built by nomads from the East; ... ... Historical dictionary

TOWER OF BABYLON- the most important episode from the story of ancient mankind in the book. Genesis (11.19). According to the biblical story, the descendants of Noah spoke the same language and settled in the valley of Shinar. Here they began the construction of a city and a tower "as high as the heavens... Orthodox Encyclopedia

tower of babel- Babylonian pandemonium. Tower of Babel. Painting by P. Brueghel the Elder. 1563. Museum of the History of Art. Vein. Babel. Tower of Babel. Painting by P. Brueghel the Elder. 1563. Museum of the History of Art. Vein. Tower of Babel in ... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary "World History"

Babel Tower- the most important episode from the story of ancient mankind in the book of Genesis (see Gen. 11, 1-9). According to the biblical story, the descendants of Noah spoke the same language and settled in the valley of Shinar. Here they began the construction of the city and the tower, ... ... Orthodoxy. Dictionary-reference

tower of babel- Book. Oh very tall building, building. On that day, the ocean gave people a real massacre ... The ether was full of messages about the emergency condition of the ships of many countries. Under the blows, the "Tower of Babel" of our days collapsed cyclopean structure,… … Phraseological dictionary of the Russian literary language

The Tower of Babel is not included in the "official" list of wonders of the world. However, it is one of the most outstanding buildings of Ancient Babylon, and its name is still a symbol of confusion and disorder. During excavations in Babylon, the German scientist Robert Koldewey managed to discover the foundation and ruins of the tower. The tower referred to in the Bible was probably destroyed before the era of Hammurabi. To replace it, another was built, which was erected in memory of the first. According to Koldewey, it had a square base, each side of which was 90 meters. The height of the tower was also 90 meters, the first tier had a height of 33 meters, the second - 18, the third and fifth - 6 meters each, the seventh - the sanctuary of the god Marduk - was 15 meters high.

The tower stood on the Sakhn plain (literal translation of this name - "frying pan") on the left bank of the Euphrates. It was surrounded by the houses of priests, temple buildings and houses for pilgrims who flocked here from all over Babylonia. The topmost tier of the tower was lined with blue tiles and covered with gold. The description of the Tower of Babel was left by Herodotus, who thoroughly examined it and, perhaps, even visited its top. This is the only documentary description of an eyewitness from Europe.
"A building has been erected in the middle of every part of the city. In one part - royal palace surrounded by a huge and strong wall; in the other - the sanctuary of Zeus-Bel with copper gates that have survived to this day. The temple sacred site is quadrangular, each side being two stages long. In the middle of this temple-sanctuary stands a huge tower, one stadia long and wide. On this tower stands a second one, and on it another tower; in total, eight towers - one on top of the other. An outside staircase leads up around all these towers. There are benches in the middle of the stairs - they must be for rest. Erected on the last tower big temple. In this temple there is a large, luxuriously furnished bed and next to it is a golden table. However, there is no image of the deity there. And not a single person spends the night here, with the exception of one woman, whom, according to the Chaldeans, the priests of this god, the god chooses for himself from all the local women.

There is another sanctuary in the sacred temple area in Babylon below, where there is a huge golden statue of Zeus. Nearby there is a large golden table, a footstool and a throne - also golden. According to the Chaldeans, 800 talents of gold went into making [all these things]. A golden altar was erected in front of this temple. There is another huge altar there - adult animals are sacrificed on it; on the golden altar, only suckers can be sacrificed. On a large altar, the Chaldeans annually burn 1000 talents of incense at a festival in honor of this god. There was still in the sacred precinct at the time in question a golden statue of the god, entirely of gold, 12 cubits high. I myself did not happen to see her, but I convey only what the Chaldeans told. Darius, the son of Hystapes, passionately desired this statue, but did not dare to seize it ... ".

According to Herodotus, the Tower of Babel had eight tiers, the width of the lowest was 180 meters. According to Koldevey's descriptions, the tower was a tier lower, and the lower tier was 90 meters wide, that is, half as much. It is hard not to believe Koldewey, a learned and conscientious man, but perhaps in the time of Herodotus the tower stood on some terrace, albeit not high, which was leveled to the ground over the millennia, and during excavations Koldewey did not find any trace of it. Each great Babylonian city had its own ziggurat, but none of them could compare with the Tower of Babel, which towered over the entire district in a colossal pyramid. It took 85 million bricks to build it, and entire generations of rulers built the Tower of Babel. The Babylonian ziggurat was repeatedly destroyed, but each time it was restored and decorated anew. The ziggurat was a shrine that belonged to all the people, it was a place where thousands of people flocked to worship the supreme deity Marduk.

Tukulti-Ninurta, Sargon, Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal stormed Babylon and destroyed the Tower of Babel - the sanctuary of Marduk. Nabopolazar and Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt it. Cyrus, who took possession of Babylon after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, was the first conqueror to leave the city intact. He was struck by the scale of E-temen-anka, and he not only forbade destroying anything, but ordered that a monument be erected on his grave in the form of a miniature ziggurat, a small Tower of Babel.

And yet the tower was again destroyed. The Persian king Xerxes left only the ruins that Alexander the Great saw on his way to India. He, too, was struck by the gigantic ruins - he, too, stood in front of them as if spellbound. Alexander the Great intended to build it again. “But,” as Strabo writes, “this work required a lot of time and effort, because the ruins would have to be removed by ten thousand people for two months, and he did not fulfill his plan, as he soon fell ill and died.”

The biblical story about the grandiose structure - the Tower of Babel, still haunts numerous scientists who are trying to either refute or prove the veracity of this story. According to this well-known legend, once people wanted to build a tower that would reach the sky, and this did not please God, who, as a punishment for human pride and self-confidence, deprived people of a common language.

The builders, who had ceased to understand each other, abandoned their idea, and the place where this significant event took place historical event, was called Babylon, which in Aramaic means "mixing."

However, some philologists are ready to argue with this interpretation, since in Hebrew Babylon sounds like Babel. And the words Bab-il and Bab-ilu, which are often found in ancient inscriptions consonant with “Babylon”, most likely mean “gates of god”, which is more consonant with the original than the Aramaic balbel.

Be that as it may, but experts from all over the world are trying to find traces of the legendary building that took place in antiquity. According to British scientists, they managed to find reliable evidence of the existence of the Tower of Babel. And they were helped in this by a private collection of one of the businessmen, which includes cuneiform tablets and a fragment of carved stone. The decoding of the inscriptions made it possible to establish that they contain a detailed description of the “Stela of the Tower of Babel”, and the figure depicts King Nebuchadnezzar himself, who ruled Babylon 2500 years ago.

According to the existing this moment version, the famous Tower of Babel is the ziggurat of Etemenanki, an ancient temple 91 meters high. Such an assumption was put forward by specialists a long time ago, since the ruins of the once great Babylon were discovered by Robert Koldewey at the end of the century before last. Again open city confirmed the existence of one of the wonders of the world - the Gardens of Babylon, and also provided "information for thought" about the biblical tower.

Actually, the found building (Temple Etemenanki) is not quite a tower, it is rather a pyramid, the width of which is 90 meters. The top of this building was once crowned with a golden statue of the supreme god of the Babylonians - Marduk. According to one version, in the construction of this grandiose temple, King Nebuchadnezzar used captive slaves captured in the Kingdom of Judah, who spoke different dialects, and such a variety of languages ​​amazed the Jews, who had not yet encountered multilingualism. Perhaps it was this moment that served as the basis for the plot of the Tower of Babel.

The found Etemenanki ziggurat has seven tiers, but the famous historian Herodotus describes the Tower of Babel as eight-tiered, with a width of 180 meters at the base. Archaeologists suggest that the "missing" tier may well be below, underground.

Despite the fact that experts seem to have decided on the location of the Tower of Babel, a similar legend is also made up of a pyramid located in the city of Cholula (Mexico). This grand building up to 160 feet high, it closely resembles the pyramids of Egypt, and even surpasses them in size. The legend of this unique building was recorded back in 1579 by the historian Durand, and the plot is very similar to the biblical one. Although it is likely that it was the Spanish missionaries who presented the construction of this colossal pyramid in this way.

In general, the legend about the mixing of languages ​​​​with the help of the Tower of Babel is unique in its kind, since the legends of other peoples are similar to it either in the first part (the construction of a “staircase” to heaven), or in the second part, which simply talks about the mixing of languages.

For example, some African tribes in the vicinity of the Zambezi have legends that tell us that the god Niambe once demanded obedience from people. But people did not want to submit to him and decided to kill Niambe. Then the god hastily climbed into the sky, and the masts fastened together, along which people also climbed into the sky in an attempt to catch the fugitive, collapsed, and the pursuers died.

The Ashanti also have a similar legend, where the offended god left the earth, ascending to heaven. Only in this case, pestles for pushing grains, which were placed one on top of the other, acted as a ladder for people.

In the same Africa (in the Wa-Sena tribe) there is a very entertaining legend about how people began to speak different languages. As expected, at first all peoples had one language, but during a severe famine, people lost their minds and dispersed to different parts of the world, while muttering incomprehensible words, which then became the language of any nationality. The Maidu Indians of California also have their own version of the mixing of languages, according to which, on the eve of one of the festivities, people stopped understanding each other, and only married couples could communicate with each other in the same language.

But God appeared at night to one of the spellcasters and gave him the gift to understand each of the languages, and this "intermediary" taught people everything: cook food, hunt, follow the established laws. Then all the people were sent to different directions.

The legends of many peoples find a reflection of what people once had mutual language, and some of the scientists are even trying to establish what language the first inhabitants of the Garden of Eden spoke, including the insidious serpent. There have been and still are a great many languages ​​and dialects on the planet, and a huge number of them are no longer subject to restoration.

Unfortunately, these initially imperceptible losses eventually turn into complex puzzles, enclosed in symbols and letters incomprehensible to subsequent generations. Although some of these inscriptions no doubt contain information capable of shedding light on some of the the greatest mysteries stories.

Another mystery of history, to which modern scientists still cannot find an answer, is connected with the death of the biblical Babylon and the famous Tower of Babel in Borsippa. This tower, half burned down and melted to a glassy state by a monstrous temperature, has survived to this day as a symbol of God's wrath.

It is a clear confirmation of the veracity of the biblical texts about the terrible fury of heavenly fire that hit the Earth in the middle of the second millennium BC.

According to biblical legend, Babylon was built by Nimrod, who is usually identified with the giant hunter Orion. This is a very important circumstance in astral legend, determining one of the five places of the previous appearances of the "revenge comet" in the night sky, which will be told in the appropriate place.

Nimrod was the son of Cush and a descendant of Ham, one of the three sons of Noah: “Cush also begat Nimrod: this one began to be strong on earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; therefore it is said, A mighty hunter like Nimrod before the Lord. His kingdom at first consisted of: Babylon, Erech, Akkad and Halne, in the land of Senaar. / Gen. 10:8-10/

The biblical myth tells that after Noah's flood, people attempted to build the city of Babylon (from the Sumerians. Bab-ily - "the gates of God") and the Tower of Babel "as high as the heavens."

And here it is appropriate to say that in mythological texts the names “gates of God”, “gates of heaven”, as well as “gates of hell” are used to designate places of cosmic explosions, in the epicenter of which all living things died from heavenly fire.

Enraged by unheard of human insolence, G-d “confounded their tongues” and scattered the builders of the Tower of Babel throughout the earth, as a result of which people ceased to understand each other: “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men were building. And the Lord said, Behold, there is one people, and all have one language; and this is what they began to do, and they will not lag behind what they have planned to do. Let us go down and confuse their language there, so that one does not understand the speech of the other. And the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore a name was given to her: Babylon; For there the Lord confounded the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them over all the earth” (Gen. 11:5-9/.

Therefore, another meaning of the word Babylon is reproduced from the Hebrew word balal - “mixing”.

Turris babel Athanasius Kircher, 1679
This deliberate biblical distortion of the name of the city, based on the similarity of the sound of words, actually reflects the historical reality. results archaeological sites testify that the time of the death of Babylon is the time of the great migration of tribes and peoples, the mixing of their languages ​​​​and customs, the development and seizure of new territories.

Not far from the city of Babylon are the ruins of Borsippa with the preserved ruins of a burnt ancient temple and a huge temple tower, which is considered to be the legendary Tower of Babel mentioned in the Bible.

True, some archaeologists dispute this name, on the grounds that within the city of Babylon there was a temple tower of no less respectable size.

As archaeologists have determined, the tower from Borsippa previously consisted of seven tiers of steps, standing on a massive square base.

Previously, they were painted in seven colors: black, white, purplish red, blue, bright red, silver and gold. Even now, the remains of the tower are impressive. Its melted skeleton, standing on a hill, rises 46 meters above the base of the tower.

The walls of the tower, built of baked bricks, as well as the huge cult premises inside, were badly damaged by fire.

From the heat of an unthinkable temperature, the upper, most of the tower literally evaporated, and the remaining, smaller part of the tower melted into a single glassy mass, both from the inside and from the outside.

Here is how Erich Zehren writes about it: “It is impossible to find an explanation for where such heat came from, which not only heated, but also melted hundreds of burnt bricks, singeing the entire skeleton of the tower, all its clay walls.”

It is also curious to cite the testimony of Wilhelm Koenig, who tried to comprehend the cause of the unthinkable heat that literally melted the stepped ziggurat tower in Borsippa: “Ordinary building bricks can only melt in a very strong fire.

ROMANESQUE PAINTER, French The Building of the Tower of Babel Fresco - Abbey Church, Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe

And here is how Mark Twain, traveling through Mesopotamia in 1867, described the tower from Borsippa:
“... it had eight tiers, two of which stand to this day - a giant brickwork, scattered in the middle from an earthquake, scorched and half melted by the lightning of an angry G-d.”

It must be said that to date, no researcher has been able to satisfactorily explain this monstrous melting, under the influence of an unthinkable temperature, due to which the upper part of the masonry turned into steam, and the remains of the melted tower seemed to split from top to bottom.

Attempts to explain this melting by a lightning strike of high power cannot be considered convincing, which is clearly seen from the information on linear lightning given below.

According to modern concepts, linear lightning is a giant spark that occurs between clouds, or between a cloud and the surface of the earth. Their average size is several kilometers, but sometimes there are lightnings up to fifty and even one hundred and fifty kilometers. The average discharge current is from 20 to 100 kiloamperes, but sometimes reaches 500 kiloamperes.

average temperature lightning channel 25000-30000 degrees Kelvin.

It is quite obvious that not a single, even super-powerful lightning could fuse the Tower of Babel into a single monolith. And even more so to destroy the temple adjacent to it, as well as the city of Babylon, located a dozen and a half kilometers from it, the circumference of which, according to the data specified by archaeologists, was 18 kilometers, and the thickness of the walls is estimated at 25 meters.

Pieter Brugel - THE TOWER OF BABYLON 1563
According to Herodotus, the city of Babylon was an almost regular quadrangle, and was located on both sides of the Euphrates River. Each side of this quadrangle was approximately 22 kilometers, and the thickness of the walls was 50 cubits (a cubit is about 52 cm), and six chariots in a row could simultaneously pass through them.

And the height of the walls, and it is almost impossible to believe, reached 100 meters. The walls of the city had 100 copper gates, and 250 towers rose on the walls themselves. The whole city was surrounded by a wide and deep moat.

In the middle of the second millennium BC, Babylon was a cultural, spiritual and political center Chaldea, and one of the richest and most powerful cities in all Ancient World. It was the time of prosperity and greatness of Babylon. The city had the most large stock gold in the world, and nothing seemed to shake his power.

Contemporaries called it "beauty of Chaldea", "granary of Chaldea", "pride of Chaldea", "glory of kingdoms", "golden city". Biblical texts report that "Babylon was a golden cup in the hand of the Lord."

So what destroyed Babylon and melted the Tower of Babel to a glassy state?

There is no doubt that this monstrous temperature, which is comparable only to the heat of a nuclear explosion, arose as a result of a giant electric discharge explosion of a falling celestial body, the fiery column of which covered the temple tower, and the released energy of the discharge, in the form of a colossal power of the blast wave, fell on the city of Babylon, in a few minutes turning it into piles of ruins.

The death of the city was so terrible that the compilers of biblical texts find it difficult to select epithets to denote its terrible destruction.

Babylon, which was "a golden cup in the hand of the Lord," suddenly, in one day, "became a terror among the nations," "a deserted wilderness," a "heap of ruins," a "house of desolation," and a "dwelling of jackals."

This is what the biblical prophecies look like about the destruction of Babylon, which came true: “Behold, a fierce day comes, with anger and flaming fury, to make the earth a desert and destroy her sinners from it. The stars of heaven and the luminaries do not give light from themselves; the sun is darkened at its rising, and the moon does not shine with its light. I will punish the world for evil, and the wicked for their iniquities, and I will put an end to the arrogance of the proud, and I will humble the arrogance of the oppressors; ... For this I will shake heaven and earth will move from his place because of the wrath of the Lord of hosts, in the day of His burning wrath .... And Babylon, the beauty of kingdoms, the pride of the Chaldeans, will be overthrown by God, like Sodom and Gomorrah. It will never be inhabited, and in the generations of generations there will be no inhabitants in it. /Is. 13:9-11,13,19-20/

It must be said that the power of an electric discharge explosion of a large meteorite can amount to hundreds of thousands of megatons of TNT, which significantly exceeds the power of modern thermonuclear charges, so the death of Babylon surrounded by cyclopean walls, with its giant ziggurats, as biblical texts testify, lasted less than one hour.

The city was literally swept off the face of the earth by a colossal blast wave, turning into huge mountains charred rubble and debris.

The ruins of ancient Babylon are located on the banks of the Euphrates, about a hundred kilometers from modern capital Iraq of Baghdad, and after the explosion they were giant mountains of garbage and are located near the Arab settlement of Gillah that arose later.

The Arabs called these hills of rubble Amran ibn Ali, Babil, Jumjuma and Qasr.

The location of ancient Babylon was initially known to archaeologists, and some of them, including the fortunate Layard and Oppert, even made trial excavations on its ruins, but realizing the huge amount of earthwork and the amount of money needed for this, did not dare to organize serious archaeological research.

And only at the very end of the nineteenth century, in the spring of 1899, the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, having received a fabulous sum of half a million gold marks for the production of works, ventured to start excavations, of course not assuming that it would take him eighteen years to get to the ruins of the capital ancient Chaldea.

In order to carry out a volume of excavation work that had never been done before, he had to order a field railway from Germany and lay a railway track to the excavation site. It must be said that Railway the first, and, it seems, the only time, was used in archaeological work of similar scale.

The thickness of the layer of earth, mixed with desert sand, ash and ashes, over the ruins of Babylon exceeded ten meters, but hard work in the hellish conditions of the desert was rewarded with discoveries that brought Robert Koldewey well-deserved world fame.

Based on the excavations of the expedition of Robert Koldewey, it became possible to reproduce the reconstruction of Ancient Babylon, in the ruins of which, during the excavation of the gates of the goddess Ishtar, images of the syncretic animal "Sirrush" were found, consisting of parts of four syncretic animals: a fantastic quadrupedal animal, which could not be identified, an eagle, a snake and a scorpion, which allows us to consider it a prototype Great Sphinx.

Biblical texts call Babylon a city of sin and debauchery, but in fact it was a real city of the gods. Archaeologists have unearthed dozens of temples of the supreme god Marduk and hundreds of sanctuaries of other deities on its territory. For example, according to cuneiform texts, the city had "53 temples, 55 sanctuaries of the supreme god Marduk, 300 sanctuaries of earthly and 600 heavenly deities, 180 altars of Ishtar, 180 altars of Nergal and Adadi and 12 other altars."
But this did not save him from the fury of cosmic fire and flood.

Remains of the original Tower of Babel excavated by Robert Koldewey
It must be said that none of the researchers and archaeologists wants to pay attention to the fact that the ruins of Babylon, destroyed by an electric discharge explosion, were also flooded by the waters of Noah's flood.

Babylon, which was excavated by the workers of Koldevey, was a city built on the ruins of numerous, even more ancient buildings, but many years of attempts to get to these cultural layers were unsuccessful, groundwater constantly flooded the mines.

The catastrophe that destroyed Babylon undermined all the foundations of the Babylonian kingdom and caused its decline.

historical documents absolutely accurately recorded the date, which is considered the beginning of the Neo-Babylonian kingdom - 1596 BC. in modern chronology.
And this once again indicates that the death of the Old Babylonian kingdom was a consequence of space disaster 1596 BC, which modern historians are not yet aware of.

Tower of Babel bible illustration by Gustave Dore

Or otherwise called Ziggurat(significant peak) in Babylon was not included in sleepjuice of the ancient wonders of the world. However, it is no less interesting architectural object than the Pyramid of Cheops or the Colossus of Rhodes.

The tower is dedicated to the biblical giving, which tells how people who survived after the Flood decided to build a tower that would be a symbol of their greatness. The tower was supposed to reach the sky. But God was angry with the people and divided them, creating different languages. People ceased to understand each other and dispersed throughout the earth. This is the biblical version of the origin of different languages ​​of the peoples of the world.

IN modern world the existence of the tower was highly doubted. References to it were found by the architect Robert Koldewein. During his expedition, scientists found the ruins of Babylon - walls, towers, temples, palaces, cuneiform tablets. As it turned out, these tablets contained a large number of useful information.

The English officer Henry Rawlinson was engaged in deciphering the inscriptions. He also owns the decoding of the inscriptions on the bas-relief of King Darius the First. To translate the tablets from Babylon, the scientist spent 18 years.

But thanks to the expedition of Robert Koldewein, greatest discovery in the history of archeology. Cuneiform tablets written in the language of King Hamurappi contained detailed description Tower of Babel. In addition, the expedition members found an image of the Tower of Babel.

What did the Tower of Babel look like? The structure in the form of a pyramid was located on a flat, round Sikhn plain (in the Skovoroda lane). The tower consisted of seven floors (about 90 m) and was surrounded by a wall. Occult structures were erected nearby. The tower was built using river clay and fired bricks.

Archaeologists managed to unearth the foundation of the tower and the preserved part of the walls. Interestingly, the remains of the tower look like they were exposed to enormous temperatures. They are scorched to the state of glass.The rest, unfortunately, did not survive.

Scientists doubted whether the find they made was really the legendary Tower of Babel. But after carefully comparing all the facts, they came to the conclusion that they were not mistaken. The Tower of Babel has been found.

Where is the Tower of Babel located?

The legendary creation of the inhabitants of Babylon, like the city itself, did not survive to this day. But, fortunately, thanks to the work of scientists, we can imagine what it looked like.

Ancient Babylon was located in Mesopotamia. Today it is the territory of Iraq. The excavations can be seen 90 km from the city of Baghdad. You can get here by car or by bus.