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Ancient Mediterranean + Europe
Course: Ancient Mediterranean + Europe > Unit 2
Lesson 6: Babylonian- Babylonia, an introduction
- Ancient Babylon: excavations, restorations and modern tourism
- The Babylonian mind
- The Law Code Stele of King Hammurabi
- Hammurabi: The king who made the four quarters of the earth obedient
- Law Code of Hammurabi
- Ishtar gate and Processional Way
- Ishtar Gate
- Map of the world
- Towers of Babel
- The "Queen of the Night" relief
- Kassite Art: Unfinished Kudurru
- Neo-Babylonian
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Towers of Babel
British Museum curator Irving Finkel © Trustees of the British Museum. Created by British Museum.
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- While I don't disagree with any of the facts presented in the video, I find the video misleading in regards to the Biblical account. The tower of babel that was built by Nebuchadnezzer couldn't be the same tower that is described in Genesis. The book of Genesis was probably written by Moses at the same time as the books of the Law (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). These books including Genesis make up the Torah which is the foundation for the Hebrew faith. Nebuchadnezzar ruled during the exile of the Hebrews which was much later and is described in the book of Daniel. Is this video referring to the Nebuchadnezzar of Daniel's time or someone much earlier in history?(12 votes)
- The tower of Babel dates back to a ruler known as Nimrod. He was around before king Nebuchadnezzar. Moses wrote the book of Genesis but, the events within that book occurred before even his time.(5 votes)
- Is this Video not in the wrong section here? I mean yes the tower of Babel was a near eastern Building of ancient times. But there is verry little discussion about the actual building, (which no longer exists and is therefore hard to talk about it's architecture or art) but it is mostly about depictions of the building from much later times. So the art is from a lot of time periods but not the ancient times.(7 votes)
- If there was nothing left of the tower, how do we know the exact architecture of it? Or is it just a guess?(4 votes)
- Yes, that is a good question. We have the base of the Tower of Babel, but the rest of it is all destroyed. Many artists have made their own depictions of the tower, but we don't know how any more than the first five feet looked like.(3 votes)
- Have the towers ever been found?(2 votes)
- He said that nothing was left of the tower(5 votes)
- Atof the video, the virtual metrics of the ziggurat is shown to be so heavenly in height and monumental in comparison to the mortals of the ground; I wonder how many generations it took to achieve this, given the tools in the prehistoric past? 1:55(3 votes)
- the tower was meant to save the king if the earth ever flooded again! and God had promised Noah that he would never flood the entire earth ever again. that tower was pretty much pointless!(1 vote)
- atwhat is all those buildings? 4:11(2 votes)
- As far as I understood, that's a methaphorical depiction of our civilization as a kind of a Tower of Babel, symbolized by modern skyscrapers and etc. twisted in the iconic shape of the Tower.(2 votes)
- Between @and @ 2:40, does anyone know exactly what languages are being spoken? 2:58(2 votes)
- What book in the Bible tells the story about the tower of Babel?I read the Bible everyday and I'm reading in Numbers so I forgot which book in the Bible tells the story of the tower of Babel.(1 vote)
- It's in Genesis chapter 11, verses 1-9, to be precise. :)(2 votes)
- I agree with nichole and it is not a good represintation(1 vote)
- What is the image at the end of the video, showing a collage of different buildings on a hill?Is this a real place or a piece of art? 4:12(1 vote)
- I believe it symbolizes a twisted iconic shape of the Tower.I'm not sure though.(1 vote)
Video transcript
The Tower of Babel built in the second millennium BC in the ancient city of Babylon in Iraq depicted by artists through the ages and a powerful symbol of both myth and reality When people think of the Tower of Babel they often think of this painting which is here
behind me blown up much larger than life-size and it's how the Dutch painter Bruegel in
the sixteenth century brought to life this amazing edifice which
has towered over the world since genesis was first put to paper This really is a painting one has to look
at very carefully It's full of extraordinary things not least
the fact that part of the tower seems to be completely
finished and part of it still in a rudimentary state and you might imagine that it would all be
rudimentary and then all finished at once but if you've ever worked on a big building
project you'll know that isn't the case What people don't often know however is that the Tower of Babel itself as imagined
here was once a real building called the Ziggurat in the centre of the capital Babylon ruled over by Nebuchadnezzar II And parallel to this historical account the Old Testament tells us that the tower built so that its top may reach onto heaven became a symbol of human ambition when the whole world had just one language Nothing remains on the ground of Nebuchadnezzar's huge edifice the Ziggurrat nothing remains at all, all the bricks have
vanished But when the surveyors investigated they established that the ground plan was about 91 meters squared so it was a huge building and when all the evidence is put together it's been
concluded that the building itself must have been about
17 meters tall And on this model there are human beings put
in to scale just to give it an idea exactly how huge it
was and how this building in its hay day towered
over people's lives just like the Tower of Babel does when you
read the Bible The Bible tells us that man was to be punished for building his tower to the heavens and that punishment was to be the creation of different languages so that humans would be divided and unable to understand
each other My fascination with the Tower of Babel began
from about 1990 onward looking at for example Bruegel's famous painting Anne Desmet is one of the contemporary artists
in the exhibition who has an enduring fascination with this
image The Tower of Babel story is significant in
that I find it as a symbol of human aspiration
and folly that combination of the ambition of human ideals and human dreams and then perhaps overreaching themselves sometimes but there's still something wonderful in that
ambition and I think there's something in our own generation when there are moments of apocalypse 9/11 was another one obviously an obvious
one but it seems to make you think back to that historical tradition of the Tower
of Babel it seems still a very relevant image for today