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Tales ... The tower of Babel, between myth and reality. (II)

By Maximilian Lormier

How Etemenanki became the tower of Babel.

Many passages in the Bible were written Babylon. Anxious not to lose their ideological foundation, religious and cultural Jewish scholars have collected what is most often transmitted by the oral route to transcribe, like that of the Mesopotamian civilizations, Sumer since, compiling written and archive all kinds of works or treated (scientific and judicial). The writings of certain passages, like the Flood and the lex talionis (eye for eye, tooth for tooth), are imbued with myths and historical facts Mesopotamia. Thus we can say that Babylon and its myths have served as models for literary writings of the Old Testament .

Once entered Babylon, the Jewish people were deported, like many others, impressed by this turn of worship which stood majestically and familiarly the sky. At the top of the ziggurat was a temple high, built of bricks glazed blue, which shone by reflecting sunlight, omnipresent in this region of the globe.

But Babylon was also and above all the capital of a great empire of gigantic proportions. The city was alive with activity and noise. Thus, mingled travelers, merchants and prisoners who had the whole empire and neighboring kingdoms. Babylon was the center where they met all ancient cultures. The idea of mixing the language found in the biblical story has taken root at the foot of the ziggurat tower, which saw an explosion cultural and linguistic diversity at the heart of the city of Nebuchadnezzar II.

must be seen as the etymology of the name of the city of Babylon, the research idea, that before the Babylonian and Mesopotamian civilizations more generally, to achieve their gods. The name of Babylon is from Akkadian Bab- Ilim which, itself, comes from Sumerian Ka-ding-ra and both mean "Gate of God". Babylon, as it was called today, we derived from the Greek who had translated the Akkadian name in Babylon . The name Babel , he does not come from the name of the city, but comes from Hebrew balal meaning "confused", "scramble". The tower of Babel symbolized according to the Bible's vanity and arrogance of the first hero Nimrod and that men as a whole. Before the construction of the tower, the men all spoke the same language, the same as God used to speak to Adam and Eve. The tower was designed for cheeky sacred text, like the ziggurat, to reach the heavens and so to assert equal with God himself. We all know the end of this episode where God confounded the languages to end their business by spreading exaggerated men on earth. Also, as stated in these terms practically the biblical text, this tower was called Babel ( Balal ) because that was where God confounded the languages.

The mixture of languages: an invention Mesopotamia?

As we said, many of the Mesopotamian stories are found in the biblical text. The main feature of the great civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates was compiled very early, writing, libraries, stories and myths that went back for the most part, the time when men of this region were handed their oral history. Transcribed on clay tablets with cuneiform writings're saying, these stories are preserved, and since the first excavations until today, archaeologists have reached hundreds of thousands. Although we are able to translate, much remains hidden in the soil and the archaeological museum storerooms around the world. Some of these tablets are more or less well preserved, and often leaving only fragments of text to decipher.

epigraphists Thus did they were surprised to find a text where it mentions the god Enki god who fashioned the image of man then created, scattering, so quite similar to the Lord, men on earth. Enki wanted to break and the search for excesses of humanity who ran hopelessly into a new loss, Enlil, the god of gods in Sumerian, which may at any time decide the destruction of men " Enki changed the language in their mouths. Until he had placed them there (foreign languages), the language of humanity was a . .

What deduct?

If the tower of Babel is the tower of the god Marduk ziggurat etymologically speaking, it is really the idea - inconceivable for Jews - that the building was function to reach the divine world. The Marduk ziggurat was the center of attention and charmed travelers of all cultures. In Babylon, and especially around this religious center that managed to religious services, crafts and trade, the Jews were marked by the multitude of cultures and languages converged, as a single being, to this sacred sanctuary where we inquired about the benevolence of Marduk. Some Jews have also been found in the omnipotence of God and monotheism in this latent image of Yahweh. Finally, it is also in Babylon that the writing of the Bible took a decisive turn: the Jewish scholars of Mesopotamian culture impregnated wrote the holy text via myths and customs of Babylonian, while adapting them to their own perception of their religion and their culture.

biblical sources.

Everyone was of one language and few words. As men moved to the East, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they settled there. They said one to another: "Come! make bricks and bake them in a fire! . And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. They said: Come! build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven Let us make a name, lest we be scattered all over the earth! .

Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men had built. And the Lord said: "Here are all one people and spoke one language, and this is the beginning of their business! Now, nothing will be impossible for them. Come on! Descend! And there confuse their language so they may not understand one another. "Yahweh scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth and they stopped building the city. Also named Does it Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the inhabitants of the earth and hence it's scattered over the face of the earth.

Genesis XI, 1-9

Glossary:

Old Testament : Gather all the biblical writings predate the life of Jesus.

Enki: Enki was a Sumerian god, brother god Enlil and freshwater, creator of humanity he fashioned from clay and blood. There was no lack of courage and compassion, going several times to help his creation threatened with extermination. His worship was at Eridu, who received the first royalty and civilization.

Enlil : tutelary god of the Sumerian religion in the third millennium before being replaced by Marduk. His worship was held in Nippur, the religious capital of Mesopotamia important. Investigator of the major disasters that befell on men like the famous flood.

Genesis: The Book of Genesis (Greek: "birth," "beginning", "source", "origin", "cause") is the first book of the Torah (Pentateuch), so the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and the Christian Bible. Genesis tells the story of the foundations of humanity on earth by God and history of the Jewish people to Egypt.

Hammurabi : Towards 1792-1750 BC. AD. First great king of Babylon, through his conquests, made the most powerful city Babylon of Mesopotamia. Known for his intelligence and diplomatic tactics, he is the creator of the famous code that bears his name, presentation today at the Louvre.

Herodotus : Toward 485-425. Greek historian, called the "Father of History" by Cicero. Traveler, he traveled empires and interested companies and their stories that he compiled in his book Historiai (Survey).

Kish : City of central Mesopotamia was a great military and political capital of the third millennium. Submit and Kish have meant having power over the region of the ancient land of Sumer. She was also the birthplace of the great Sargon of Akkad, who founded the first empire in the known world.

Marduk God of Babylon Polias, who became the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon from the second millennium and whose temple was Esagil ("temple at the top level").

Mithras: God Indo-Iranian. His cult was born in the early second millennium, crossed the Zagros mountains and the Mediterranean to win in Rome as a rival cult of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries AD. Cult based on secret initiation rites and oral, there remains nothing written, but fairly abundant iconography.

Nabopolassar : Toward 625-605. Founder of the New Babylonian empire (Neo-Babylonian) in the late seventh century BC. AD. He put end to the Assyrian empire, seizing Nineveh in 612.

Nebuchadnezzar II: King of Babylon, he succeeded his father Nabopolassar. Both enlightened ruler and warrior, he distinguished himself by developing major operations in Babylon (walls, shrines, temples) and formed a vast empire including Mesopotamia to the Levant. The capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple of the Lord smote the king of Babylon to posterity through the echoes of it by the Bible.

Zoroastrianism: Founded by Zarathustra in the first millennium BC. AD religion based on worship of the god Ahura Mazda, which will include the protector of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty.

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Tower of Babel, between myth and reality. (I)

By Maximilian Lormier.

The construction of the tower of Babel is one of the most significant episodes in Genesis. There, God confused the language of men and scattered to the four corners of the earth. The story of the Tower of Babel is still debate among historians, archaeologists and theologians. The brainchild of the Jewish population deported to Babylon the Great from a huge building that really existed, what was the true image of the Tower of Babel?

The story of a real tower.

Tower of Babel, as named in the Genesis, was in fact a landmark building of the Mesopotamian civilization, ie a ziggurat. In Babylon, the ziggurat was dedicated to the worship of the god Marduk . Built in stages, the building was made of adobe (sun dried) covered a wall of bricks are more resistant to the vagaries of time. The ziggurat has its origins in Mesopotamia during the period of the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III more commonly known) between the reign of King Ur-Nammu to 2112 BC. AD and the destruction of this empire around 2004. Religious buildings, the ziggurat marked pride and the power of a city and its god Polias.

Babylon is a city that is mentioned for the first time in the writings of the shelves mid-third millennium but who actually becomes a dominant power until the reign of the mighty conqueror and legislator Hammurabi (1792-1750). Thus became the god Marduk, the highest in the hierarchy of the pantheon Mesopotamian city since his dominating all of Mesopotamia. The shrine's god Babylon probably dates from this period because archeology has revealed that the sovereign was the investigator of several huge projects like construction of ziggurats, which we find traces in certain cities, in particular Kish, belonging to his great empire. It was not until the reign later, but so equally rich, from King Nebuchadnezzar II (circa 630-562 BC. AD) for the ziggurat in the city reaches its pedigree and it passes posterity by the biblical writings.

Archaeology of the ziggurat of Babylon.

When the first excavations were conducted by a German mission, that of Robert Koldewey on the presumed site of Babylon in the early twentieth century, archaeologists hoped to discover great riches buried and particularly the Hanging Gardens one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Tower of Babel described in the Bible. The excavation did not allow to discover the mythical gardens or any building that had looked like the tower of Babel, but assured of wonderful discoveries, such as the Ishtar Gate and the monstrous walls of the city that had enchanted Herodotus.

However, research from the tower of Babel did not remain fruitless. The excavators extricated the footprints in the soil of a large square shaped building that turned out to be, through research, the great ziggurat of the god Marduk. This imposing structure there were only a few brick foundations in the basement, but the ground track is still quite remarkable that one can, with satellite photos, to see very clearly. The tower was destroyed, the sources tell us, by Alexander the Great, who made Babylon the capital of his vast empire, wished to rebuild. The calculations now made from topographical surveys, field measurements and information taken from the shelves and other inscriptions, tend to define the ziggurat as having been a building of 90 square meters on a side, consisting 7-storey terraces built, bringing the building at a height between 66 and 90m. Cyclopean dimensions of the ziggurat made it visible for miles from the city and had to delight and impress visitors and foreigners who traveled to Babylon.

When myth and reality intersect.

The great ziggurat of Babylon was called the Etemenanki, literally " home, the foundation of heaven and earth . It is now considered part of the very famous biblical Tower of Babel. As its name suggests, Etemenanki was a link between the divine and human. This gateway to the scale of a god, used to facilitate the descent of Marduk with men and vice versa. The climax of this supreme god was around the reigns of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II, and attained such a degree of worship that religion, in those days, had some tendencies monotheists. If this arrangement religion does not finally took root, he left few traces conceptual found later in the cult of Mithra Asia Minor and Rome, or in the Zoroastrian religion . Jews deported to Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem in 597 and the destruction of the temple of Yahweh, were so heavily inspired by the worship of this god Hebrew theology and the writing of the Bible have been strongly marked.

(To be continued)

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Explorer

by Schiffer Liesel.

Their names Ida, Fanny, Alex, Karen, Emily, Rosie and Margaret, are European or American origins but most often preferred bitten by the love of travel and also one of the adventure: geographical, archaeological, ethnological, entomological, loving, sometimes together! All are distinguished by a strong character in the days of crinolines of Queen Victoria and later that same bell caps of the Roaring Twenties, where he did not yet good be an independent woman, zany freedom of movement, freedom at all ... Even though most remain steeped in colonialist principles shared by the majority of their contemporaries, each showing a genuine curiosity about the other, an appreciation the different landscapes, empathy for other cultures and peoples called "native", seen from the "developed" world ...

ago Daisy Bates, Irish orphan mysteriously stranded in Australia who invents an aristocratic past and finds its place among the Aborigines for which she plays the nurses, educators, anthropologists and even judges. And also the famous Alexandra David-Neel in search of spirituality and awareness of Tibet in a legend or Isabelle Eberhardt who gets lost in southern Algeria by force to navigate between the dredge in the souks of the Arab city, ecstasy Sufi mystic or the far less prestigious, alcohol in large doses, to the point of neglecting his talents pen. Not to mention Gertrude Bell, English friend of the Bedouin tribes, Colonel Lawrence and King Faisal of Iraq, the Caribbean Mary Seacole who discovers his talents as a nurse at the Crimean War, Britain and tongue-in-cheek Mary Kingsley who laughs at herself when she entertains the villagers watching the dangerous crossing by canoe rapids Ogooué in Gabon. Or Emily Hahn, an American who did not have cold feet since the 1930s, she became the concubine of the Chinese poet Sinmay Zau refugee in Japan with him, she tasted the pleasure of opium dangerous ... Despite their allure "Mary Poppins", one begins to dream and follow those thirty adventurers of the past throughout the globe, with the motto, that of one of them, Freya Stark, passionate Middle East: "The real vagrant, one whose trips are made for happiness, do not travel to flee but to seek. "

They have conquered the world, the great adventurers 1850-1950. Alexandra Lapierre, Christel Mouchard Arthaud, collection "Classics Illustrated", Paris, 2007.