Where was the Tower of Babel built? The Tower of Babel is neither a legend nor a myth
Tower of Babel.
The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מִגְדָּל בָּלַל Migdal Bavel) is a tower to which the biblical legend is dedicated, set out in chapter 2 “Noah” (verses 11:1-11:9) of the book of Genesis.
The Tower of Babel is not on the "official" list of wonders of the world. However, she is one of the most outstanding buildings Ancient Babylon, and its name is still a symbol of confusion and disorder.
Jan Collaert 1579
According to the ancient biblical legend, after the Flood, more than four thousand years ago, all people lived in Mesopotamia (from the east people came to the land of Shinar), that is, in the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and everyone spoke the same language. Since the land of these places was very fertile, people lived richly. They decided to build a city (Babylon) and a tower as high as the heavens to “make a name for themselves.”
Marten Van Valckenborch I (1535-1612)
To build a monumental structure, people did not use stone, but unfired raw brick; bitumen (mountain tar) was used instead of lime to join the bricks. The tower grew and grew in height.
Theodosius Rihel 1574-1578
Finally, God became angry with the foolish and vain people and punished them: he forced the builders to speak different languages. As a result, the stupid, proud people stopped understanding each other and, abandoning their guns, stopped building the tower, and then dispersed to different directions of the Earth. So the tower turned out to be unfinished, and the city where construction took place and all languages were mixed was called Babylon. Thus, the story of the Tower of Babel explains the emergence of different languages after the Flood.
A number of biblical scholars trace the connection between the legend of the Tower of Babel and the construction of high tower-temples called ziggurats in Mesopotamia. The tops of the towers served for religious rites and astronomical observations.
Fresco 1100
The tallest ziggurat (91 m high, one rectangular step and seven spiral ones - 8 in total) was located in Babylon. It was called Etemenanki, which means “the house where heaven meets earth.” It is unknown when exactly the original construction of this tower was carried out, but it already existed during the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC).
Assyrian king Sennacherib in 689 BC. e. destroyed Babylon, Etemenanki suffered the same fate. The ziggurat was restored by Nebuchadnezzar II. The Jews, forcibly resettled by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah, became acquainted with the culture and religion of Mesopotamia and undoubtedly knew about the existence of ziggurats.
During excavations in Babylon, the German scientist Robert Koldewey managed to discover the foundation and ruins of a tower. The tower mentioned in the Bible was probably destroyed before the time of Hammurabi. To replace it, another was built, which was erected in memory of the first. According to Koldewey, it had a square base, each side of which was 90 meters. The height of the tower was also 90 m, the first tier had a height of 33 m, the second - 18, the third and fifth - 6 m each, the seventh - the sanctuary of the god Marduk - was 15 m high. By today's standards, the structure reached a height of 30 - storey skyscraper.
Calculations suggest that about 85 million bricks were used to build this tower. A monumental staircase led to the upper platform of the tower, where the temple soared into the sky. The tower was part temple complex, located on the banks of the Euphrates River. Clay tablets with inscriptions found by archaeologists suggest that each section of the tower had its own special meaning. The same tablets provide information about the religious rituals performed in this temple.
The tower stood on the left bank of the Euphrates on the Sakhn plain, which literally translates as “frying pan.” It was surrounded by the houses of priests, temple buildings and houses for pilgrims who flocked here from all over Babylonia. A description of the Tower of Babel was left by Herodotus, who thoroughly examined it and, perhaps, even visited its top. This is the only documented account of an eyewitness from Europe.
Tobias Verhaecht, The Tower Of Babel.
The Tower of Babel was a stepped eight-tiered pyramid, lined with baked bricks on the outside. Moreover, each tier had a strictly defined color. At the top of the ziggurat there was a sanctuary lined with blue tiles and decorated at the corners with golden horns (a symbol of fertility). It was considered the habitat of the god Marduk, the patron saint of the city. In addition, inside the sanctuary there were a gilded table and bed of Marduk. Stairs led to the tiers; Religious processions ascended along them. The ziggurat was a shrine that belonged to the entire people, it was a place where thousands of people flocked to worship the supreme deity Marduk.
The upper platforms of the ziggurats were used not only for cultic purposes, but also for practical purposes: for warrior-guards to view the surrounding area. Cyrus, who took control of Babylon after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, was the first conqueror to leave the city undestroyed. He was struck by the scale of Etemenanki, and he not only forbade the destruction of anything, but ordered the construction of a monument on his grave in the form of a miniature ziggurat, a small Tower of Babel.
Hendrick III van Cleve (1525 - 1589)
And yet the tower was destroyed again. The Persian king Xerxes left only ruins of it, which Alexander the Great saw on his way to India. He, too, was struck by the gigantic ruins - he, too, stood in front of them as if spellbound. Alexander the Great intended to build it again. “But,” as Strabo writes, “this work required a lot of time and effort, because ten thousand people would have had to clear the ruins for two months, and he did not realize his plan, since he soon fell ill and died.”
Lucas van Valckenborch 1594
Lucas van Valckenborch 1595
Currently, only the foundation and the lower part of the wall remain from the legendary Tower of Babel. But thanks to cuneiform tablets, there is a description of the famous ziggurat and even its image.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Tower of Babel 1564.
The story of the Tower of Babel is widespread in Christian iconography - in numerous miniatures, handwritten and printed publications the Bible (for example, in miniature of an 11th century English manuscript); as well as in mosaics and frescoes of cathedrals and churches (for example, the mosaic of the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice, late XII - early XIII century).
Fresco of the Tower of Babel from the Venetian Cathedral of San Marco.
Towers of this type still exist in Iraq - very tall, stepped or spiral-shaped. In Babylon itself, almost nothing reminds of the tower; only part of the wall and foundation, as well as beautiful ancient reliefs, have been preserved there royal palace in excavations.
The current building of the European Parliament is designed after a painting of the unfinished Tower of Babel painted in 1563 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The motto of the European Parliament in French: “Many languages, one voice” distorts the meaning of the biblical text. The building was built to give the impression of being unfinished. In fact, this is the completed building of the European Parliament, the construction of which was completed in December 2000.
THE TOWER OF BABEL - the most important episode from the story of ancient humanity in the book of Genesis (11. 1-9).
According to the biblical account, Noah's descendants spoke the same language and settled in the Valley of Shinar. Here they began the construction of a city and a tower, “with its height reaching to heaven, let us make a name for ourselves,” they said, “before [in MT “lest”] we be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11.4). However, the construction was stopped by the Lord, who “confused the languages.” People, having ceased to understand each other, stopped construction and scattered throughout the earth (Gen. 11.8). The city was named "Babylon". Thus, the story about the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.9) is based on the consonance of the Hebrew name “Babylon” and the verb “to mix.” According to legend, the construction of the Tower of Babel was led by Ham’s descendant Nimrod (Ios. Flav. Antiq. I 4.2; Epiph. Adv. haer. I 1.6).
The biblical story of the Tower of Babel provides a symbolic explanation of the reason for the emergence of the diversity of the world's languages, which can also be correlated with the modern understanding of the development of human languages. Research in the field of historical linguistics allows us to draw a conclusion about the existence of a single proto-language, conventionally called “Nostratic”; Indo-European (Japhetic), Hamito-Semitic, Altai, Uralic, Dravidian, Kartvelian and other languages were isolated from it. The followers of this theory were such scientists as V.M. Illich-Svitych, I.M. Dyakonov, V.N. Toporov and V.V. Ivanov. In addition, the story of the Tower of Babel is an important indication of the biblical understanding of man and the historical process and, in particular, of the secondary nature of the division into races and peoples for the human essence. Subsequently, this idea, expressed in a different form by the Apostle Paul, became one of the foundations of Christian anthropology (Col 3:11).
In the Christian tradition, the Tower of Babel is a symbol, firstly, of the pride of people who consider it possible to reach heaven on their own and have as their main goal “to make a name for themselves”, and, secondly, the inevitability of punishment for this and the futility of the human mind, not sanctified By divine grace. In the gift of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, scattered humanity receives the once lost ability of full mutual understanding. The antithesis of the Tower of Babel is the miracle of the founding of the Church, which unites nations through the Holy Spirit (Acts 2.4-6). The Tower of Babel is also a prototype of modern technocracy.
The image of the “city and tower” in the book of Genesis reflected a whole complex of mythological universals, for example, the idea of the “center of the world”, which was supposed to be a city built by people. The historically attested temples of Mesopotamia did fulfill this mythological function (Oppenheim, p. 135). In the Holy Scriptures, the construction of the Tower of Babel is described from the perspective of Divine Revelation, in the light of which it is, first of all, an expression of human pride.
Another aspect of the story of the Tower of Babel is that it points to the prospects for the progress of human civilization, and at the same time, the biblical narrative contains a negative attitude towards the urbanism of the Mesopotamian civilization (Nelis J. T. Col. 1864).
The image of the Tower of Babel undoubtedly shows parallels with the Mesopotamian tradition of temple building. The temples of Mesopotamia (ziggurats) were stepped structures of several terraces located one above the other (their number could reach 7); on the upper terrace there was a sanctuary of the deity (Parrot. R. 43). The Holy Scripture accurately conveys the realities of Mesopotamian temple construction, where, unlike most other states of the Ancient Near East, sun-dried or baked brick and resin were used as the main material (cf. Gen. 11.3).
During the active archaeological study of Ancient Mesopotamia, many attempts were made to find the so-called “prototype” of the Tower of Babel in one of the excavated ziggurats; the most reasonable assumption can be considered the Babylonian temple of Marduk (Jacobsen. P. 334), which had the Sumerian name “e-temen” -an-ki" - temple of the cornerstone of heaven and earth.
They tried to find the remains of the Tower of Babel already in the 12th century. Until the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, 2 ziggurats were identified with it, in Borsippa and Akar-Kuf, on the site of ancient cities located at a considerable distance from Babylon (in the description of Herodotus, the city was so large that it could include both points). The Tower of Babel was identified with the ziggurat in Borsippa by Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Babylonia twice (between 1160-1173), the German explorer K. Niebuhr (1774), the English artist R. Kerr Porter (1818) and others. In Akar-Kuf, the Tower of Babel was seen by the German L. Rauwolf (1573-1576), the merchant J. Eldred, who described the ruins of the “tower” at the end of the 16th century. Italian traveler Pietro della Valle, who compiled the first detailed description site of Babylon (1616), considered the Tower of Babel to be the northernmost of its hills, which retained the ancient name “Babil”. Attempts to find the Tower of Babel in one of the 3 tells - Babila, Borsippa and Akar Kufa - continued until the end of the 19th century.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the borders of Ancient Babylon were revealed and neighboring cities were no longer perceived as its parts. After the excavations of K. J. Rich and H. Rassam in Borsippa (the site of Birs-Nimrud, 17 km southwest of Babylon, II-I millennium BC), it became clear that in connection with the Tower of Babel we cannot talk about her ziggurat, which was part of the temple of the goddess Nabu (Old Babylonian period - the first half of the 2nd millennium BC; reconstruction in the New Babylonian period - 625-539). G.K. Rawlinson identified Akar-Kuf with Dur-Kurigalza, the capital of the Kassite kingdom (30 km west of Babylon, founded at the end of the 15th - beginning of the 14th centuries, abandoned by the inhabitants already in the 12th century BC), which excluded the possibility of its ziggurat, dedicated to the god Enlil (excavated in the 40s of the 20th century by S. Lloyd and T. Bakir), considered the Tower of Babel. Finally, excavations of Babil, the northernmost of the hills of Babylon, showed that it does not hide a ziggurat, but one of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar II.
Finding the Tower of Babel inside Babylon was one of the tasks set for the German expedition of R. Koldewey (1899-1917). In the central part of the city, the remains of a foundation platform were discovered, which in 1901 were identified with the foundation of the Etemenanki ziggurat. In 1913, F. Wetzel carried out the cleaning and measurements of the monument. His materials, published in 1938, became the basis for new reconstructions. In 1962, Wetzel completed research on the monument, and H. Schmid conducted a detailed analysis of the materials collected over a century and published (1995) a new, more reasonable periodization and reconstruction of the Etemenanka ziggurat.
The city of Babylon, which means “Gate of God,” was founded in ancient times on the banks of the Euphrates. He was one of largest cities Ancient world and was the capital of Babylonia, a kingdom that existed for one and a half millennia in the south of Mesopotamia (the territory of modern Iraq).
The basis of the architecture of Mesopotamia was secular buildings - palaces and religious monumental structures - ziggurats. Powerful religious towers, called ziggurat (ziggurat - holy mountain), were square and resembled a step pyramid. The steps were connected by stairs, and along the edge of the wall there was a ramp leading to the temple. The walls were painted black (asphalt), white (lime) and red (brick).
Jan il Vecchio Bruegel
According to biblical tradition, after the Flood, humanity was represented by one people speaking the same language. From the east, people came to the land of Shinar (in the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates), where they decided to build a city (Babylon) and a tower high to heaven in order to “make a name for themselves.”
Jan Collaert, 1579
The construction of the tower was interrupted by God, who created new languages for different people, because of which they ceased to understand each other, could not continue the construction of the city and the tower, and were scattered throughout the land of Babylon.
The tower stood on the left bank of the Euphrates on the plain of Sahn, which literally translates as “frying pan.” It was surrounded by the houses of priests, temple buildings and houses for pilgrims who flocked here from all over the Babylonian kingdom. A description of the Tower of Babel was left by Herodotus, who thoroughly examined it and, perhaps, even visited its top.
...Babylon was built like this... It lies on a vast plain, forming a quadrangle, each side of which is 120 stadia (meters) in length. The circumference of all four sides of the city is 480 stadia (meters). Babylon was not only very big city, but also the most beautiful of all the cities I know. First of all, the city is surrounded by a deep, wide and water-filled ditch, then there is a wall 50 royal (Persian) cubits wide (26.64 meters) and 200 cubits high (106.56 meters).
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563
If the Tower of Babel existed, what did it look like and what did it serve? What was it - a mystical path to heaven to the abode of the gods? Or maybe a temple or astronomical observatory? The scientific history of the search for the Tower of Babel began with several pieces of painted bricks found at the site of the Kingdom of Babylon by the German architect and archaeologist Robert Koldewey. The fragments of the brick bas-relief were a good enough reason for Kaiser Wilhelm II and the newly founded German Oriental Society to generously finance excavations of the ancient city.
On March 26, 1899, Robert Koldewey solemnly began excavations. But only in 1913, due to the fact that the groundwater level had dropped, archaeologists were able to begin exploring the remains of the legendary tower. At the bottom of deep excavations, they freed from under the layers the remaining part of the brick foundation and several steps of the staircase.
Marten Van Valckenborch I
Since then and to this day, an irreconcilable struggle has continued between supporters of various hypotheses, representing the shape of this building and its height in different ways. The most controversial thing is the location of the stairs: some researchers are sure that the steps were outside, others insist on placing the stairs inside the tower.
The tower mentioned in the Bible was probably destroyed before the time of Hammurabi. To replace it, another was built, which was erected in memory of the first. The Tower of Babel was a stepped eight-tiered pyramid, each tier of which had a strictly defined color. Each side of the square base was 90 meters.
Marten van Valckenborch, 1595
The height of the tower was also 90 meters, the first tier had a height of 33 meters, the second - 18, the third and fifth - 6 meters each, the seventh - the sanctuary of the god Marduk was 15 meters high. By today's standards, the structure reached the height of a 25-story building.
Calculations suggest that about 85 million mud bricks from a mixture of clay, sand and straw were used for the construction of the Tower of Babel, since there are few trees and stones in Mesopotamia. Bitumen (mountain tar) was used to connect the bricks.
Marten van Valckenborch, 1600
Robert Koldewey managed to excavate famous hanging gardens Semiramis, which was not built by this legendary queen, but was built by order of Nebuchadnezzar II for his beloved wife Amytis, an Indian princess who, in dusty Babylon, yearned for the green hills of her homeland. Magnificent gardens with rare trees, fragrant flowers and coolness in the sultry city were truly a wonder of the world.
In 1962, an expedition led by the architect Hans-Georg Schmidt continued to explore the ruins of the tower. Professor Schmidt created a new model of construction: two side staircases led to a wide terrace located at a height of 31 meters from the ground, the monumental central staircase ended on the second tier at a height of 48 meters. From there four more flights of stairs led up, and at the top of the tower stood a temple - a sanctuary of the god Marduk, lined with blue tiles and decorated with golden horns at the corners - a symbol of fertility. Inside the sanctuary were the gilded table and bed of Marduk. The ziggurat was a shrine that belonged to the entire people, it was a place where thousands of people flocked to worship the supreme deity Marduk.
Professor Schmidt compared his calculations with data on a small clay tablet discovered by archaeologists. This unique document contains a description of a multi-tiered tower in the Babylonian kingdom - the famous temple of the supreme deity Marduk. The tower was called Etemenanki, which means “the house where heaven meets earth.” It is unknown when exactly the original construction of this tower took place, but it already existed during the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC). Now on the site of the “skyscraper temple” there is a swamp overgrown with reeds.
Cyrus, who took control of Babylon after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, was the first conqueror to leave the city undestroyed. He was struck by the scale of Etemenanka, and he not only forbade the destruction of anything, but ordered the construction of a monument on his grave in the form of a miniature ziggurat - a small Tower of Babel.
During its three-thousand-year history, Babylon was destroyed to the ground three times and each time rose again from the ashes, until it completely fell into decay under the rule of the Persians and Macedonians in the 6th-5th centuries BC. The Persian king Xerxes left only the ruins of the Tower of Babel, which Alexander the Great saw on his way to India. He intended to build it again. “But,” as Strabo writes, “this work required a lot of time and effort, because the ruins would have had to be removed by ten thousand people for two months, and he did not realize his plan, since he soon fell ill and died.”
The Tower of Babel, which at that time was simply a miracle of technology, brought glory to its city. This ziggurat was the tallest and latest structure of its type, but by no means the only high-rise temple in Mesopotamia. Along two mighty rivers - the Tigris and the Euphrates - there were colossal shrines in a long line.
The tradition of building towers originated among the Sumerians in the south of Mesopotamia. Already seven thousand years ago, the first stepped temple with a terrace only one meter high was built in Eridu. Over time, architects learned to design taller buildings and developed construction technology to achieve stability and strength of walls.
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There are few legends in Christendom more famous than the story of the Babylonian Pandemonium. The Bible (Genesis 11:1-9) talks about it this way: “The whole earth had one language and one speech. Moving from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other: Let us make bricks and burn them with fire. And they used bricks instead of stones, and earthen resin instead of lime. And they said: Let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose height reaches to heaven...
The inscriptions on this black stone date back to 604-562 BC. The slab depicts King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon more than 2,500 years ago, and the legendary Tower of Babel. To be more precise, then, of course, what we have in front of us is not literally it, but the ziggurat of Etemenanki. Historians consider this 91-meter structure to be the prototype of the legendary tower from the Bible...
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Tower of Babel: fiction or truth?
Maxim - Skazanie. info
There are few legends in Christendom more famous than the story of the Babylonian Pandemonium.
The Bible (Genesis 11:1-9) puts it this way:
“The whole earth had one language and one dialect. Moving from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other: Let us make bricks and burn them with fire. And they used bricks instead of stones, and earthen resin instead of lime. And they said, Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, its height reaching to heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves, before we are scattered over the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men were building. And the Lord said: Behold, there is one people, and they all have one language; and this is what they began to do, and they will not deviate from what they planned to do; Let us go down and confuse their language there, so that one does not understand the speech of the other. And the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore the name was given to it: Babylon, for there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them throughout all the earth.”
What is Shinar, where the proud decided to build a giant? This is how the Bible calls the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in ancient times. He is also Sumer, geographically modern Iraq.
According to Genesis, this is the time between the Flood and the migration of Abraham from Mesopotamia to Palestine. Biblical scholars (believing biblical scholars) date the life of Abraham to the beginning of the second millennium BC. Therefore, the Babylonian Confusion in the literal biblical version occurs sometime in the third millennium BC, several generations before Abraham (the reality of the character is not the topic of this article).
Josephus supports this version: post-flood people do not want to depend on the gods, they build a tower to heaven, the gods are angry, confusion of languages, cessation of construction.
We already have something: built in Sumer in the 3rd millennium BC. For historians, the Bible alone is not enough, so let us next listen to the inhabitants of Mesopotamia themselves:
“By this time, Marduk commanded me to erect the Tower of Babel, which before me had been weakened and brought to the point of falling, with its foundation installed on my chest underworld, and its top should go into the sky,” writes Nabopolassar.
“I had a hand in completing the peak of Etemenanka so that it could compete with the sky,” writes his son, Nebuchadnezzar.
In 1899, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, exploring the desert hills 100 km south of Baghdad, discovers the ruins of a forgotten Babylon. Koldewey will spend the next 15 years of his life excavating it. And it will confirm two legends: about the Gardens of Babylon and about the Tower of Babel.
Koldewey discovered the square base of the Etemenanka temple, 90 meters wide. The above words of the kings were discovered during the same excavations on cuneiform clay tablets of Babylon. Every Big city Babylon was supposed to have a ziggurat (pyramid-temple). The Etemenanki Temple (Temple of the Cornerstone of Heaven and Earth) had 7 tiers painted in different colors. Each tier functioned as a temple to a deity. The pyramid was crowned with a golden statue of Marduk, the supreme god of the Babylonians. The height of Etemenanka was 91 meters. Compared to the Cheops Pyramid (142 meters), it is a rather impressive structure. For ancient man gave the impression of a stairway to heaven. And this “stairs” was built from baked clay bricks, as it is written in the Bible.
Now let's connect the data. How did the Etemenanka Temple get into the Bible?
Nebuchadnezzar II (Nebuchadnezzar II) at the beginning of the 6th century BC. destroyed the kingdom of Judah, relocating the population to Babylon. It was there that the Jews, who by that time had not yet completed the formation of the Old Testament, saw the ziggurats that struck their imagination. And the dilapidated or unfinished temple of Etemenanka. It is most likely that Nebuchadnezzar used the captives to restore the cultural monument of his ancestors and build new ones. There the slaves’ version appeared: “balal” - “mixing” (Hebrew). After all, Jews had never encountered such multilingualism before. But in the native language, "Babylon" meant "God's Gate." There a version appeared that God once destroyed this tower. The ancient Jews seem to be trying to use myth to condemn construction work involving slaves. Where the Babylonians wanted to become closer to the gods, the Jews saw sacrilege.
Herodotus describes the Tower of Babel as 8-tiered, 180 meters at the base. It is quite possible that under our ziggurat there is another, missing tier. In addition, there is indirect evidence that the Temple of Etemenanka already stood under Hammurabi (XVIII century BC). It is not yet known for certain when construction began.
March 31, 2019
Korea, Ancient holiday Hansik: do not eat hot food to appease the fire, symbolizing the coming warmth, and bring gifts to the graves of ancestors
1284- Bishop Ely founds Peterhouse, the oldest and smallest college of the University of Cambridge
1461- Jonah of Moscow, the last Moscow saint who bore the title of Metropolitan of Kyiv, died; canonized
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1675- the future Pope Benedict XIV (Prospero Lambertini) was born
1682- burning of Avvakum and his followers by order of Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich and Patriarch Joachim
1860- Rodney Gypsy Smith, evangelist, born
1869- Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Leon Denizard-Rivaille), the founder of spiritualism, died
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1959- Tibetan Buddhist leader Dalai Lama fled Chinese-occupied Tibet
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This new creature with long hair really bothers me. It sticks out in front of my eyes all the time and follows me on my heels. I don’t like it at all: I’m not used to society. I wish I could go to other animals...
Dagestanis is a term for the peoples originally living in Dagestan. There are about 30 peoples and ethnographic groups in Dagestan. In addition to Russians, Azerbaijanis and Chechens, who make up a significant proportion of the population of the republic, these are Avars, Dargins, Kumti, Lezgins, Laks, Tabasarans, Nogais, Rutuls, Aguls, Tats, etc.
Circassians (self-called Adyghe) are a people in Karachay-Cherkessia. In Turkey and other countries of Western Asia, Circassians are also called all people from the North. Caucasus. Believers are Sunni Muslims. The Kabardino-Circassian language belongs to the Caucasian (Iberian-Caucasian) languages (Abkhazian-Adyghe group). Writing based on the Russian alphabet.
In European painting, the most famous painting on this subject is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Babylonian Pandemonium” (1563). A more stylized geometric structure was depicted by M. Escher in a 1928 engraving.
Literature
The plot of the Tower of Babel has received wide interpretation in European literature:
- Franz Kafka wrote a parable on this topic, “The Coat of Arms of the City” (City Emblem)
- Clive Lewis, novel "The Vile Power"
- Victor Pelevin, novel “Generation P”
- Neal Stephenson, in his novel Avalanche, gives an interesting version of the construction and significance of the Tower of Babel.
Music
It should be noted that many of the above songs contain the word Babylon in the title, but there is no mention of the Tower of Babel.
Theater
Categories:
- Ancient Babylon
- Unrealized supertall buildings
- Scenes from the Old Testament
- Concepts and Terms in the Bible
- Ziggurat
- Tower of Babel
- Genesis
- Jewish mythology
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See what the “Tower of Babel” is in other dictionaries:
And the confusion of languages, two legends about Ancient Babylon (combined in the canonical text of the Bible into a single story): 1) about the construction of the city and the confusion of languages and 2) about the construction of the tower and the scattering of people. These legends are dated to the “beginning of history”... ... Encyclopedia of Mythology
TOWER OF BABYLON. Painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. a building that, according to biblical tradition (Genesis 11:1 9), the descendants of Noah erected in the land of Shinar (Babylonia) in order to reach heaven. God, angry at the plans and actions of the builders... ... Collier's Encyclopedia
In the Bible there is a legend dated to the beginning of human history (after the flood), when they built a city and a tower to heaven (the first great construction of people). If the city was built by sedentary residents who knew how to burn bricks, then the tower was built by nomads from the East;... ... Historical Dictionary
TOWER OF BABEL- the most important episode from the story about ancient humanity in the book. Genesis (11. 1 9). According to the biblical account, Noah's descendants spoke the same language and settled in the Valley of Shinar. Here they began building a city and a tower “high to the heavens... Orthodox Encyclopedia
Tower of Babel- Babylonian pandemonium. Tower of Babel. Painting by P. Bruegel the Elder. 1563. Museum of Art History. Vein. Babel. Tower of Babel. Painting by P. Bruegel the Elder. 1563. Museum of Art History. Vein. Tower of Babel in... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary of World History
Tower of Babel- the most important episode from the story about ancient humanity in the book of Genesis (see Gen. 11, 1 9). According to the biblical account, Noah's descendants spoke the same language and settled in the Valley of Shinar. Here they began building a city and a tower,... ... Orthodoxy. Dictionary-reference book
Tower of Babel- Book About very tall building, building. That day, the ocean caused a real massacre for people... The airwaves were full of messages about the emergency condition of ships in many countries. The “Tower of Babel” of our days, a cyclopean structure, collapsed under the blows... ... Phraseological Dictionary of the Russian Literary Language
