This page is for the richness of Babel.
There are at least four Babels worth keeping in one place: a real tower, a story about the tower, a library built out of the story, and a piece of software I use every day. They are all the same idea wearing different clothes — the totality of language, and what it costs.
the tower that actually stood
Babel was a real place before it was a metaphor. The name is Bab-ilim — “gate of the god” — Babylon, on the Euphrates, and its tower was the Etemenanki: “the temple of the foundation of heaven and earth,” a seven-tiered ziggurat of baked brick and bitumen sacred to Marduk, rising perhaps 90 metres over the city. It was old when history found it — damaged and rebuilt across centuries, most famously restored by Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BCE), who recorded the work in glazed-brick boast: its top was to “rival the heavens.”