You mention babel so i will conclude by mentioning Excavations in and around the ruins of ancient Babylon have revealed the sites of several ziggurats, or pyramid like, staged temple-towers including the ruind temple of Etemenanki. One fragment found states “The building of this temple offended the gods. In a night they threw down what had been built/ They scattered them abroad, and made strange their speech. The progress they impeded |Bible and Spade, 1938, S. L. Caiger, page 29
Caiger says this fragment refers to a ziggurat like the Etemenanki and other Babylonian ones. He doesn't associate it directly. Caiger's fragment quote comes from George Smith's The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1880, co-written with A.H. Sayce), p. 163-165. Smith excavated the Assyrian Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh, and this seems to be the origin of the fragment which, on p. 163, is said to "shockingly mutilated." 'Shockingly mutilated' fragments are hard to read and meaningfully interpret (cf. Preface, p. ix-x). Smith/Sayce may have been a little over-zealous in finding a direct link between it and the Bible's tale of the tower of Babel.
An article by the Louvre titled 'Modern-era Travelers and Archaeological Excavations at Babylon' made this comment:
"In 1875 English Assyriologist George Smith had published a book titled, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, Containing the Description of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, the Time of the Patriarchs, and Nimrod; Babylonian Fables, and Legends of the Gods, from the Cuneiform Inscriptions. The promise of the title was a little ambitious: ancient Mesopotamia literature contains no mention of original sin, no history of the building of the tower, no Biblical patriarchs or Nimrod. However, the parallel of the deluge in the Epic of Gilgamesh with the Biblical Flood was itself sufficiently interesting, an interest that would only grow as exaggerated links between Babylon and the Bible were asserted."
The online Catholic Encyclopedia (1917) says:
"The descendants of Noah had migrated from the "east" ( Armenia ) first southward, along the course of the Tigris, then westward across the Tigris into "a plain in the land of Sennar". As their growing number forced them to live in localities more and more distant from their patriarchal homes, "they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven ; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands." The work was soon fairly under way; "and they had brick instead of stones, and slime (asphalt) instead of mortar." But God confounded their tongue, so that they did not understand one another's speech, and thus scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city.
"This is the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel. Thus far no Babylonian document has been discovered which refers clearly to the subject. Authorities like George Smith, Chad Boscawen, and Sayce believed they had discovered a reference to the Tower of Babel; but Fr. Delitzch pointed out that the translation of the precise words which determine the meaning of the text is most uncertain (Smith-Delitzsch. "Chaldaische Genesis", 1876, 120-124; Anmerk., p. 310)."
I ought to point out that I haven't found a copy of the German translation of Smith's work where Delitzsch discusses the uncertainty of the text, so I can't be sure if he's referring to the same text as the one above or a different one.
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SOURCES
Caiger's quote in context. Scroll to the bottom.
P. 4 - Classic quote: