The Tower of Babel

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from housetop dot com.
And the whole earth was of one language and of
one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed
from the east that they found a plain in the

(00:23):
land of Shinar, and they dwelt there, and they said
to one another, go to, let us make brick and
burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and
slime they had for mortar. And they said, go to,
let us build a city and a tower whose top
may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name,

(00:43):
lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the
whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the
city and the tower which the children of men built,
and the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and
they have all one language. And this they begin to do.
And now nothing will be restrained from them which they
have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down.

(01:06):
And they're confound their language that they may not understand
one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from
thence upon the face of all the earth, and they
left off to build the city. Therefore is the name
of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound
the language of all the earth? And from thence did
the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all

(01:29):
the earth. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
that was a reading from the Book of Genesis in
the Bible. It is the story of the Tower of Babel. Robert,
I've got to ask you, what did this story look
like when you were a little kid. Inside your head? Oh,
I mean, I guess it's always kind of looked the same. Um,

(01:52):
I don't, I don't. I wish I did you picture
the tower? Yes, But I have to say I had
this book of Bible stories with illustrations for each one,
and I think it was kind of Gustaf Dora inspired.
It had a kind of spiraling, you know, almost a
seashell kind of looked to it. And I was always
taken by that. I was this was a fabulous book

(02:13):
in many respects because I remember it had it just
had all of these strange illustrations to them, especially the
more mystical Old Testament occurrences. Now, did it have a
direct translation of the Genesis account along with illustrations or
was it like adapted into a modern sort of retelling
of the So I think it was adapted because it
was kind of for kids, you know, So I didn't

(02:35):
have access in that book to the you know, the
the nice keen James version that we have here with
all the slime and mortar and weirdness and some other translations.
That word slime is rendered tar alright, So if you're
not familiar with it, the account of Genesis basically lays
it all out. So humans got smart, they got organized,

(02:56):
they got more than a little bit ambitious. They decided
to build a structure that would show of the world
just how amazing they really were. And uh, God wasn't
too crazy about this development. So in this, uh, this story,
in this myth, he blasts their language so that they
can't understand each other and scatters them far and wide.
Then the tower is never finished. Right, So this is

(03:16):
pretty straightforward about how this would work in the logic
of the story. Right, if you confuse the tongues, if
you ever, if everybody speaks the same language, they can
all work together. If you make them all speak different languages,
then they can't coordinate their activities, and thus the building
of the tower has to stop. Yeah, it's it's at
least gonna set back production of the tower somewhat because

(03:37):
you're gonna have to figure out how I mean in
this magical scenario, You're gonna have to figure out how
your language relates to their language. You're gonna have to
figure out some sort of common means of communicating, and
it's essentially have to reorganize the whole the whole venture.
Now this is coming right pretty much right after a
catastrophe in the Book of Genesis, because this is after

(03:58):
the flood narrative, right, so we had the whole earth
except for one family destroyed in the Great Flood. So
it's after the flood, and and so you've got people
rebuilding civilization. But they get a little haughty, and there
are multiple ways that you could interpret what they're doing
when they're building this tower up to heaven. As a child,

(04:19):
I think the way I read the story was, well,
they're prideful right there, saying look what we can accomplish.
Were showing off, and God did not like their pride
and punish them for it. More recently, when I look
at this story, I see an implied threat essentially that
they are attempting to physically scale to the heavens so
that they could challenge the gods. In one sense, they

(04:42):
are bridging heaven and earth. Yeah, it's like a yeah,
it really is, and so what's what's God to do?
I mean, there are some accounts I remember reading when
I was younger. They would even say that the workmen
on the tower, like on their lunch break, I guess,
would shoot angels with bows and arrows because it was
getting that high, you know, it was getting clo to
the heavenly domain. Yeah, when I when I was young,

(05:03):
and for the longest I think it was the definitely
the pride version, the idea that they just got too boastful, which,
on one hand, the message there ties in I guess
nicely with a lot of human endeavor. I don't get
too full of yourself, because God still got the final word.
But it also kind of makes God look like a
paranoid jerk where he's just like, oh, this tower is
getting a little too tall from my like and I'm

(05:24):
gonna smite that, Like why you're God, They're just building
a tower. That The behavior is more understandable if you
interpret it as an attempt to overthrow the gods, a
threat against their place in the sky. It also makes
more sense when you think about ancient cosmology with with
the idea that the heavens were actually a fairly low
plane that you could access through ascension in the air.

(05:47):
When when I was a kid, I had this story
in my head, and I was trying to picture it
as something that had happened. But I also had knowledge
of outer space travel and and how big the atmosphere
actually was, so I was trying to picture it like, Okay,
so they're building a tower that literally goes up to
space because that's where God is. Well, I didn't necessarily
think God was in space, but that was the only way,

(06:09):
knowing about space, that's the only way I could really
interpret it. And so I was picturing a tower that
just went up as far as you could see, which
is kind of ridiculous to picture. Now, if you see
the great artistic representations of the story, it's not really
that the tower reaches beyond where you can see, though
actually I guess in some of them it is. But
like later we'll be looking at a Peter bru Egels interpretation,

(06:32):
and it's more just kind of this massive project that
more reflects pride, I think. Yeah, And even with just
a basic almost subconscious understanding of engineering, you look at
those representations and you know this thing is not going
to reach a low Earth orbit or anything. Right now.
You can also look at the myth, you know, in
two basic ways as well. I guess you can say
that this was basically an etiological attempt, you know, to explain, well,

(06:56):
why do we have all these languages? Yeah, and ideologies
are extremely common and in ancient literature and ancient mythology,
and you find them all throughout the Bible. The Book
of Genesis is full of stories that tell you a
story about something that happened, and it sort of ends
with the punch line, and that's why these people are
now called this which relates to some fact about the story,
you know it would be like, And then they cut

(07:18):
off one guy's leg, and that's why this tribe is
now called the left footers. Yeah. And then but then
there's just not a real But then there's another level
too to our interpretation of this tale, this myth uh
as And and I think I think it's not too
much of a stretch to to think about it being
baked into the original purpose as well is that it
explains why people can't get along very well, why people

(07:42):
can't come can can very rarely come together on a
megaproject um and and stick with it like something's going
to fall apart. Uh. And you have to have extenuating
circumstances to allow something grandiose to happen to begin with. Yeah,
And in that vein, I can see how it's not
only an ideological story to explain why we have all

(08:03):
these different languages on Earth, why there's so much conflict,
but it also has some kind of ancient techno paranoia,
uh idea. Right, So there's actually a bit of discussion
of technological change in the story. They say, you know what,
they were burning those bricks thoroughly. This actually represented a
technological upgrade. And the architecture of ancient Mesopotamia, a lot

(08:27):
of it was built with mud bricks. These are sun
baked mud bricks that you would form together out of
clay and then allow to harden in the sun. And
these were you know, you could build out of them,
but they didn't. They weren't in it for the long haul. Later,
if you had fire baked bricks that you made at
a much higher temperature, they would be much sturdier. So
we're seeing here there's technological change. This technological change leads

(08:50):
to either on one interpretation, you know, Huber as people
being uh very haughty about what they can do with
their their new ovens and kilns now out, or it
leads to them saying, you know, we've got this new power,
we could ascend to the heavens and take over. Yeah,
they're like, how you touched on the sort of the
violence of making the bricks, because they're they're kind of

(09:11):
perpetrating an act of violence on the earth, remaking the
earth into an artificial mountain. And in so many mythologies,
I mean, the mountain is the mountains are where the
gods live. The mountain is the thing that bridges Earth
to the sky. Yeah. So eventually in this episode, we
want to take a quick look at about the diversification
of languages and where language speciation comes from. But before

(09:33):
we get into that, I think we just want to
talk about the myth itself because it's such an interesting story. Yeah,
we're gonna kick off with the myth. We're gonna talk
a little bit about art, and yeah, we're gonna get
into some engineering and linguistics. But first the myth and
uh and and as is the case with the number
of these Old Testament stories, and we went into this
a little bit when we we talked about the Great
Flood in a previous episode, like these are these are

(09:56):
tales that existed before the the Old Testament was really thing? Like,
these were tales that they were brought into this collection. Well,
you can, you can definitely look at it that way.
Another way to look at it is that, um, if
the tales in Genesis didn't necessarily come from other stories
that you'd find and say ancient Sumerian literature or something

(10:17):
like that, you might say that they had a common
ancestor you know that they they might not be direct
descendants of one another, but might be cousins that come
from more primeval stories. But yeah, it's hard to know exactly,
but you can see parallels in in other ancient Sumerian
mythology that are very interesting. And I want to get
into it a little bit, but first I just wanted

(10:37):
to take a peek at some of the translation notes,
which was this is one of my favorite things to
do about an Old Bible story is go look up
a fairly literal translations, such as like the New American
Standard version that's a trans English translation of the Bible that,
more so than most versions, tries to follow the literal
word for word progression of the text. Now, a lot

(11:00):
of times this doesn't necessarily render the best reading um,
but it is just more interesting to see what the
original language looked like, and then also look at there
there will be usually if there's like a if it's
a good online resource, there will be like footnotes you
can click that will tell you literally what the original
word was. So, for example, everywhere the word language appears

(11:21):
in this original story, it says the whole earth was
of one language and of one speech. Literally, that's the
whole earth was of one lip or had one lip.
So I'm imagining everybody sharing a lip or sort of
lip locking all the time when they're talking, and the
the one speech was of one set of words or

(11:41):
few words. And so when God speaks to God, God
is speaking to some kind of other heavenly beings one
would assume other gods in the earlier pantheon or angels.
God says, let us go down there and confuse their
lips so that they will not understand one another's lip.
But there's also another ideological feature of this story, which

(12:03):
is that it tries to explain the origin of the
term Babel. So you've got this line in verse nine
where it says, therefore is the name of it called
babble because the Lord did their confound the language of
all the earth, and thence did the Lord scatter them
abroad upon the face of the earth. So he's talking
about this place called Babel. Literally, this is probably referring

(12:24):
to Babylon. That's their word for it. But also there's
a joke in the name because the Hebrew word baalal
means confused or confound, So it's trying to say there's
some kind of cognate in the word they use for
the place Babylon and the word for confused. It's like, yeah,
that's why they call that place Babylon. It's because it's confused.

(12:45):
Old Testament jokes. You know why they call it Pittsburgh.
It's the pit. Yeah, there you go. It's the same spirit.
Or here's another one, Joe, which us state is um
is high in the middle and around on both ends.
I have no idea. Oh hioh, there you go. Uh man.
But back to ancient Babylon. Oh you got me there,

(13:09):
Robert I am slain, I die Horatio. So back to
the original myth. So we've got this Genesis version. But
there are also other versions of the same story. For example,
one appears in the Book of Jubilees, which is another
ancient Jewish text that is sort of a retelling of
a lot of the other Genesis stories. It's a it's

(13:29):
a retelling of the history of the Jewish people and
their relationship with God, and it's sort of like dictated
by angels, and they give just a few extra details
in the story. For example, in the Jubilees version, it says,
and they began to build, and in the fourth week
they made brick with fire, and the bricks served them
for stone, and the clay with which they cemented them
together was asphalt, which cometh out of the sea and

(13:52):
out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinnar.
So that's given us a little more detail about like
the technological origins of their instruction methods. More about the
construction methods. They specified the size of the tower and
they built it forty and three years. Where they're building
its breadth was two hundred and three bricks, and the
height of a brick was the third of one. It's

(14:13):
height amounted to five thousand, four hundred and thirty three
cubits and two palms, and the extent of one of
the walls was thirteen states and of the other thirty states.
So if Google's unit conversion program of length of the
length of a cubit is right, this means that the
tower would have been about eight thousand, one fifty ft tall.

(14:35):
And to put that in in in terms of modern buildings,
the Burge Khalifa in the United are Arab Emirates is
two thousand, seven hundred seventeen feet tall. So this would
have dwarfed the tallest building that has has ever existed,
the stall structure that's ever existed, by a substantial degree. Now,

(14:55):
I wonder how this compares to the alternate designs for
the Colossus of Chane Cargo we talked about in our
in our Chicago World's Fair episode. Remember the other proposed
structures before they had the ferris wheel, they were going
to be thousands and thousands of feet tall, many Birch
Khalifa's Yes, I don't know, it would be interesting to
go back super fans can listen and tell us what

(15:17):
we said. Uh. And then also we get another detail
in the Jubilees version about how God knocked the tower
down in the end, so he didn't just scatter the people,
but he crushed the tower. So it says, the Lord
send a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it
upon the earth, and behold it was between as Sure
and Babylon in the land of Shannar, and they called
its name Overthrow. So it looks like we get another

(15:40):
ideological legend there. There's some place that translates roughly to
overthrow apparently, and saying you know why we call it
overthrow because it's where God knocked down the tower. It
does put a totally different spin on the myth. Like
on one level, he just he's like, what do I
have to do to knock down this tower? I just
have to confuse their languages, snap of the fingers. It's done.
It takes care of itself. But in this version he

(16:01):
does that, but he's like, a heck, I'll not get
down to why I'm a giant toddler. Uh. So there
are also some interesting parallels here where you've got the
Sumerian got Inky, and one of his roles that has
been discovered in in recent decades is as the confuser
of languages in Sumerian mythology. So I want to refer

(16:22):
to a paper I came across by Samuel Noah Kramer,
who is a twentieth century Sumerian history expert, and he
wrote this paper called the Babble of Tongues a Sumerian
Version in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Now
this was from night so this is not a new discovery, um,
but but we do find that it when it comes

(16:42):
to studying the Tower of Babble, new research is is
a very relative term. There's not a lot of like
cutting edge study of this. This. There was some new
stuff at the time this came out, though, because he
had just recently gotten access to some new cune of
form tablets have filled in the gaps in a previously

(17:02):
known legend that that that had had incomplete sections because
of the deterioration of our sources. So he notes that
the biblical scholar E. A. Spicer had demonstrated in his
Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis that the Tower of Babel
narrative likely had a cune of form source, so another
Mesopotamian source going back to this other ancient Mesopotamian literature,

(17:25):
and Kramer was trying to bolster this view given recent
discoveries of his day of clay fragments filling in this
incomplete fragment from a Sumerian epic tale known as in
mer Car and the Lord of Arrata, and the details
of the narrative aren't especially important. Basically, it's about a
conflict between two rulers or kings. One is in mere
Car and he wants to get the king of Rata

(17:48):
to submit to him and pay tribute of gold and gems.
And there's one section known as the Golden Age passage,
and this is where an envoy from Rata is asked
to deliver this sort of formalized statement. It's kind of
like a hymn or a poem to his master. And
this is Kramer's translation of the part that was already
known when before these new tablet pieces were discovered. It

(18:12):
goes like this, Once upon a time, there was no snake,
there was no scorpion, there was no hyena, there was
no lion, there was no wild dog, no wolf. There
was no fear, no terror. Man had no rival in
those days. The lands of Saber and Hamazi, harmony tongued summer,

(18:34):
the great land of the decrees of prince ship Uri,
the land having all that is appropriate, the landmark to
resting in security, the whole universe, the people in unison,
to in Leal, and that's a Sumerian chief god to
in Leal. In one tongue spoke then Adah, the Lord Adah,
the Prince Adah, the king. In Key, Adah the Lord Adah,

(18:57):
the Prince, Adah, the king, and repeats it again, a
Da the Lord ada the Prince, a Da the King.
There's a lot of repetition in these um So that's
what they had already. But then there was this new
discovery that added in some new fragments. It went on
to say, in Key, which is another Sumerian guard, the
Lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy, the Lord of Wisdom,

(19:19):
who understands the land, the leader of the gods endowed
with wisdom, the Lord of airy. Do change the speech
in their mouths, brought contention into it, into the speech
of man that until then had been one. So here's
another version of the story. Of the confusion of tongues. Now,
this one lacks a lot of detail. It doesn't say

(19:40):
that humans were building a tower. It doesn't really give
a rationale for in Key changing the languages that people spoke.
It just says that people offered praise to in Leal
in one tongue. They all spoke the same language, and
then at some point this great figure in Key brought
contention into their languages and split the languages into different fragment. Now,

(20:01):
Kramer notes a difference from the Biblical account. Of course,
in the Biblical story, the gods confused the speech of
humankind because humankind is threatening to encroach into the heavens,
which is the domain of the gods, and it's a
conflict between between God and the humans that leads to
the confusion of tongues. But in the Sumerian version, as
I was saying, there's nothing apparent that the humans did

(20:24):
to have their speech confused. So Cramer suggests that any
Key confusing the tongues of humanity is a result of
his rivalry with the other god of the Sumerian pantheon
that's mentioned in the story the Big One in Leal,
rather than of a rivalry with humans. This is interesting
because it makes me think about the differences very broadly

(20:45):
between worshiping a pantheon of gods or a single god,
between being polytheistic and monotheistic. So if you just have
one god, well, well, let me take it from this direction.
If you have multiple gods, and it's possible that these
gods don't get along, and then you're just left with
the residual um chaos of their turmoil. In the same way,

(21:06):
might be an innocent bystanding yeah, yeah, in a way
that I think relates to modern experience, but even ancient experience,
where you know, what are you doing? You're just a
normal person trying to live your life. You're a farmer,
you're a craftsman, your podcast or whatever you are. And
the conflicts among the greats, among the kings, the governments

(21:26):
of the nations themselves, the way no input do you
have no input? But then you still have to suffer
what the wages of these conflicts. But it's not a
judgment thing, it's just that's how life works. But if
it's a single god, then then who else is there?
Like every every catastrophic event, every minor misfortune or blessing

(21:48):
is or or you know, positive effect is a is
a blessing or a curse. It's all a direct communication
with the divine being. Yeah, they're they're definitely shades of that,
I think in the division between monotheism and polytheism. But
one thing we see also in a lot of these
ancient accounts is that the line between monotheism and polytheism
is not quite such a stark division as one would expect.

(22:09):
I think that there are shades of monotheism and shades
of polytheism. Like in this ancient context, you may have
seen a lot of cases where there is sort of
a concept of a greater pantheon of God's but maybe
one God is strongly favored or something, uh or or
there is an idea that there are other heavenly beings,

(22:29):
but you wouldn't call them God quite in the same way,
like you've got a chief God who's the real God,
but then there are also these other powers in heaven
that aren't quite human. Yeah, you have these different angelic
forces or or on the opposite end, demonic forces, and
then you have these intermediaries as well, such as uh,
you know, saints or in in other modes of belief,

(22:49):
ancestors that can serve as as go betweens for you
and the hereafter. Yeah. So Cramer in nineteen in his
paper actually has a really interesting speculation in a footnote
about the difference in the motivation for the confusion of
tongues between the Sumerian epic and the Biblical account. And
it sort of goes along with what you were saying, Robert.

(23:10):
He says, quote, the biblical storyteller was no doubt inspired
to invent his moralistic explanation by the twofold aspect of
the Babylonian ziggurat. And in just a minute we're going
to get into the role that ziggurats may have played
in inspiring this story. But basically, a zigarat is an
ancient Mesopotamian structure, a big step pyramid with a flat top,

(23:31):
and so he says that this may have been an explanation.
He continues, Uh, the one aspect is the high rise,
sky reaching appearance of the structure in its prime that
could be interpreted as a threat to the gods in
their power. And the other thing, it's melancholy and pathetic
appearance when in a state of disrepair and collapse, which
was not infrequent that could be viewed as a punishment

(23:55):
by the angered gods or Yahweh for man's overreaching ambition.
The Mesopotamian, on the other hand, far from viewing the
Ziggarat as an outgrowth of man's rivalry with an antagonism
to the gods, actually deemed it to be a bond
between heaven and earth, man and God, and attributed its
ruin and decay to the inscrutable will of the gods

(24:16):
and their incontestable decisions. And so the different views of
these cultures upon seeing, for example, a ruined ziggurat would
be based on their different idea of what the ziggurat
was for. If if you're, say a monotheistic Yahwist, and
you see a ruined Ziggarat, you might not know that
this is for the people who built it, that it's

(24:37):
for some kind of positive connection they believe they have
with the gods. Yeah, I mean, of course, we can
think a plenty of examples of that, right where if
you're you have someone outside of a religion looking in,
and especially if they have their own religious viewpoints that
they're using to make the judgment, you can vastly misinterpret
what something's for, Like people saying oh, look at the
Look at those guys worshiping that Buddha or or look

(24:59):
at that mighty church that they've built, um, you know,
as a tribute to themselves. Like what's the difference between
you know, the humorists of a cathedral and the huborists
of this tower. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, like it.
It's definitely difficult to see the significance of religious artifacts
from the outside if you don't make an attempt to
understand what they mean. The practitioners to the Mesopotamians, these

(25:22):
zigarattes wouldn't have been an assault on heaven. They were.
They were an attempt to connect and bond with and
appease the heavens. But I guess it's time to look
at the zigarattes themselves, right, So I would say, I
don't want to you to come away from this episode
with the impression that, oh, the Tower of Babel was
a zigaratte and they just saw zigarattes and that's where

(25:42):
the story came from, because I'm not so certain, but
it has been widely speculated that the Tower of Babel
story could have been inspired by sites of ziggarattes, and
that may be true to some extent. I don't know
what you think about this, Robert Well, I guess some
of two minds on this. Like if I were to definitely, uh,
you know, get behind an idea of there being a
literal tower that inspired the tails, then I would probably

(26:03):
line up with a zigaratte explanation. But we kind of
get into that area we've gotten to in uh in
the discussion of fossils and dinosaurs and dragons, Right, did
people dream up dragons because they saw a triceratops fossil
or Griffin's Yeah, And we we argued in that episode
of the Stuff About Your Mind that, well, you can't

(26:23):
just say that nobody had creative energy in the old days,
that they weren't capable of creating myths out of other
things than just very literal sights and sounds. Yeah, And
I don't think it is wrong to try to look
for things that could have literally inspired the creation of
ancient of tropes and ancient literatures, such as monsters or
structures or things like that. It's not that I think

(26:44):
that is a worthless project, because in many cases it
may be that these things inspired people. But I just
I think we should never forget the role of creative
imagination in creating literature. Yeah, I mean there were towers around,
There were zigaratts around, and you can imagine someone creating
the story of out some people who build a tower,
and you don't actually need it that to be a

(27:05):
literal place in a literal tower for that kind of
story to come together. Yeah. But anyway, so let's look
at the zigarattes. So you've probably seen pictures of zigarettes before.
They're these huge, ancient Near Eastern stepped pyramids with a
flat top. So one thing you can do if you
haven't actually seen one is google one. But let's say
you can't google one picture the pyramids. Surely you've seen

(27:26):
that of ancient Egypt. And then take the top, the
pointy top off, so they've got a flat top, and
then uh, and then give them a couple of stairways
that are going up to the top. And some things
would probably originally have been on the top. I think
a lot of the replicas or ruins that exist today
don't have much on the top, but back then, and
there may have been a temple or a shrine to

(27:48):
a god such as mar Duke and uh, it may
have also been thought of as the dwelling place of
the God at the top of the zigaratte, like the
God comes down and sleeps on top of the zigaratte
or something like that. Yeah, I think it's very helpful
to again think of the ziggurat in terms of a
holy mountain. It is an artificial holy mountain. And so
since we know we have these things in the ancient

(28:10):
Near Eastern context, plenty of people have positive that the
story of the Tower of Babel may have been inspired
by the sight of a zigarat or the ruins of
a zigarat. And there's one candidate in particular that often
comes up right. Yes, the specific candidate here is the
Babylonian Tower temple north of the Marduk Temple, which in
Babylonian was called bab Elu or Gate of God. Yeah,

(28:34):
and the zigarat itself was known as the etim an
Key or the house of the foundation platform of Heaven
and the underworld. I've also seen it translated as house
of the foundation platform of Heaven and Earth. And one
thing to keep in mind about ancient ziggurats versus the
existing ruins and replicas is uh is that the ancient

(28:56):
versions were probably more beautiful like the generally more decorated,
for example, with this one particular place that at him
and an key. When Nebuchadnezzar the King came through and
restored this zigaratte, he covered the top with blue glazed
bricks and other types of decorations, some gold and things
like that. And the image of the zigaratte I have

(29:18):
in my mind is it's the modern version, right. It's
what either the replicas you would see in Iraq or
the actual ruins of some previous zigarattes that still exist
to some extent. Generally, when you think about them, they're
the exact same color as the sand all around them,
and sort of the same color as the sky, and

(29:38):
this tends to have a kind of brutal effect on
the eye, at least to me. I don't know how
you feel about this, Robert, but it's like, this massive, dense,
colorless edifice is almost like it was specifically programmed to
make you odd, but not in a good way, to
fill you with this kind of crushing dread. It's stifling
to the mind, and I think that's just because of

(30:00):
the lack of color. I don't know if you feel
the same way, um, but when I see recreations of
the same structures with color and decoration added. It doesn't
have that effect on me at all. It's more like
seeing these other types of ancient buildings that would be
fascinating and beautiful. Yeah, I mean I can get that.
It's it's kind of like when you look at ancient
statues and all you have or the like the pale

(30:23):
marble and the featureless faces and the blank eyes, and
it gives you the stoic sense of of hauntedness. But
of course in many cases statues were painted. They were
you know that they had color, they had pigments, they
had eyes, and it would have been a totally different
experience to the contemporary viewer of such a work. When

(30:44):
you see these ancient Assyrian statues, I think, I think
about seeing these in New York, the ancient Assyrian statues
that have carvings. They're not just statues, but they're like
walls with relief carvings to have all these people in them,
like these men with the huge braided beer. And when
I often think about those statues, they seem very scary

(31:05):
and ghostly to me because they don't have paint on
them anymore, or some versions don't, and so the eyes
are just blank. They have these eyes that you can
see the rounded edges of them, but they don't have
pupils or any colors in them. So it just looks
like these gray ghostmen marching towards you. But when you
see the painted versions or the restored painted versions, of

(31:27):
course the eyes have eye colors in them. Was like
whites of the eyes and pupils, and it looks very different.
It looks just more like art, you know of people.
In the Tower of Babel Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts A. R. George,
the author takes an exhaustive and I mean exhaustive look
at modern architectural interpretations for a Babylonian tower. Yeah, and

(31:50):
I believe this article is actually a review of a
book on the subject, right yeah, um, so, so what
what does he come up with? He's talking about the
idea that the Tower of Babel would have been inspired
by this Babylonian zigarat design or temple design. Yeah, so
he he looked. One of the sources of this paper
discusses is the the Napapulas a cylinder and this was

(32:14):
found in Iraq in nine and it was named for
the seventh century BC, founder of the Neo Babylonian Empire,
who's exploits it details and it provides some details concerning
uh Napopolass completion of Assyrian king Charadin. He would have
been six eighty through six sixty nine BC. Of his

(32:37):
earlier Zigarat project. This was a baked brick tower base
of ninety one square. This matches up with the timeline
modeled on an even older structure of the same base area.
Now that's something I want to get into in just
a minute. But there you see the idea of structures
being built on top of one another in ancient Mesopotamia.

(32:57):
But it also mentions here so this is a ached
brick tower, which is part of the story of the
Tower of Babel is saying, hey, none of those sun
baked bricks anymore. Now, now we're firing these things to
make them really strong. Yeah. So this is one example
of the kind of buildings that that that historians and
archaeologists and sort of myth dissectors will will take a

(33:19):
look at. And like I said earlier, you get into
the problem though, where you're you're taking the myth and
you're kind of chasing around history with the myth like
myth on a stick approach, which is a fascinating exercise
and can certainly be illuminating, but you're still, in a
sense kind of putting the cart before the horse, right. Well, yeah,
I mean, it's what we were saying earlier. It's not

(33:40):
that I think it's a bad project to try to
look for physical inspirations for stories from history and mythology.
It's just that always don't forget we could have plenty
of creative imagination in here. It's not like the author
had to see something literally that they went and wrote
down and now we have to figure out what the
thing they saw was. And in terms of just large

(34:04):
building structures, large towers that we've been making these for
some time. You can you can look at Egypt's various
pyramids from the third millennium b C, of which there
are many, including both the ones that immediately pop into
your mind, and indeed there still stands the Zigarat of
or from BC, uh Sardinia's Uh Narugus sant Antinnie this

(34:26):
was from six b C. And the Ziggurat of dr
coagal Zoo from the fourteenth century BC. And these are
just a few to mention. So um I don't want
to make it sound like this was an age where
there was only ever one tower, right that that and
and these are just the large structures that survived to
us today. Certainly you could get the idea of a tower,

(34:47):
and that can inspire a myth about a tower based
on a much smaller construction. Yeah. Now I want to
look at another aspect of ancient Near Eastern architecture, or
at least ancient Near Eastern civic design that is relevant.
And though I don't want to say that this is
necessarily what inspired the story, I just think it's kind
of interesting. So imagine you're the child of a trader

(35:08):
and you visit an ancient Mesopotamian city with your parents,
and the walls or these mud brick structures, but they're
they're huge, They're bigger than anything you normally see. It's
also powerful. It's rather overwhelming. And then you leave with
your your parents and go trade in many other places,
and you don't come back for many years. But then
you revisit the same city again when you're very old,

(35:30):
you might you just might notice something odd. Is the
city higher up off the surrounding desert than it was
when you visited all those years ago, or is that
just your imagination? Not necessarily so. Ancient Mesopotamian architecture is
characterized by the slow accumulation of what's known as tells

(35:50):
like t e l or t e l l, meaning
hills or mounds and uh. An ancient Mesopotamian city had
these buildings like we were talking about, made out of
sun bay to mud bricks, which were useful, but they
were prone to fairly rapid deterioration in the elements. And
as these structures deteriorated over time, they were replaced, but

(36:10):
not necessarily removed, And so the trampled remains of old
and demolished mud brick structures became the foundation for new structures.
So as we cycled through generations of human architecture in
these cities, the ground level of the city rose up.
So in a sense, not only were human buildings growing

(36:31):
taller with the ages of Messopotamian city life, but the
city itself was rising up out of the earth. And
I just wonder would an ancient writer have been able
to notice such a thing. I'm not saying they would,
because it's definitely a slow process that takes place over
hundreds or thousands of years. Then again, if you come
upon a city in the desert where everything else is
pretty flat around, and suddenly just the city, part of

(36:53):
the city is on this mound risen up out of
the desert, I don't know. That's interesting. Yeah, And of
course it's very poetic as well. It's the idea of
I mean, civilization quite literally physically rising up. Yeah. And
I would like to emphasize that in the Biblical account,
it doesn't actually call the Tower of Babel the Tower
of Babel. That phrases our modern way of describing the story.

(37:17):
The phrase in the original story is the city and
the tower. Yes, all right, we're gonna take a quick break,
and when we come back, we're gonna take a look
at a few different attempts to in in varying ways
make the tower real. Alright, we're back, Robert. There are

(37:40):
some awesome paintings of the Tower of Babel story. I
I love paintings of Biblical stories in general. That's one
of my favorite genres of ancient paintings, especially the ones
that are paintings of Old Testament stories. But but the
Tower of Babel paintings are great, and some of the
best ones have got to be the ones by Peter Brogel, right, Yes,

(38:02):
Peter Broigel the Elder in particular, sixteenth century Flemish artist,
and he actually created three different interpretations of the tower.
Two survived, both oil paintings on wood. And then there's
a lost painting that was on ivory. Oh I'd like
to see that, well, everyone would, but it's lost, Joe.
If you find it, let him let us know. Um

(38:24):
So the elephants came and took it back. Yeah, maybe
there's a justice in that. Uh So, So we're left
with two interpretations. And I think I had one of
these on my wall in college, Like these are famous
works of art, and it's the type of art unlike
some things I had on my wall in college. This
is ax. I would put this on my wall today.
It's that great a painting. Because you the two that

(38:46):
survive also play off each other in unique ways as
well discussed. So the first one is is often referred
to as the Great Tower of Babel. And in this
image we have this, uh this sort of half completed
tower rising up out of the landscape. You've got the
the ocean visible in the lower right hand. In the

(39:07):
lower left hand there's a king surrounded by some workers.
You see tiny ant like people scaling uh the edifice,
working on it, and the whole thing is clearly inspired
by Roman architecture. So instead of looking like a Zigarat
out of ancient Babylon, it instead looks it reminds one
of the Roman colosseum. Yeah. Yeah, it's like if the

(39:29):
Roman colosseum, uh like mated with a Zigarat, you might
get this result. I also love it's got this quality
that I always really enjoy in paintings, in that it's
I don't know what you call this. There are lots
of lots of little details going on all around it.
I'm I guess you might call this dizziness. But it's

(39:50):
not just buzziness. It's something about the fact that there
are all these little people doing their own thing far away. Yeah.
I mean it works on two levels, right, because on
one hand is will be z town and one hand
is busy town, and it's just finding cool things going
on and your imagination is just stoked by all these
little details. But then on the other, of course, uh,

(40:10):
the Flemish masters were were masters of their craft and
and nothing was just thrown in you know, half slap
in dilly dally like there's a there's a symbolism it played,
there's a purpose at play in play and uh, and
individuals like Brugo, we're attempting to convey certain ideas and messages,
at least to the informed viewers of the piece. Now,

(40:33):
the original story in the Bible does not tell you
that there's any particular king overseeing the construction of the tower.
But that doesn't mean that later readers didn't sort of
supplement that information and come up with a king to
be the guy in charge of this evil tower enterprise. Right. Yeah,
Indeed we have a king in the lower left hand corner,
as we mentioned, and uh, and many interpret this is

(40:54):
being King Nimrod. Yeah, King Nimrod, who the Bible says
was a mighty hunter. But or yah, yeah, nim Rob
the hunter. And so that's that's that's the potential read
on on this this painting. Now I'm going to dive
in a little deeper on this painting. The other the
other painting is the the Little Tower of Babel and
it's called that because it's a smaller work. And uh,

(41:16):
but let's start with this one, and I will include
images of both these paintings and the landing pig for
this episode stuff to blow your Mind dot com in
case you want to compare and look yourself. So I
was looking at a work by author s A Man's
Bach titled Peter Brugle's Tower of Babel. And as the
author points out, the the artist here is not really

(41:37):
telling the story of the Tower of Babel. He's not
He's not showing like in terms of action. It's just
people working on the tower and a king talking to
some people that you don't see language splinters. You don't
see a tower falling down. You don't see God coming
down with his holy troops to dish out some uh
some dialect. I don't even see well baked mud bricks

(41:59):
and sly for mortar. And it's again not completely clear
that it's it's Nimrod now. But prior to to Brugle
you had people like Flavius Josephus wrote about Nimrod in
Antiquities of the Jews. This was first century. See, there's
a whole story about Nimrod building this tower as vengeance

(42:22):
over the Great flood, like he wanted to get back
at God. Yeah, it's like God just wrecked all this havoc.
So it's like, all right, I'm coming for you God,
I'm building the tower. Now wait, was it just like
was it like spite against God? Or was it like
he was literally coming for him to wage war against him.
I took him to mean spite. But now, but I
really like the idea of him coming after him. And

(42:44):
that's pretty That's that's some action hero Like, uh, what
am I thinking of? That's like Bruce Willis in uh
in die Hard kind of another tower story, building a
causeway to the heavens. Yeah, so, um, he builds this
thing in Babylon and uh in the original And Brugle

(43:04):
may or may not have read the text. He might
have taken this detail from other artistic interpretations of the tower,
or it might it might not be a nod to
Nimrod at all. So the author of the article Mansbach
Here he cites Zigmat Wazbinski, who argues that Brugal deviates
from past traditions and shows the tower as rounded, reflecting

(43:27):
on modern urban design trends. So they're not building the tower, perhaps,
but rebuilding it in the form of a Babylon of
the West or a Roman Babylon and in this case,
he argues, the king that we're seeing is not Nimrod
but Alexander the Great, and this is it's an interesting
argument because it does get into the idea of like,
it's not just an illustration that he's doing, He's creating

(43:49):
a work of art. It is making some contemporary points
utilizing the symbology of an old story. Yeah, I hadn't
thought so much about the idea of the tower being round.
Now again, in the original story doesn't say what the
shaping tower is in the Genesis account an other uh,
in other later mythological adaptations, it might. But definitely if
you see it in medieval art, like I've seen an

(44:11):
ancient uh not ancient, a medieval painting of the Tower
of Babble where it's just a tall rectangle, looks like
a church church bell tower. Yeah, now, Man's bach. He
thinks that this this reading is a bit of an overread, uh,
the idea that this is Alexander the Grade and it's
really the rebuilding of Babble and Babble of the West.

(44:32):
But he does think the Brugal was still clear certainly
imparting a different meaning to humanists and progressives of the time.
To learned viewers, so that the king might not be
Nimrod or Alexander, but contemporary ruler Philip the Second of Spain, Yeah,
who had an ill reputation with his Flemish subjects. So
Spanish domination was pretty harsh at the time, especially on

(44:55):
Flemish liberal Catholics and Protestants. And Philip the Second, enhanced
of the powers of the Inquisition in fifty six, who
waged a campaign of suppression against Antwerp's Calvinists, and Philip
the Second, on top of this spoke neither French nor Dutch,
a further deepening the divide. So there's this disagreement, there's
this clash of cultures, and it's uh it's situated by

(45:19):
the linguistic differences in play. Interesting. So we've looked at
the Great Tower of Bebel by uh by Burgal here,
but there's another version that you mentioned earlier, this lesser's Tower,
the Little Tower of Bebel, and I've got a little
image of it here, yes, in our in our outline.
This is different, right, It's not just a smaller version

(45:40):
of the same painting. It's fundamentally different. It's got stuff missing,
like where's the king. Yeah, where's the sprawling city and
the crazy thing too. You can glance at it and
both just look like incomplete towers. But the second tower
is about two thirds complete. Perhaps, Yeah, it's a lot
more along the way. You see fewer people in it,

(46:01):
and it's more close to done. Yeah, And there's a
there's a religious procession winding its way upward, cheaper grazing
in the distance. Uh. In fact, they're grazing in areas
previously devoted in the former painting to utility buildings. So
arguably what we see here is a utopian vision of
what is possible for humanity when it is free from tyranny. Again,

(46:25):
the king has gone. There's no king in this painting.
Oh man, that that would mean the Tower of Babel
would be a very odd selection of story to predict
a genuine utopian vision. Well, but if you're a humanist, uh,
I mean not so like reappropriating the story exactly. Yeah.
So there is a hopefulness to this painting, the works
of humanity in a state of grace, about to transcend

(46:47):
the limits of of not only what we've accomplished before,
but the limits of the frame, the limits of the
the actual canvas that or the you know, or the
wood that he's working on here um the limits of
the artist's vision, even like this is a tower of
babble that may be completed. I you know, kings and
bureaucracy and all the than the negative aspects of the world.

(47:10):
To stay out of the affair Men's box, says this quote.
In some the Flemish painter has produced in this panel
a suggestive image of an ideal state, a symbolic communal
hive rising heavenward from a bucolic real landscape and bustling port.
And he has shown us the greatness and power of
human productivity made possible in the absence of a tyrant's

(47:32):
hebristic will. The artist has given his contemporaries and us
a glimpse of the humanists ideal city, a terrestrial utopia.
In a word, Brugle has provided a visual metaphor of
mankind in a state of grace. Babble has been remedied. Woa,
So there you go. Uh again, that's just some added
layers of interest to just to phenomenal paintings. So I

(47:56):
want to look at one more great work of art
to pick ing the Tower of Babel, and that is
an engraving by Gustav Dora known as the Confusion of Tongues,
and this was made in eighteen sixty five. I think,
uh it was. I've seen it described as a woodcut
or an engraving. Now, this is the the image that
I think was referenced in the childhood illustration that I

(48:20):
mentioned earlier that I grew up with, in that this
looks very much like just a spiral road up into
the heavens um And interestingly enough, Dora apparently based his
design on the minaret of the great Mosque It's Samara.
This is a ninth century mosque located in Samara, Iraq,
and it's still there to this day. Only the outer

(48:42):
wall and the minaret remain as the as the mosque
itself was destroyed in twelve seventy eight. Now I really
love this. I love Doris a virgin. Dora always sort
of does it for me. He's got these great illustrations
of the divine comedy that are just burned. I want
to talk about one of those in a second. But
the man the tower here I said earlier, I think

(49:05):
that none of the traditional artistic representations match what I
had in my mind as a kid, meaning a tower
that literally goes up to where you can't see it anymore,
so straight into space. Yeah, that's where this one really Uh.
Is different from the Brugle images because the Brugle towers
are incomplete to see where they break off and their
sky above them. This thing just vanishes into the heavens. Yeah. Well,

(49:27):
here you can see the tower has it's further along.
But this is the moment of confusion. It's not like
the king lording over the construction saying, look, what good
work we're doing here. It's surrounded by people who appear
to be in anguish, and you can guess that they're
in anguish because they've had their languages confused and they
can't understand one another anymore. There's a man in the
foreground reaching up to the heavens with like a plaintive

(49:50):
kind of posture, like why would you do this to me? Yeah,
it's kind of going stout there, what's happening? Uh? And
and of course it has that great black and white
pathos that you see in Doria's work. Um. One of
my favorite illustrations of his is from his illustration of
the Divine Comedy and the scene in Kanto seven, when

(50:11):
Dante and Virgil are passing by the demon Plutus, who's
also the you know, Greco Roman god of wealth. Uh,
but he's uttering the string of nonsense words. Plutus is saying,
Pope Satan, Pope Satan Aleppe, which is, at least in
the medieval Italian of the story, it's nonsense. The Dante's
Pilgrim doesn't understand what he's saying, but Virgil apparently does

(50:36):
understand what Plutus is saying and interprets his words as
a threat. And so it makes me recall this idea
of the confused tongues maybe uh even confused tongues in
the heavenly realms, Like would they speak a different language
in hell than they would in heaven or on earth. Yeah,
we're get We're getting. We're almost getting into speaking in

(50:57):
tongues territory here we have to, But we have to
save at rabbit hole for another day. I just wanted
to add one interesting modern interpretation that I came across
on the Internet the other day, and it's by artist
and animator Katsuhiro Otomo and collage artist Kosuke Kawamura. And
this is a version of Broygel's interpretation of the tower.

(51:20):
But it's got to cut away, so it's like those
old books, you know, the picture books where they have
a cross section of the Hanna War and they've got
to cut away of the tower where you can see
the inside. And I think it's great, this is worth
looking up. Nice he's a sort of extrapolating on the
design that Rugle's gone with with for the exterior, and yes,
trying to imagine what it would look like inside. Yeah. Nice.

(51:42):
And apparently one of these artists that I just mentioned
had something to do with the Kira so nice. Alright, Well,
we're gonna take another break, and when we come back,
we're gonna look at some I guess you could say
thought experiments on the dimensions of the tower if it,
if it were to exist. Yes, and then also at
the confusion of language. All right, we're back. So, as

(52:09):
we've discussed, the biblical account itself is vague, so you
have to go to these other accounts, such as the
Jubilee for even a starting point if you're gonna try
and put numbers behind what the Tower of Babble consists off,
and the Book of Jubilees does put numbers on it,
and I wonder if it's the only one. Other accounts
may put numbers on it as well, but I believe

(52:29):
it's the prime one. Certainly. If if you're gonna go
for an ancient text that has numbers, that's where you go.
And then you start busting out down those cubits and
making them into meters or feet, you know. Yeah, if
you want to mentions, crack open your jubilees. Yeah. Now,
one thing that the ways we mentioned that the biblical
account does say that they're reaching unto heaven, and that's
the thing that defies measurement, unless heaven is orbital access

(52:52):
to angelic space aliens, in which case we're talking a
space elevator, and we'd uh, we needed to reach a
g stationary orbit of thirty five thousand, eight hundred kilometers
or twenty two thousand, two hundred forty five miles. Uh.
That's a big tower. That's a big tower. And even
today we're waiting on carbon nano technology to catch up

(53:14):
with the dream man. I've heard some criticisms of even
that speculation. It's like even carbon carbon nanotubes are not
going to save us. Some people think that building a
space elevator is really just impossible from a material's perspective.
So we we're still trying to figure out how to
you know, violate the pieces of the earth, how how

(53:34):
how much we can bake that stone to make it
serve our purposes here maybe if it's well baked enough.
So your earlier, earlier attempts to guess the tower's height
are based in you know, older and Western view of history,
one in which such wonders of the Bible were a
matter of actual history and could conceivably be uncovered and found,

(53:54):
and later attempts were more in the spirit of a
thought experiment. So I'm not gonna go through all of them.
But if you crush the cubits, depending on you know,
where you're getting your figures from, your tower height figures
might hit any of the following sixt that doesn't sound
like it reaches the heavens. Well, it's still big, still big,

(54:15):
one point three miles high, one point six, three point six,
four point six, and then eight miles So at this
point you're in territory with the birds. Yeah, but but
you're uh, and the thing is that eight miles high,
of course, you're still far short of that that space

(54:35):
elevator that I mentioned earlier, and again the Burj Khalifa
is uh two thousand, seven hundred and seventeen feet tall
and that's roughly half a mile. So, as I said,
all of this is just a matter of trying to
translate old systems of measurement into new. However, here's another approach,
and this this came to us by late material scientist

(54:56):
and author J. E. Gordon. He wrote a book back
in the day titled Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down? Uh.
And it's it's a wonderful book. You can I was
looking through it on on Google Books. It's out there
in various formats. You can pick up a used coffee
really easily. Uh. And he's he's cited in a Uh.
He's often cited for his comments on the tower. His

(55:18):
book is not primarily about the tower, but he touches
on it a couple of times. Uh. He doesn't go
all in, but he does share the basic idea. Quote. Now,
brick and stone weigh about one and twenty pounds per
cubic foot or two thousand uh kilograms per meter, and
the crushing strength of these materials is generally rather better

(55:40):
than six thousand pounds for square inch. Elementary arithmetic shows
us that a tower with parallel walls could have been
built to a height of seven thousand feet that's two
kilometers one point three miles before the bricks at the
bottom would be crushed. So that's higher than I would
have expected. Yeah, but he also points out that, yeah,

(56:01):
with a broad enough base, you could have built as
high as Mount Everest. I mean, if you again, this
is thought experiment, land, if you're just saying sky's a limit.
I got this enormous plane, and somehow I can get
the materials there. Sure you could build at least as
high as Mount Everest at twenty nine thousand eight ft
or five point four miles eight kilometers. So the pyramid approach, Yeah,

(56:25):
just if you have enough space and enough slave labor
to do it, he says. Quote. Thus, a simple tower,
preferably with a broad base and tapered toward the top,
could well have been built to such a height that
the men of Shannar would have run short of oxygen
and had difficulty in breathing before the brick walls were
crushed beneath their own dead weight. So there you go,

(56:46):
a little physics breakdown on the Tower of Battle and
what would what was conceivably or even inconceivably possible. So Robert,
you're telling me they really did build a tower to them? Uh,
just just it's just an eye of what's possible, you
know at that point, if you're gonna go ahead and
build on those things. When I just impoured a mountain,

(57:07):
you can just cut off a mountain at the base
and drag it over to where you need it. Yeah,
but you're not really it's not really flipping off God properly, right,
because the whole thing is this is a mountain you built.
So you're going with the angry Nimrod interpretation here where
he's got spite because of the flood. I do like it.
I kind of want this to be an Aeronowski film,
you know, the angry Russell Crow Nimrod who's on a

(57:29):
mission of vengeance against God at the top of the tower.
Are you not threatened? Al Right? Well, at this point
we should we should get into the language. Okay, so
this is gonna be the last thing we discussed here today.
But yeah, the the idea of the confusion of tongues
is clearly central to the Babel myth, Right, it's that

(57:50):
it's this ideological purpose. Like, like we discussed, it's an
obvious fact of nature that people speak different languages in
different places. Why is that? Why doesn't everybody speak the
same language? It would be so much easier if everybody
spoke the same language. So how come that in the case? Indeed,
that's the basic question, like what why do we have
all these languages? To begin with? Uh, let's let's try

(58:12):
and sort of answer that question, the same question that's
being asked and answered and then answered by the myth
but with their modern understanding. So, according to the Linguistic
Society of America, humans currently have roughly six thousand, nine
hundred and nine distinct languages. Each of these falls into
one of two hundred and fifty language families. For instance,
the Indo European language group includes some two hundred languages,

(58:36):
and they're not evenly spread out either. Europe has two
hundred and thirty while Asia has two thousand, one hundred
ninety seven. Papua New Guinea alone has eight hundred and
thirty two. Yeah, and I know what you you might
be thinking, I said, all right, so they're similar, die, Yeah,
they sure they have just just eight hundred thirty two
shades of the same color. But no, these are in

(58:57):
thirty to forty distinct language groups. So it just goes
to show it's not it's not just based on how
far people are spread, their number of other factors. Now,
it's obvious to some extent that languages change over time,
and you can probably guess that new languages are produced generally,
not by people planning out a language, sitting down and

(59:19):
doing the esperanto kind of thing, cleon or what have you. Right,
though created languages do exist, they're not generally spoken as
people's native native tongue languages evolve, right, yeah, yeah, So
that in the roots of realizing this go back to
the rough observations of earlier man. So you take Greek

(59:40):
and Latin, for instance, they show similarities and this led
them any to assume that Latin came from Greek, but
it didn't both emerge from from older Indo European tongues,
perhaps according to to some theorist Indo Hittite. Now, other
similar languages were often dismissed as the same tongue. So,
for instance, the Romans often considered just all bar barbarians

(01:00:02):
spoke Barbarian, when, of course you had various groups and
various languages in play. And by the Middle Ages there
was an increased Western interest in the language, but this
often entailed such a doomed ventures as the attempt to
root all European tongues in Hebrew, and Hebrews not directly
related to any of them, because it's a Semitic language. Yeah,
so I imagine that was a religiously motivated quest exactly,

(01:00:25):
kind of like taking your myth on a stick and
you know, running around through history. So language changes over time,
sometimes fairly rapidly and in many ways. Just consider how
different English is today compared to a few centuries ago
with the Canterbury Tales. You know, you have to have
a translation of it really to read it, or or
a proper understanding of this older version of English. And

(01:00:47):
yet on the other hand, US languages like Japanese, which
has apparently changed very little in a thousand years now,
isn't that an interesting problem? Why do some languages change
faster than others? Yeah? And indeed, and then you have
to realize, well, there there's not just one change. There
all these different changes. So there's lexical change phonetic and

(01:01:08):
phonological change, spelling changes, semantic changes, uh, syntactic changes. And
on top of this, there's this concept of linguistic drift,
both short term uneddirectional drift and long term cyclic drift.
So we might have to have Christian jump in on
a future episode because I know he's very interested in
linguistic studies. Uh. But suffice to say that large scale

(01:01:32):
linguistic shifts often occur in response to social, economic, and
political pressures. So invasion, displacement, colonization, um, you know, enslavement.
The history books are full of examples. Uh. New technologies
also require new words and new ways of talking to
each other. But the breakup of language is more complicated

(01:01:52):
than you might think. So you might think that if
speaker of language A and speaker of language BE can
understand each other, then they speak the same tongue. But
this isn't always the case, and in some cases speaker
BE can understand speaker A, but not the other way around.
So to come back to the Tower of Babble and
the confusion of tongues here, UH is an instantaneous splintering

(01:02:13):
of language possible and not really not the outside of
some sort of magic or perhaps crazy ancient alien technology
scheme right where they're like zapping language centers of the brain.
But certainly, if you don't interpret the Tower of Babble
story to literally, you could say that God just simply
did something else to displace people and cease the building
of the tower with cataclysms, war, et cetera, and that

(01:02:36):
these traumas and displacements are what splintered language in a
way that matches up with our understanding. Yeah, I think
this will go along with something I want to get
into in just a minute. When I look at at
an interesting article about this that I came across, it
makes it an interesting bit of sense, doesn't it when
you when you think of the towers a means of
reaching God or technological greatness. The displacement and spread of

(01:02:56):
human civilization leads to the birth of numerous languages. Culture
is in modes of thinking. They make such a unity,
such vision that kind of humanist dream of of ruggle
the elder. It makes it just incredibly difficult to accomplish now,
as we see in every corner of our world today.
Right now. First, I want to look at this article
that I found that I thought was interesting about the
idea of the evolution of language and how that happens.

(01:03:20):
Um and also comparisons between the way languages evolved in
the way organisms evolved. But also we should keep in
mind to come back to the idea that what if
the confusion of tongues has benefits as well. Now, first
I just wanted to look at this interesting article from
Plos Biology in two thousand and eight by John Whitfield

(01:03:41):
that was called across the Curious Parallel of Language and
species evolution. Now this this wasn't a study, This was
like a feature article that was talking about some ongoing
research at the time. I thought that was pretty cool.
So the author, John Whitfield, has um It starts off
by talking about how in eighty seven Charles Darwin wrote

(01:04:01):
a letter to his sister where he talked about the
ideas of this linguist named Sir John Herschel. Now Herschel
wasn't just a linguist. He was a polymath. He did
all kinds of stuff. But Herschel had a thesis about language,
and the thesis was languages, the languages that exist today
were descended from a common ancestor. Now, the idea of

(01:04:21):
a common descent of languages. I think it seems fairly
intuitive to us now, but it encountered problems in the
nineteenth century, and one of which was uh that the
evolution of Earth's diverse languages, as different as they were,
would make the Earth much older than people generally believed
it to be at the time for religious reasons such
as Bishop Usher's Biblical chronology, which you know, made the

(01:04:42):
Earth about six to ten thousand years old. Right. So
by Darwin's time, linguists already had some success tracing the
genealogies of languages, so it was clear, for example, that
many of the languages of Western Europe, such as French, Spanish,
and Italian, had origins ancient Latin. That's not even that
hard to observe, right You might imagine just sort of

(01:05:04):
figuring this out by looking at the languages themselves, but
one could also see the interbreeding of languages with with
different ancestors. For example, you've got modern English. This has
a strong base in Germanic languages, but you also can
see that it clearly has input from Romance languages like
French and Latin and Spanish as well. It's also fairly

(01:05:26):
clear how this usually happened since we had textual records
reflecting changes in language use over time. So the basic
principle was discent with modification. People pass on their languages
to the next generation. But with each generation, small changes
creep in. New words appear, old words foality use, or

(01:05:46):
become pronounced differently. New grammar rules start to come into use,
and eventually enough of these changes accumulate that it would
be difficult for a person speaking the ancient parent language
to understand a person speaking the modern descendent language. That
they would talk to each other and they wouldn't get it.
And so Darwin started to wonder, I wonder if new
species could evolve by descent with modification the same way

(01:06:09):
languages do. And now modern linguists have quantitative analytical tools
that can help them understand how languages change over time,
and you can use very similar tools to investigate changes
in genomes over time. So a lot of this article
then ends up comparing genetic change or genomic change to

(01:06:29):
language change. What are what are the points of similarity
and what are the points of difference? Um and so
Whitfield quotes an evolutionary biologists named Mark Pagel of the
University of Reading, who says languages are extraordinarily like genomes.
We think that they could be very that there could
be very general laws of lexical evolution to rival those

(01:06:49):
of genetic evolution. So there are ways in which language
evolution and genomic evolution are similar. They're gonna be other
ways that they're different, and we should acknowledge that in
a minute. But one way is that the most basic
or most important components change the slowest. So in biology,
this is gonna be genes that are used constantly by

(01:07:10):
nearly all organisms. One example would be genes involved in
protein synthesis. You've got to do this all the time,
so they just change very slowly, and for this reason
they can be used to trace genomic relationships way deep
into history. And in linguistic this would be the words
you use all the time, like pronouns and numbers. If
you think about the way language is change, if the

(01:07:32):
language is going to be changing over time, what are
the things that are most likely to have discontinuity from
the way your parents spoke. It's gonna be like less
common sayings or new expressions or something like that. Another
parallel he talks about is that the varying rates of
evolution in both languages in genomes that they can alter

(01:07:54):
over time. So uh. In biology, it looks like that
there is generally a slow and steady rate of change
in a line of descent that is then suddenly punctuated
by occasionally brief periods of more rapid change. This might happen,
for example, when you get various populations of the same
species that are suddenly cut off from one another and

(01:08:14):
unable to inter breed and forced into different living conditions.
So you might think about our episode on the London
Underground mosquito. You've got the surface Coulex pipiens mosquito, and
part of that population appears to break off into a
subgroup that gets trapped into the London underground, which selects
for different traits. You've got to like the dark, You've
got to really have a taste for rat and human

(01:08:36):
blood instead of bird blood. Uh. And eventually, the version
of Coulex pipiens that's that's accumulating these different adaptations is
a different species within a surprisingly short amount of time,
and they can no longer successfully breed and produce fertile
offspring with one another. With the surface population, it looks
like a similar kind of thing happens with languages. Populations

(01:08:58):
that speak them accumul late small changes over long periods
of time, but there may be more rapid speciation events
eventually after a population splits off. So if you take
a large group of English speakers and you split them
up into smaller groups, and you put them on different islands,
so they never talk to each other, you can expect
their rate of differentiation and how their language has change

(01:09:21):
is going to accelerate. Now this isn't exactly a dissenting opinion,
but I want to throw this bit in from the
Linguistic Society of America on the diversity of language compared
to biological diversity. So the languages of the world seem
amazingly diverse, but when you compare them to communication systems
in general, they're all remarkably similar to one another. Quote.

(01:09:42):
Human language differs from the communicative behavior of every other
known organism in a number of fundamental ways, all shared
across languages, they say. Quote, human language is so different
from any other known system in the natural world that
the narrowly constrained ways in which one grammar can differ
from another fade into insignificance. For a native of Milan,

(01:10:04):
the differences between the speech of that city and that
of Turin may loom large, but for a visitor from
Kula Lumpur, both are simply Italian. Similarly, the differences we
find across the world in Grammars seem very important. But
for an outside observer, say a biologist studying communication among
living beings in general, or this is me, but dare say,

(01:10:25):
you know, an angelic destroyer sent down or a Babylonian
god quote, all our relatively minor variations on the single
theme of human language. That's interesting. Yeah, stuff that may
appear very diverse to us because we are so highly
attuned to the differences between it, just from an outside
encoding perspective is not all that different. Yeah. They're all

(01:10:47):
speaking Earth anyway, they're all speaking human. Yeah, so what
drives language change? Like? Well, again we've touched on on
on some of the reasons. But but what what you're
you're taking your research show? Well, obviously this is not
at a settled issue. I mean, there are all kinds
of things that drive changes in language. Um, some appear
to be these fairly random kind of influences and changes

(01:11:09):
in pronunciation and stuff like that. Sociolinguists and this is
this is a point that um Whitfield makes in his article.
Sociolinguists would point out that sort of random artifacts of
culture can influence language trends, and so they might give
the example of the idiosyncratic speech patterns of a very
high status person or social group get copied a lot,

(01:11:31):
and that can become the sort of driving factor in
the way languages change over time. Imagine if Marlon Brando's
the coolest guy in America and suddenly all all the
men in America start mumbling their words like him. Or
if you're if you're living in England and it's recently
been conquered by French aristocrats, suddenly you might you might

(01:11:52):
want to start incorporating more Francophonic features into your speech,
so you talk more like the new bosses and the
new rich people. Your company is purchased by a different
company and they have different bits of business jargon, and
suddenly you're speaking like that at home. That forbid, that
would be that would be grounds for the confusion of

(01:12:12):
tongue in business. Uh. There are even ideas that genetics
could influence language change. Not I think it's not strongly.
It's not believed that this is strongly determinative by everybody
that I know of who said, like, you know that
you have genes for speaking Chinese or something. But in
a more subtle way, it appears that there could be

(01:12:33):
certain types of genes that favor the development of certain
types of languages. So, for example, it appears there could
be the certain ancestral genes that correlate with the development
of what's known as tonal languages versus non tonal languages.
And a tonal language is one in which saying basically
the same word, the same sequence of phonemes with a

(01:12:55):
different pitch or tone has a different meaning. Chinese is
a good example of this. Yeah, Like they're multiple ways
to say ma. We say my in our tongue and
it means one thing, but it can mean you you
say it wrong. You might think you're saying a mother
in Chinese, but you're actually saying horse or himp. Is
that a direct horse or himp? Well that's that's that's

(01:13:15):
just three of them, mother, horse, and himp, But then
their additionals as well. So can you do the different pronunciations?
How what does it sound like? Well, you have there's
like rising around it. So there's like and there's there's
like ma ma ma ma u. Those are just a few,
but just just an idea of just some of the tones.
And that's why a language like Mandarin Chinese is it

(01:13:36):
can be so difficult for uh, for say, an English
speaker to pick up on. I mean, that sounds amazingly
difficult to learn if you don't come from a language
that has tonal qualities to it. Yeah, we well, you know,
the thing is, we don't, and we do. I thought
about this a lot because certainly your tone in saying
certain words in English can can have a very important

(01:13:59):
effect act on what you're saying. Uh, not so much
changing the definition of a word, but changing the connotations.
So so it's not yet it's not a direct comparison,
but it's it's kind of like the the the the
importance of tone in English taken to a different level altogether. Yeah,
that is interesting. But anyway, so the idea here is that, um,

(01:14:23):
not so much that you would have a gene that
tells you to speak a certain to speak a language
like that, but that there are certain genes that appear
to be geographically correlated with areas where people had developed
languages with tonal features, so that could play a role.
But another interesting feature is the fact that if languages

(01:14:44):
evolved like organisms, if this is, if this analogy is
correct at all, they're more like the evolution of bacteria
than the evolution of say, complex mammals, because languages can
trade horizontally, right, The transmission of language is is not
just vertical across generations. You don't just directly inherent your

(01:15:04):
language from your parents. You largely do, but it's also horizontal.
You get new words, new speaking patterns, new grammatical rules
from the people around you, and you can trade them off.
So it is more like the horizontal gene transfer you'd
see in microbial life. That's true, that's a good point.
And then, of course I think it's not just the
people around you. It's the TV programs around you as well.

(01:15:27):
Uh and and and another extent, the books you read.
You have all these these influences that are are taking
what you were essentially given by those who reared you.
And uh, and you're you're recreating it every day. Yeah,
So in the creation of new languages, I think the
the analogy of evolution by natural selection or maybe not
natural selection, evolution by some kind of selection. Evolution by

(01:15:50):
vague selection is somewhat a good analogy in other ways
it's not a perfect analogy. But I also have a
question for any linguists out there listening. So we've talked
about the difficulties of identifying, you know, or the idea
of a species in biology before. In biology, the species
distinction is usually taken to mean that two different species
are animals or organisms that cannot breed and produce fertile offspring.

(01:16:15):
So if we follow the analogy between genomics and linguistics,
what is the equivalent distinction between different species of language?
I mean, you might be tempted to say, well, it's
when you can't understand one another, But there are varying
degrees of understanding, right, you might sort of understand somebody.
So anyway, if you have a good answer for that,

(01:16:35):
you might want to email us it blow the mind
at how stuff works dot com to let us know.
All right, as we begin to close out here, and
I want to talk very briefly about a book and
an idea that I imagine a number of you out
there have been thinking about the whole time. And that's
Neil Stevenson's Cyberpunk Classics No Crash. I've never read this,
but I've always meant to. Oh yeah, this is the one,
of course, It's it's a wild book. It's you've got

(01:16:56):
so many fun elements going on in a hero protagonist
with samurai sword. But the part that's stuck with me
the most, and the part that that that that jives
with today's episode is this important plot point about about
this uh, this this this thing that's referred to as
the nam Shub of Inky who mentioned earlier this is

(01:17:18):
the Sumerian god. So the idea here and this is
like the this is the version of it that that
Stevenson plays within the book. Is he of this ancient
Sumerian or language and it allowed brain function to be
programmed using audio stimuli in conjunction with a d N
a altering virus. So Sumerian culture in this scenario UH

(01:17:40):
is organized around these programs known as ME, which were
administered by priests. Oh yeah, the ME. So there in
one of the things I mentioned earlier, the the Golden
Age passage in the Sumerian epic. There, I think there
is a recital of m A. That's that's it. Yeah,
that that's what he's playing off of in this So

(01:18:01):
Inky this uh this this important figure this uh this
God develops a counter virus known as the nam shub
and then he delivers uh this to stop the Sumerian
language from being processed by the brain, and this leads
to the development of other less literal languages, giving birth
to the babble myth. So this would be a case

(01:18:23):
where the confusion of languages as described by Inky confusing
the tongues in this epic is actually a benevolent thing.
So yeah, the idea that Stevenson is rolling out here
is that if you have a mono linguistic culture, it's
like having like a massive farm that's only one crop
because you're susceptible to a single virus or pathogen or

(01:18:46):
parasite is wiping it out. They specifically mentioned say, you know,
uh Nazism coming in, and if if it resonates with
a few people, if everyone has the same language and
essentially the same culture, then that that that harmful idea,
that that that linguistic meme can just run rampant and
eat everyone up. But if you have these it's like

(01:19:08):
having a forest fire breakout in a global forest with
you know, without any streams or planes to break it up,
everything's going to burn. I love this idea, and I
think this is fascinating. I think it is a great
case for preserving the diversity of human language and culture.
I mean, I think sometimes it is tempting. I think,
wouldn't it be great if the whole world had one

(01:19:30):
language in one culture. It would be so easy for
us all to get along. We could do trade would
be so much easier, we could just really you know,
like it seems utopian when you think about it, but
I absolutely see some merit in the idea that that
would make us much more uniquely vulnerable to a particularly
bad linguistic or cultural program that gets instituted that catches

(01:19:55):
on easily. I mean, it's easy to think about memes
like Nazism or like a really awful interpretation of a
religion or something like that, And there are ideas that
can be captivating to people that they feel very entranced
by and beholden to um, but they're utterly destructive. And
if you have these divisions of culture and divisions of

(01:20:17):
language where you can't play exactly the same linguistic meme
on somebody else's brain. It's a it's a little bit
of an immunity barrier, or what if the what if
the pathogen here is a is an intense desire to
build a giant tower into the sky, and maybe ultimately
the god or gods in the scenario saying well, look
at these people, they're totally wasting their time building this

(01:20:38):
tower to nowhere. We better break that up before they
hurt themselves. The only humane thing to do is to
knock it down, and thereafter called the land Overthrow. All right, Well,
there you have it, everybody. The Tower of Babel, artistic interpretations,
mathematical interpretations, linguistic interpretations, and hey, there is a lot

(01:20:59):
of awesome other Tower of Babel literature and legend out
there that we didn't even have time to get into today.
So if you want to write us about your favorite
Tower of Babel stories from or or equivalent legends from
other other types of literature mythological history, let us know
about that. That's right in the meantime, Heading over to
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that's what we
will find all the podcast episodes, including the Great Flood

(01:21:22):
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ut Aground Mosquito as well. You'll find those episodes and
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(01:21:55):
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