Historical story

In search of the Tower of Babel

Did the Tower of Babel really exist? And did building it cause confusion? Salomon Kroonenberg goes in search of the origin of human multilingualism, using the Biblical story as a guideline. From scratch, and without knowing how his exploration would end. Kroonenberg's amazement cannot help but stimulate your imagination.

Why don't we just speak one language worldwide? Wouldn't that be much more convenient than the six thousand currently in circulation? As a boy Salomon Kroonenberg (1947) often thought about this, together with his grandfather who spoke fourteen languages ​​himself and had a mysterious library full of foreign linguistic books. But they never came to an answer. The Bible does offer an explanation, in Genesis chapter 11. Whether you were raised a believer or an unbeliever, you have probably heard the story of the Tower of Babel. The story in which God punishes mankind for its pride, and sows confusion of tongues:

"It happened that the whole earth was one language and one of words. It came to pass as they went from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they settled there. . . . They said, Come let us build us a city and a tower with its top in heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves, that we may not be scattered over all the earth. Yahweh (sic) came down to see the city and the tower that the people were building. Yahweh said:(…) Come let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they no longer understand each other's language. Yahweh scattered them from there over all the earth, and they ceased to build the city.

What is the historical core of this Bible story? Did the Tower of Babel really exist? And did building it cause confusion? It intrigued Kroonenberg from an early age, precisely because so many details were missing and this story seemed never to have been tested by science. But when he had to make a choice of study, he decided to go into geology, and the evolution of the human language ability ended up on a side track. Fifty years later, Kroonenberg is now Professor Emeritus of Geology at TU Delft, he decided to make up for what he missed.

In The Courtyard of Babel he goes in search of the origin of human multilingualism, using the tower of Babel as a guideline. He just started, from scratch, and without knowing how the voyage of discovery would end. And that is noticeable:every sentence expresses its amazement. You will learn that the old Bible story can sometimes be filled in with facts, but is often overtaken by geological knowledge and archaeological finds. Just as the creation story clashes with Darwin's theory of evolution, Kroonenberg says, the Tower of Babel also clashes with what is known so far about the evolution of languages.

The book stimulates your imagination and creates the tension that you experienced as a child when you were carried away by a historical masterpiece by Thea Beckman. Kroonenberg turns out to be a good storyteller, although the information density is sometimes a bit high. His fascination begins with the Tower of Babel, but along the way he discovers and describes more and more peoples and languages, not only in Mesopotamia, but all over the world. The jumps between then and now also make you dizzy. But no problem, to get the right timeline in your head you just have to read the book chronologically. And it is precisely this information density that makes the book suitable as a reference work. So put it in the cupboard after you've read it, so that you can flip through it every now and then.


Eighty kilometers below Baghdad

The Tower of Babel has existed, appears early in the book. Babylon originated about fifty miles south of Baghdad in Iraq, on the Euphrates. Shinar is a corruption of Sanhara, the old name for Mesopotamia, the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris. The Mesopotamian plain could have been populated at the earliest six thousand years before our era, because only then did it recover from the last ice age, Kroonenberg supposes. The discoverers of the area were people of the so-called Ubaid culture, and 'the East', where they came from, would have been the Zagros Mountains in north-western Iran.

However, Babylon was not the first city:the name of the city does not appear until around 2400 BCE on cuneiform clay tablets found in the thousand-year-older and nearby city of Uruk. The first clay tablets from Babylon itself only date from 1812 BC, and the tower was not built until seven hundred years later.

Deciphering the cuneiform script

This revelation immediately brought Kroonenberg to a new question:do those clay tablets from Uruk and Babylon represent the original language of man? What language was this actually? To do this, it was necessary to be able to decipher the cuneiform writing, and this only started at the end of the sixteenth century. How exactly that happened is such an impressive and exciting story that Kroonenberg has devoted an entire chapter to it, which really reads like a detective. The key to decipherment turned out to be a gigantic cuneiform inscription in the Zagros Mountains in Iran. A text of 15 by 25 meters, engraved in a steep rock face of massive limestone.

Kroonenberg describes how explorers have puzzled for more than two hundred years since this discovery until they had decoded the inscription and thus the cuneiform writing. Once the time had come, it turned out that the Mesopotamians – and therefore also the Babylonians – spoke several languages ​​even before the Tower of Babel was built. The Bible story turns out to be exactly the wrong way to represent reality:building the tower actually contributed to the emergence of a common language. Before 1100 BC, Babylon had several languages, but when all those foreigners started building a tower together, they started speaking the same language, a language that would be spoken as a common language in Mesopotamia for centuries:Aramaic. A surprising turn in the story, which Kroonenberg himself had not foreseen.

Glory faded

These are just a few stories of his journey, which aptly portray the mysticism but also the sadness of transience. Now there is little left of Babylon's former glory. The city was looted, destroyed and rebuilt several times between 2400 and 600 BC. Around 600 BCE, the city experienced its heyday, the time when the city is said to have been decorated with its famous Hanging Gardens according to mythology. However, no scientific evidence for this has been found. The glory was short-lived, however:Alexander the Great destroyed the city by 300 BC and dumped the remains of the tower on the dump.

Now there is so little left of the city that Unesco has twice refused its place on the World Heritage list. One hundred years ago, the ancient city could still be excavated. But in the 1980s, dictator Saddam Hussein built picnic areas in the midst of the remains, replenishing ancient ruins with modern materials to make them look like Babylonian houses again. He also built museums full of replicas of art treasures. These museums were looted after Hussein's deposition.

But the humiliation wasn't over yet. In 2003, the Americans set up their base there – the city is strategically distant from Baghdad – and poured concrete on it, for parking lots and helicopter fields. They used the dump with the remains of the tower to fill their HESCO containers, a kind of bunkers. Pieces of glazed tiles, remnants of clay tablets and a single Greek coin glisten among the rubble, Kroonenberg writes. The Flemish Assyriologist Tom Boiy compares the courtyard of the Tower of Babel with Ground Zero. Babylon seems to have disappeared, Kroonenberg writes, but a large part of the city lies beneath the water table that has never been discovered. Dig twelve meters deep, and history will reveal itself.

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