Dynastic History|Etemenanki, Babylon — The Ziggurat That Is Now a Pit Full of Water

É-temen-an-ki, "the foundation platform of heaven and earth", was Marduk's ziggurat, standing beside his temple É-sag-íla in the middle of بابل. Its measurements survive not in the building but in a text: the Esagila Tablet, a copy made in 229 BCE and now in the Louvre, which sets out the dimensions of each of its seven stages. Scholars have long identified it with the tower of the Genesis account. That identification is an argument about a text, not a datable event, and it is worth keeping the two apart.

What the Neo-Babylonian kings did here is documented mainly by their own foundation cylinders. Nabopolassar's describe the rebuilding as an act of piety and place him and his sons at the work, carrying baskets. That is a claim about royal legitimacy, made in the king's own inscription, and it is also the only surviving account of who did the building. His son Nebuchadnezzar II completed it. Later Greek writers report that Alexander ordered the mound cleared in 323 BCE so the ziggurat could be raised again; nothing was raised, and the brick was carried away over the following centuries for other buildings.

Robert Koldewey recovered the footprint during his campaign of 1899 to 1917, along with the stairways and the gates that tied it to Esagila. Today, about ninety kilometres south of Baghdad, the largest building in the city is a rectangular depression in the ground, standing water in the bottom and reeds around the edge. Its plan reads clearly only from the air.

📸 Cover: the water-filled foundation pit of Etemenanki, photographed in 2012, Marjon Verburg, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons and Livius.org