The Tower of Babel

slime they had for mortar. And they said, go to, let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built, and the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have all one language. And this they begin to do. And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down.

And they're confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth, and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth? And from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.

My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that was a reading from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. It is the story of the Tower of Babel. Robert, I've got to ask you, what did this story look like when you were a little kid. Inside your head? Oh, I mean, I guess it's always kind of looked the same. Um, I don't, I don't. I wish I did you picture

the tower? Yes, But I have to say I had this book of Bible stories with illustrations for each one, and I think it was kind of Gustaf Dora inspired. It had a kind of spiraling, you know, almost a seashell kind of looked to it. And I was always taken by that. I was this was a fabulous book in many respects because I remember it had it just had all of these strange illustrations to them, especially the

more mystical Old Testament occurrences. Now, did it have a direct translation of the Genesis account along with illustrations or was it like adapted into a modern sort of retelling of the So I think it was adapted because it was kind of for kids, you know, So I didn't have access in that book to the you know, the the nice keen James version that we have here with all the slime and mortar and weirdness and some other translations.

That word slime is rendered tar alright, So if you're not familiar with it, the account of Genesis basically lays it all out. So humans got smart, they got organized, they got more than a little bit ambitious. They decided to build a structure that would show of the world just how amazing they really were. And uh, God wasn't too crazy about this development. So in this, uh, this story, in this myth, he blasts their language so that they can't understand each other and scatters them far and wide.

Then the tower is never finished. Right, So this is pretty straightforward about how this would work in the logic of the story. Right, if you confuse the tongues, if you ever, if everybody speaks the same language, they can all work together. If you make them all speak different languages, then they can't coordinate their activities, and thus the building

of the tower has to stop. Yeah, it's it's at least gonna set back production of the tower somewhat because you're gonna have to figure out how I mean in this magical scenario, You're gonna have to figure out how your language relates to their language. You're gonna have to figure out some sort of common means of communicating, and it's essentially have to reorganize the whole the whole venture.

Now this is coming right pretty much right after a catastrophe in the Book of Genesis, because this is after the flood narrative, right, so we had the whole earth except for one family destroyed in the Great Flood. So it's after the flood, and and so you've got people rebuilding civilization. But they get a little haughty, and there are multiple ways that you could interpret what they're doing

when they're building this tower up to heaven. As a child, I think the way I read the story was, well, they're prideful right there, saying look what we can accomplish. Were showing off, and God did not like their pride and punish them for it. More recently, when I look at this story, I see an implied threat essentially that they are attempting to physically scale to the heavens so that they could challenge the gods. In one sense, they

are bridging heaven and earth. Yeah, it's like a yeah, it really is, and so what's what's God to do? I mean, there are some accounts I remember reading when I was younger. They would even say that the workmen on the tower, like on their lunch break, I guess, would shoot angels with bows and arrows because it was getting that high, you know, it was getting clo to

the heavenly domain. Yeah, when I when I was young, and for the longest I think it was the definitely the pride version, the idea that they just got too boastful, which, on one hand, the message there ties in I guess nicely with a lot of human endeavor. I don't get too full of yourself, because God still got the final word.

But it also kind of makes God look like a paranoid jerk where he's just like, oh, this tower is getting a little too tall from my like and I'm gonna smite that, Like why you're God, They're just building a tower. That The behavior is more understandable if you interpret it as an attempt to overthrow the gods, a

threat against their place in the sky. It also makes more sense when you think about ancient cosmology with with the idea that the heavens were actually a fairly low plane that you could access through ascension in the air. When when I was a kid, I had this story in my head, and I was trying to picture it

as something that had happened. But I also had knowledge of outer space travel and and how big the atmosphere actually was, so I was trying to picture it like, Okay, so they're building a tower that literally goes up to space because that's where God is. Well, I didn't necessarily think God was in space, but that was the only way, knowing about space, that's the only way I could really interpret it. And so I was picturing a tower that just went up as far as you could see, which

is kind of ridiculous to picture. Now, if you see the great artistic representations of the story, it's not really that the tower reaches beyond where you can see, though actually I guess in some of them it is. But like later we'll be looking at a Peter bru Egels interpretation, and it's more just kind of this massive project that

more reflects pride, I think. Yeah, And even with just a basic almost subconscious understanding of engineering, you look at those representations and you know this thing is not going to reach a low Earth orbit or anything. Right now. You can also look at the myth, you know, in two basic ways as well. I guess you can say that this was basically an etiological attempt, you know, to explain, well,

why do we have all these languages? Yeah, and ideologies are extremely common and in ancient literature and ancient mythology, and you find them all throughout the Bible. The Book of Genesis is full of stories that tell you a story about something that happened, and it sort of ends with the punch line, and that's why these people are now called this which relates to some fact about the story, you know it would be like, And then they cut off one guy's leg, and that's why this tribe is

now called the left footers. Yeah. And then but then there's just not a real But then there's another level too to our interpretation of this tale, this myth uh as And and I think I think it's not too much of a stretch to to think about it being baked into the original purpose as well is that it explains why people can't get along very well, why people can't come can can very rarely come together on a megaproject um and and stick with it like something's going

to fall apart. Uh. And you have to have extenuating circumstances to allow something grandiose to happen to begin with. Yeah, And in that vein, I can see how it's not only an ideological story to explain why we have all these different languages on Earth, why there's so much conflict, but it also has some kind of ancient techno paranoia, uh idea. Right, So there's actually a bit of discussion of technological change in the story. They say, you know what,

they were burning those bricks thoroughly. This actually represented a technological upgrade. And the architecture of ancient Mesopotamia, a lot of it was built with mud bricks. These are sun baked mud bricks that you would form together out of clay and then allow to harden in the sun. And these were you know, you could build out of them, but they didn't. They weren't in it for the long haul. Later, if you had fire baked bricks that you made at

a much higher temperature, they would be much sturdier. So we're seeing here there's technological change. This technological change leads to either on one interpretation, you know, Huber as people being uh very haughty about what they can do with their their new ovens and kilns now out, or it leads to them saying, you know, we've got this new power,

we could ascend to the heavens and take over. Yeah, they're like, how you touched on the sort of the violence of making the bricks, because they're they're kind of perpetrating an act of violence on the earth, remaking the earth into an artificial mountain. And in so many mythologies, I mean, the mountain is the mountains are where the gods live. The mountain is the thing that bridges Earth to the sky. Yeah. So eventually in this episode, we want to take a quick look at about the diversification

of languages and where language speciation comes from. But before we get into that, I think we just want to talk about the myth itself because it's such an interesting story. Yeah, we're gonna kick off with the myth. We're gonna talk a little bit about art, and yeah, we're gonna get

into some engineering and linguistics. But first the myth and uh and and as is the case with the number of these Old Testament stories, and we went into this a little bit when we we talked about the Great Flood in a previous episode, like these are these are tales that existed before the the Old Testament was really thing? Like, these were tales that they were brought into this collection. Well, you can, you can definitely look at it that way.

Another way to look at it is that, um, if the tales in Genesis didn't necessarily come from other stories that you'd find and say ancient Sumerian literature or something like that, you might say that they had a common ancestor you know that they they might not be direct descendants of one another, but might be cousins that come from more primeval stories. But yeah, it's hard to know exactly, but you can see parallels in in other ancient Sumerian

mythology that are very interesting. And I want to get into it a little bit, but first I just wanted to take a peek at some of the translation notes, which was this is one of my favorite things to do about an Old Bible story is go look up a fairly literal translations, such as like the New American Standard version that's a trans English translation of the Bible that, more so than most versions, tries to follow the literal

word for word progression of the text. Now, a lot of times this doesn't necessarily render the best reading um, but it is just more interesting to see what the original language looked like, and then also look at there there will be usually if there's like a if it's a good online resource, there will be like footnotes you can click that will tell you literally what the original word was. So, for example, everywhere the word language appears in this original story, it says the whole earth was

of one language and of one speech. Literally, that's the whole earth was of one lip or had one lip. So I'm imagining everybody sharing a lip or sort of lip locking all the time when they're talking, and the the one speech was of one set of words or few words. And so when God speaks to God, God is speaking to some kind of other heavenly beings one would assume other gods in the earlier pantheon or angels.

God says, let us go down there and confuse their lips so that they will not understand one another's lip. But there's also another ideological feature of this story, which is that it tries to explain the origin of the term Babel. So you've got this line in verse nine where it says, therefore is the name of it called babble because the Lord did their confound the language of all the earth, and thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of the earth. So he's talking

about this place called Babel. Literally, this is probably referring to Babylon. That's their word for it. But also there's a joke in the name because the Hebrew word baalal means confused or confound, So it's trying to say there's some kind of cognate in the word they use for the place Babylon and the word for confused. It's like, yeah, that's why they call that place Babylon. It's because it's confused. Old Testament jokes. You know why they call it Pittsburgh.

It's the pit. Yeah, there you go. It's the same spirit. Or here's another one, Joe, which us state is um is high in the middle and around on both ends. I have no idea. Oh hioh, there you go. Uh man. But back to ancient Babylon. Oh you got me there, Robert I am slain, I die Horatio. So back to the original myth. So we've got this Genesis version. But

there are also other versions of the same story. For example, one appears in the Book of Jubilees, which is another ancient Jewish text that is sort of a retelling of a lot of the other Genesis stories. It's a it's a retelling of the history of the Jewish people and their relationship with God, and it's sort of like dictated by angels, and they give just a few extra details

in the story. For example, in the Jubilees version, it says, and they began to build, and in the fourth week they made brick with fire, and the bricks served them for stone, and the clay with which they cemented them together was asphalt, which cometh out of the sea and out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinnar. So that's given us a little more detail about like the technological origins of their instruction methods. More about the

construction methods. They specified the size of the tower and they built it forty and three years. Where they're building its breadth was two hundred and three bricks, and the height of a brick was the third of one. It's height amounted to five thousand, four hundred and thirty three cubits and two palms, and the extent of one of the walls was thirteen states and of the other thirty states.

So if Google's unit conversion program of length of the length of a cubit is right, this means that the tower would have been about eight thousand, one fifty ft tall. And to put that in in in terms of modern buildings, the Burge Khalifa in the United are Arab Emirates is two thousand, seven hundred seventeen feet tall. So this would have dwarfed the tallest building that has has ever existed,

the stall structure that's ever existed, by a substantial degree. Now, I wonder how this compares to the alternate designs for the Colossus of Chane Cargo we talked about in our in our Chicago World's Fair episode. Remember the other proposed structures before they had the ferris wheel, they were going to be thousands and thousands of feet tall, many Birch Khalifa's Yes, I don't know, it would be interesting to go back super fans can listen and tell us what

we said. Uh. And then also we get another detail in the Jubilees version about how God knocked the tower down in the end, so he didn't just scatter the people, but he crushed the tower. So it says, the Lord send a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it upon the earth, and behold it was between as Sure and Babylon in the land of Shannar, and they called its name Overthrow. So it looks like we get another

ideological legend there. There's some place that translates roughly to overthrow apparently, and saying you know why we call it overthrow because it's where God knocked down the tower. It does put a totally different spin on the myth. Like on one level, he just he's like, what do I have to do to knock down this tower? I just have to confuse their languages, snap of the fingers. It's done. It takes care of itself. But in this version he does that, but he's like, a heck, I'll not get

down to why I'm a giant toddler. Uh. So there are also some interesting parallels here where you've got the Sumerian got Inky, and one of his roles that has been discovered in in recent decades is as the confuser of languages in Sumerian mythology. So I want to refer to a paper I came across by Samuel Noah Kramer, who is a twentieth century Sumerian history expert, and he wrote this paper called the Babble of Tongues a Sumerian

Version in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Now this was from night so this is not a new discovery, um, but but we do find that it when it comes to studying the Tower of Babble, new research is is a very relative term. There's not a lot of like

cutting edge study of this. This. There was some new stuff at the time this came out, though, because he had just recently gotten access to some new cune of form tablets have filled in the gaps in a previously known legend that that that had had incomplete sections because

of the deterioration of our sources. So he notes that the biblical scholar E. A. Spicer had demonstrated in his Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis that the Tower of Babel narrative likely had a cune of form source, so another Mesopotamian source going back to this other ancient Mesopotamian literature, and Kramer was trying to bolster this view given recent discoveries of his day of clay fragments filling in this incomplete fragment from a Sumerian epic tale known as in

mer Car and the Lord of Arrata, and the details of the narrative aren't especially important. Basically, it's about a conflict between two rulers or kings. One is in mere Car and he wants to get the king of Rata to submit to him and pay tribute of gold and gems. And there's one section known as the Golden Age passage, and this is where an envoy from Rata is asked to deliver this sort of formalized statement. It's kind of

like a hymn or a poem to his master. And this is Kramer's translation of the part that was already known when before these new tablet pieces were discovered. It goes like this, Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion, there was no hyena, there was no lion, there was no wild dog, no wolf. There was no fear, no terror. Man had no rival in

those days. The lands of Saber and Hamazi, harmony tongued summer, the great land of the decrees of prince ship Uri, the land having all that is appropriate, the landmark to resting in security, the whole universe, the people in unison, to in Leal, and that's a Sumerian chief god to in Leal. In one tongue spoke then Adah, the Lord Adah, the Prince Adah, the king. In Key, Adah the Lord Adah, the Prince, Adah, the king, and repeats it again, a Da the Lord ada the Prince, a Da the King.

There's a lot of repetition in these um So that's what they had already. But then there was this new discovery that added in some new fragments. It went on to say, in Key, which is another Sumerian guard, the Lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy, the Lord of Wisdom, who understands the land, the leader of the gods endowed with wisdom, the Lord of airy. Do change the speech in their mouths, brought contention into it, into the speech of man that until then had been one. So here's

another version of the story. Of the confusion of tongues. Now, this one lacks a lot of detail. It doesn't say that humans were building a tower. It doesn't really give a rationale for in Key changing the languages that people spoke. It just says that people offered praise to in Leal in one tongue. They all spoke the same language, and then at some point this great figure in Key brought contention into their languages and split the languages into different fragment. Now,

Kramer notes a difference from the Biblical account. Of course, in the Biblical story, the gods confused the speech of humankind because humankind is threatening to encroach into the heavens, which is the domain of the gods, and it's a conflict between between God and the humans that leads to the confusion of tongues. But in the Sumerian version, as I was saying, there's nothing apparent that the humans did

to have their speech confused. So Cramer suggests that any Key confusing the tongues of humanity is a result of his rivalry with the other god of the Sumerian pantheon that's mentioned in the story the Big One in Leal, rather than of a rivalry with humans. This is interesting because it makes me think about the differences very broadly between worshiping a pantheon of gods or a single god,

between being polytheistic and monotheistic. So if you just have one god, well, well, let me take it from this direction. If you have multiple gods, and it's possible that these gods don't get along, and then you're just left with the residual um chaos of their turmoil. In the same way, might be an innocent bystanding yeah, yeah, in a way that I think relates to modern experience, but even ancient experience, where you know, what are you doing? You're just a

normal person trying to live your life. You're a farmer, you're a craftsman, your podcast or whatever you are. And the conflicts among the greats, among the kings, the governments of the nations themselves, the way no input do you have no input? But then you still have to suffer what the wages of these conflicts. But it's not a judgment thing, it's just that's how life works. But if it's a single god, then then who else is there?

Like every every catastrophic event, every minor misfortune or blessing is or or you know, positive effect is a is a blessing or a curse. It's all a direct communication with the divine being. Yeah, they're they're definitely shades of that, I think in the division between monotheism and polytheism. But one thing we see also in a lot of these ancient accounts is that the line between monotheism and polytheism is not quite such a stark division as one would expect.

I think that there are shades of monotheism and shades of polytheism. Like in this ancient context, you may have seen a lot of cases where there is sort of a concept of a greater pantheon of God's but maybe one God is strongly favored or something, uh or or there is an idea that there are other heavenly beings, but you wouldn't call them God quite in the same way, like you've got a chief God who's the real God, but then there are also these other powers in heaven

that aren't quite human. Yeah, you have these different angelic forces or or on the opposite end, demonic forces, and then you have these intermediaries as well, such as uh, you know, saints or in in other modes of belief, ancestors that can serve as as go betweens for you and the hereafter. Yeah. So Cramer in nineteen in his paper actually has a really interesting speculation in a footnote about the difference in the motivation for the confusion of

tongues between the Sumerian epic and the Biblical account. And it sort of goes along with what you were saying, Robert. He says, quote, the biblical storyteller was no doubt inspired to invent his moralistic explanation by the twofold aspect of the Babylonian ziggurat. And in just a minute we're going to get into the role that ziggurats may have played

in inspiring this story. But basically, a zigarat is an ancient Mesopotamian structure, a big step pyramid with a flat top, and so he says that this may have been an explanation. He continues, Uh, the one aspect is the high rise, sky reaching appearance of the structure in its prime that could be interpreted as a threat to the gods in

their power. And the other thing, it's melancholy and pathetic appearance when in a state of disrepair and collapse, which was not infrequent that could be viewed as a punishment by the angered gods or Yahweh for man's overreaching ambition.

The Mesopotamian, on the other hand, far from viewing the Ziggarat as an outgrowth of man's rivalry with an antagonism to the gods, actually deemed it to be a bond between heaven and earth, man and God, and attributed its ruin and decay to the inscrutable will of the gods and their incontestable decisions. And so the different views of these cultures upon seeing, for example, a ruined ziggurat would be based on their different idea of what the ziggurat

was for. If if you're, say a monotheistic Yahwist, and you see a ruined Ziggarat, you might not know that this is for the people who built it, that it's for some kind of positive connection they believe they have

with the gods. Yeah, I mean, of course, we can think a plenty of examples of that, right where if you're you have someone outside of a religion looking in, and especially if they have their own religious viewpoints that they're using to make the judgment, you can vastly misinterpret what something's for, Like people saying oh, look at the Look at those guys worshiping that Buddha or or look at that mighty church that they've built, um, you know,

as a tribute to themselves. Like what's the difference between you know, the humorists of a cathedral and the huborists of this tower. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, like it. It's definitely difficult to see the significance of religious artifacts from the outside if you don't make an attempt to understand what they mean. The practitioners to the Mesopotamians, these zigarattes wouldn't have been an assault on heaven. They were. They were an attempt to connect and bond with and

appease the heavens. But I guess it's time to look at the zigarattes themselves, right, So I would say, I don't want to you to come away from this episode with the impression that, oh, the Tower of Babel was a zigaratte and they just saw zigarattes and that's where the story came from, because I'm not so certain, but it has been widely speculated that the Tower of Babel story could have been inspired by sites of ziggarattes, and

that may be true to some extent. I don't know what you think about this, Robert Well, I guess some of two minds on this. Like if I were to definitely, uh, you know, get behind an idea of there being a literal tower that inspired the tails, then I would probably

line up with a zigaratte explanation. But we kind of get into that area we've gotten to in uh in the discussion of fossils and dinosaurs and dragons, Right, did people dream up dragons because they saw a triceratops fossil or Griffin's Yeah, And we we argued in that episode of the Stuff About Your Mind that, well, you can't just say that nobody had creative energy in the old days, that they weren't capable of creating myths out of other

things than just very literal sights and sounds. Yeah, And I don't think it is wrong to try to look for things that could have literally inspired the creation of ancient of tropes and ancient literatures, such as monsters or structures or things like that. It's not that I think that is a worthless project, because in many cases it may be that these things inspired people. But I just I think we should never forget the role of creative

imagination in creating literature. Yeah, I mean there were towers around, There were zigaratts around, and you can imagine someone creating the story of out some people who build a tower, and you don't actually need it that to be a literal place in a literal tower for that kind of story to come together. Yeah. But anyway, so let's look at the zigarattes. So you've probably seen pictures of zigarettes before. They're these huge, ancient Near Eastern stepped pyramids with a

flat top. So one thing you can do if you haven't actually seen one is google one. But let's say you can't google one picture the pyramids. Surely you've seen that of ancient Egypt. And then take the top, the pointy top off, so they've got a flat top, and then uh, and then give them a couple of stairways that are going up to the top. And some things

would probably originally have been on the top. I think a lot of the replicas or ruins that exist today don't have much on the top, but back then, and there may have been a temple or a shrine to a god such as mar Duke and uh, it may have also been thought of as the dwelling place of the God at the top of the zigaratte, like the God comes down and sleeps on top of the zigaratte or something like that. Yeah, I think it's very helpful to again think of the ziggurat in terms of a

holy mountain. It is an artificial holy mountain. And so since we know we have these things in the ancient Near Eastern context, plenty of people have positive that the story of the Tower of Babel may have been inspired by the sight of a zigarat or the ruins of a zigarat. And there's one candidate in particular that often comes up right. Yes, the specific candidate here is the Babylonian Tower temple north of the Marduk Temple, which in

Babylonian was called bab Elu or Gate of God. Yeah, and the zigarat itself was known as the etim an Key or the house of the foundation platform of Heaven and the underworld. I've also seen it translated as house

of the foundation platform of Heaven and Earth. And one thing to keep in mind about ancient ziggurats versus the existing ruins and replicas is uh is that the ancient versions were probably more beautiful like the generally more decorated, for example, with this one particular place that at him and an key. When Nebuchadnezzar the King came through and restored this zigaratte, he covered the top with blue glazed bricks and other types of decorations, some gold and things

like that. And the image of the zigaratte I have in my mind is it's the modern version, right. It's what either the replicas you would see in Iraq or the actual ruins of some previous zigarattes that still exist to some extent. Generally, when you think about them, they're the exact same color as the sand all around them, and sort of the same color as the sky, and this tends to have a kind of brutal effect on

the eye, at least to me. I don't know how you feel about this, Robert, but it's like, this massive, dense, colorless edifice is almost like it was specifically programmed to make you odd, but not in a good way, to fill you with this kind of crushing dread. It's stifling to the mind, and I think that's just because of the lack of color. I don't know if you feel the same way, um, but when I see recreations of the same structures with color and decoration added. It doesn't

have that effect on me at all. It's more like seeing these other types of ancient buildings that would be fascinating and beautiful. Yeah, I mean I can get that. It's it's kind of like when you look at ancient statues and all you have or the like the pale marble and the featureless faces and the blank eyes, and it gives you the stoic sense of of hauntedness. But

of course in many cases statues were painted. They were you know that they had color, they had pigments, they had eyes, and it would have been a totally different experience to the contemporary viewer of such a work. When you see these ancient Assyrian statues, I think, I think about seeing these in New York, the ancient Assyrian statues that have carvings. They're not just statues, but they're like walls with relief carvings to have all these people in them,

like these men with the huge braided beer. And when I often think about those statues, they seem very scary and ghostly to me because they don't have paint on them anymore, or some versions don't, and so the eyes are just blank. They have these eyes that you can see the rounded edges of them, but they don't have pupils or any colors in them. So it just looks like these gray ghostmen marching towards you. But when you see the painted versions or the restored painted versions, of

course the eyes have eye colors in them. Was like whites of the eyes and pupils, and it looks very different. It looks just more like art, you know of people. In the Tower of Babel Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts A. R. George, the author takes an exhaustive and I mean exhaustive look at modern architectural interpretations for a Babylonian tower. Yeah, and I believe this article is actually a review of a book on the subject, right yeah, um, so, so what

what does he come up with? He's talking about the idea that the Tower of Babel would have been inspired by this Babylonian zigarat design or temple design. Yeah, so he he looked. One of the sources of this paper discusses is the the Napapulas a cylinder and this was found in Iraq in nine and it was named for the seventh century BC, founder of the Neo Babylonian Empire, who's exploits it details and it provides some details concerning

uh Napopolass completion of Assyrian king Charadin. He would have been six eighty through six sixty nine BC. Of his earlier Zigarat project. This was a baked brick tower base of ninety one square. This matches up with the timeline modeled on an even older structure of the same base area. Now that's something I want to get into in just a minute. But there you see the idea of structures being built on top of one another in ancient Mesopotamia.

But it also mentions here so this is a ached brick tower, which is part of the story of the Tower of Babel is saying, hey, none of those sun baked bricks anymore. Now, now we're firing these things to make them really strong. Yeah. So this is one example of the kind of buildings that that that historians and archaeologists and sort of myth dissectors will will take a

look at. And like I said earlier, you get into the problem though, where you're you're taking the myth and you're kind of chasing around history with the myth like myth on a stick approach, which is a fascinating exercise and can certainly be illuminating, but you're still, in a sense kind of putting the cart before the horse, right. Well, yeah,

I mean, it's what we were saying earlier. It's not that I think it's a bad project to try to look for physical inspirations for stories from history and mythology. It's just that always don't forget we could have plenty of creative imagination in here. It's not like the author had to see something literally that they went and wrote down and now we have to figure out what the thing they saw was. And in terms of just large building structures, large towers that we've been making these for

some time. You can you can look at Egypt's various pyramids from the third millennium b C, of which there are many, including both the ones that immediately pop into your mind, and indeed there still stands the Zigarat of or from BC, uh Sardinia's Uh Narugus sant Antinnie this was from six b C. And the Ziggurat of dr coagal Zoo from the fourteenth century BC. And these are

just a few to mention. So um I don't want to make it sound like this was an age where there was only ever one tower, right that that and and these are just the large structures that survived to us today. Certainly you could get the idea of a tower, and that can inspire a myth about a tower based on a much smaller construction. Yeah. Now I want to look at another aspect of ancient Near Eastern architecture, or at least ancient Near Eastern civic design that is relevant.

And though I don't want to say that this is necessarily what inspired the story, I just think it's kind of interesting. So imagine you're the child of a trader and you visit an ancient Mesopotamian city with your parents, and the walls or these mud brick structures, but they're they're huge, They're bigger than anything you normally see. It's also powerful. It's rather overwhelming. And then you leave with your your parents and go trade in many other places,

and you don't come back for many years. But then you revisit the same city again when you're very old, you might you just might notice something odd. Is the city higher up off the surrounding desert than it was when you visited all those years ago, or is that just your imagination? Not necessarily so. Ancient Mesopotamian architecture is characterized by the slow accumulation of what's known as tells like t e l or t e l l, meaning

hills or mounds and uh. An ancient Mesopotamian city had these buildings like we were talking about, made out of sun bay to mud bricks, which were useful, but they were prone to fairly rapid deterioration in the elements. And as these structures deteriorated over time, they were replaced, but not necessarily removed, And so the trampled remains of old and demolished mud brick structures became the foundation for new structures.

So as we cycled through generations of human architecture in these cities, the ground level of the city rose up. So in a sense, not only were human buildings growing taller with the ages of Messopotamian city life, but the city itself was rising up out of the earth. And I just wonder would an ancient writer have been able to notice such a thing. I'm not saying they would, because it's definitely a slow process that takes place over

hundreds or thousands of years. Then again, if you come upon a city in the desert where everything else is pretty flat around, and suddenly just the city, part of the city is on this mound risen up out of the desert, I don't know. That's interesting. Yeah, And of course it's very poetic as well. It's the idea of I mean, civilization quite literally physically rising up. Yeah. And I would like to emphasize that in the Biblical account, it doesn't actually call the Tower of Babel the Tower

of Babel. That phrases our modern way of describing the story. The phrase in the original story is the city and the tower. Yes, all right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna take a look at a few different attempts to in in varying ways make the tower real. Alright, we're back, Robert. There are some awesome paintings of the Tower of Babel story. I

I love paintings of Biblical stories in general. That's one of my favorite genres of ancient paintings, especially the ones that are paintings of Old Testament stories. But but the Tower of Babel paintings are great, and some of the best ones have got to be the ones by Peter Brogel, right, Yes, Peter Broigel the Elder in particular, sixteenth century Flemish artist, and he actually created three different interpretations of the tower. Two survived, both oil paintings on wood. And then there's

a lost painting that was on ivory. Oh I'd like to see that, well, everyone would, but it's lost, Joe. If you find it, let him let us know. Um So the elephants came and took it back. Yeah, maybe there's a justice in that. Uh So, So we're left with two interpretations. And I think I had one of these on my wall in college, Like these are famous works of art, and it's the type of art unlike some things I had on my wall in college. This is ax. I would put this on my wall today.

It's that great a painting. Because you the two that survive also play off each other in unique ways as well discussed. So the first one is is often referred to as the Great Tower of Babel. And in this image we have this, uh this sort of half completed tower rising up out of the landscape. You've got the the ocean visible in the lower right hand. In the lower left hand there's a king surrounded by some workers.

You see tiny ant like people scaling uh the edifice, working on it, and the whole thing is clearly inspired by Roman architecture. So instead of looking like a Zigarat out of ancient Babylon, it instead looks it reminds one of the Roman colosseum. Yeah. Yeah, it's like if the Roman colosseum, uh like mated with a Zigarat, you might get this result. I also love it's got this quality that I always really enjoy in paintings, in that it's

I don't know what you call this. There are lots of lots of little details going on all around it. I'm I guess you might call this dizziness. But it's not just buzziness. It's something about the fact that there are all these little people doing their own thing far away. Yeah. I mean it works on two levels, right, because on one hand is will be z town and one hand is busy town, and it's just finding cool things going on and your imagination is just stoked by all these

little details. But then on the other, of course, uh, the Flemish masters were were masters of their craft and and nothing was just thrown in you know, half slap in dilly dally like there's a there's a symbolism it played, there's a purpose at play in play and uh, and individuals like Brugo, we're attempting to convey certain ideas and messages,

at least to the informed viewers of the piece. Now, the original story in the Bible does not tell you that there's any particular king overseeing the construction of the tower. But that doesn't mean that later readers didn't sort of supplement that information and come up with a king to be the guy in charge of this evil tower enterprise. Right. Yeah, Indeed we have a king in the lower left hand corner, as we mentioned, and uh, and many interpret this is

being King Nimrod. Yeah, King Nimrod, who the Bible says was a mighty hunter. But or yah, yeah, nim Rob the hunter. And so that's that's that's the potential read on on this this painting. Now I'm going to dive in a little deeper on this painting. The other the other painting is the the Little Tower of Babel and

it's called that because it's a smaller work. And uh, but let's start with this one, and I will include images of both these paintings and the landing pig for this episode stuff to blow your Mind dot com in case you want to compare and look yourself. So I was looking at a work by author s A Man's Bach titled Peter Brugle's Tower of Babel. And as the author points out, the the artist here is not really telling the story of the Tower of Babel. He's not

He's not showing like in terms of action. It's just people working on the tower and a king talking to some people that you don't see language splinters. You don't see a tower falling down. You don't see God coming down with his holy troops to dish out some uh some dialect. I don't even see well baked mud bricks and sly for mortar. And it's again not completely clear that it's it's Nimrod now. But prior to to Brugle you had people like Flavius Josephus wrote about Nimrod in

Antiquities of the Jews. This was first century. See, there's a whole story about Nimrod building this tower as vengeance over the Great flood, like he wanted to get back at God. Yeah, it's like God just wrecked all this havoc. So it's like, all right, I'm coming for you God, I'm building the tower. Now wait, was it just like was it like spite against God? Or was it like he was literally coming for him to wage war against him. I took him to mean spite. But now, but I

really like the idea of him coming after him. And that's pretty That's that's some action hero Like, uh, what am I thinking of? That's like Bruce Willis in uh in die Hard kind of another tower story, building a causeway to the heavens. Yeah, so, um, he builds this thing in Babylon and uh in the original And Brugle may or may not have read the text. He might have taken this detail from other artistic interpretations of the tower, or it might it might not be a nod to

Nimrod at all. So the author of the article Mansbach Here he cites Zigmat Wazbinski, who argues that Brugal deviates from past traditions and shows the tower as rounded, reflecting

on modern urban design trends. So they're not building the tower, perhaps, but rebuilding it in the form of a Babylon of the West or a Roman Babylon and in this case, he argues, the king that we're seeing is not Nimrod but Alexander the Great, and this is it's an interesting argument because it does get into the idea of like, it's not just an illustration that he's doing, He's creating a work of art. It is making some contemporary points

utilizing the symbology of an old story. Yeah, I hadn't thought so much about the idea of the tower being round. Now again, in the original story doesn't say what the shaping tower is in the Genesis account an other uh, in other later mythological adaptations, it might. But definitely if you see it in medieval art, like I've seen an ancient uh not ancient, a medieval painting of the Tower of Babble where it's just a tall rectangle, looks like

a church church bell tower. Yeah, now, Man's bach. He thinks that this this reading is a bit of an overread, uh, the idea that this is Alexander the Grade and it's really the rebuilding of Babble and Babble of the West. But he does think the Brugal was still clear certainly imparting a different meaning to humanists and progressives of the time. To learned viewers, so that the king might not be Nimrod or Alexander, but contemporary ruler Philip the Second of Spain, Yeah,

who had an ill reputation with his Flemish subjects. So Spanish domination was pretty harsh at the time, especially on Flemish liberal Catholics and Protestants. And Philip the Second, enhanced of the powers of the Inquisition in fifty six, who waged a campaign of suppression against Antwerp's Calvinists, and Philip the Second, on top of this spoke neither French nor Dutch, a further deepening the divide. So there's this disagreement, there's this clash of cultures, and it's uh it's situated by

the linguistic differences in play. Interesting. So we've looked at the Great Tower of Bebel by uh by Burgal here, but there's another version that you mentioned earlier, this lesser's Tower, the Little Tower of Bebel, and I've got a little image of it here, yes, in our in our outline. This is different, right, It's not just a smaller version of the same painting. It's fundamentally different. It's got stuff missing, like where's the king. Yeah, where's the sprawling city and

the crazy thing too. You can glance at it and both just look like incomplete towers. But the second tower is about two thirds complete. Perhaps, Yeah, it's a lot more along the way. You see fewer people in it, and it's more close to done. Yeah, And there's a there's a religious procession winding its way upward, cheaper grazing in the distance. Uh. In fact, they're grazing in areas previously devoted in the former painting to utility buildings. So arguably what we see here is a utopian vision of

what is possible for humanity when it is free from tyranny. Again, the king has gone. There's no king in this painting. Oh man, that that would mean the Tower of Babel would be a very odd selection of story to predict a genuine utopian vision. Well, but if you're a humanist, uh, I mean not so like reappropriating the story exactly. Yeah.

So there is a hopefulness to this painting, the works of humanity in a state of grace, about to transcend the limits of of not only what we've accomplished before, but the limits of the frame, the limits of the the actual canvas that or the you know, or the wood that he's working on here um the limits of the artist's vision, even like this is a tower of babble that may be completed. I you know, kings and bureaucracy and all the than the negative aspects of the world.

To stay out of the affair Men's box, says this quote. In some the Flemish painter has produced in this panel a suggestive image of an ideal state, a symbolic communal hive rising heavenward from a bucolic real landscape and bustling port. And he has shown us the greatness and power of human productivity made possible in the absence of a tyrant's hebristic will. The artist has given his contemporaries and us a glimpse of the humanists ideal city, a terrestrial utopia.

In a word, Brugle has provided a visual metaphor of mankind in a state of grace. Babble has been remedied. Woa, So there you go. Uh again, that's just some added layers of interest to just to phenomenal paintings. So I want to look at one more great work of art to pick ing the Tower of Babel, and that is an engraving by Gustav Dora known as the Confusion of Tongues, and this was made in eighteen sixty five. I think, uh it was. I've seen it described as a woodcut

or an engraving. Now, this is the the image that I think was referenced in the childhood illustration that I mentioned earlier that I grew up with, in that this looks very much like just a spiral road up into the heavens um And interestingly enough, Dora apparently based his design on the minaret of the great Mosque It's Samara. This is a ninth century mosque located in Samara, Iraq, and it's still there to this day. Only the outer wall and the minaret remain as the as the mosque

itself was destroyed in twelve seventy eight. Now I really love this. I love Doris a virgin. Dora always sort of does it for me. He's got these great illustrations of the divine comedy that are just burned. I want to talk about one of those in a second. But the man the tower here I said earlier, I think that none of the traditional artistic representations match what I had in my mind as a kid, meaning a tower that literally goes up to where you can't see it anymore,

so straight into space. Yeah, that's where this one really Uh. Is different from the Brugle images because the Brugle towers are incomplete to see where they break off and their sky above them. This thing just vanishes into the heavens. Yeah. Well, here you can see the tower has it's further along. But this is the moment of confusion. It's not like the king lording over the construction saying, look, what good

work we're doing here. It's surrounded by people who appear to be in anguish, and you can guess that they're in anguish because they've had their languages confused and they can't understand one another anymore. There's a man in the foreground reaching up to the heavens with like a plaintive kind of posture, like why would you do this to me? Yeah, it's kind of going stout there, what's happening? Uh? And and of course it has that great black and white

pathos that you see in Doria's work. Um. One of my favorite illustrations of his is from his illustration of the Divine Comedy and the scene in Kanto seven, when Dante and Virgil are passing by the demon Plutus, who's also the you know, Greco Roman god of wealth. Uh, but he's uttering the string of nonsense words. Plutus is saying, Pope Satan, Pope Satan Aleppe, which is, at least in

the medieval Italian of the story, it's nonsense. The Dante's Pilgrim doesn't understand what he's saying, but Virgil apparently does understand what Plutus is saying and interprets his words as a threat. And so it makes me recall this idea of the confused tongues maybe uh even confused tongues in the heavenly realms, Like would they speak a different language in hell than they would in heaven or on earth. Yeah,

we're get We're getting. We're almost getting into speaking in tongues territory here we have to, But we have to save at rabbit hole for another day. I just wanted to add one interesting modern interpretation that I came across on the Internet the other day, and it's by artist and animator Katsuhiro Otomo and collage artist Kosuke Kawamura. And this is a version of Broygel's interpretation of the tower.

But it's got to cut away, so it's like those old books, you know, the picture books where they have a cross section of the Hanna War and they've got to cut away of the tower where you can see the inside. And I think it's great, this is worth looking up. Nice he's a sort of extrapolating on the design that Rugle's gone with with for the exterior, and yes, trying to imagine what it would look like inside. Yeah. Nice. And apparently one of these artists that I just mentioned

had something to do with the Kira so nice. Alright, Well, we're gonna take another break, and when we come back, we're gonna look at some I guess you could say thought experiments on the dimensions of the tower if it, if it were to exist. Yes, and then also at

the confusion of language. All right, we're back. So, as we've discussed, the biblical account itself is vague, so you have to go to these other accounts, such as the Jubilee for even a starting point if you're gonna try and put numbers behind what the Tower of Babble consists off, and the Book of Jubilees does put numbers on it, and I wonder if it's the only one. Other accounts may put numbers on it as well, but I believe

it's the prime one. Certainly. If if you're gonna go for an ancient text that has numbers, that's where you go. And then you start busting out down those cubits and making them into meters or feet, you know. Yeah, if

you want to mentions, crack open your jubilees. Yeah. Now, one thing that the ways we mentioned that the biblical account does say that they're reaching unto heaven, and that's the thing that defies measurement, unless heaven is orbital access to angelic space aliens, in which case we're talking a space elevator, and we'd uh, we needed to reach a g stationary orbit of thirty five thousand, eight hundred kilometers or twenty two thousand, two hundred forty five miles. Uh.

That's a big tower. That's a big tower. And even today we're waiting on carbon nano technology to catch up with the dream man. I've heard some criticisms of even that speculation. It's like even carbon carbon nanotubes are not going to save us. Some people think that building a space elevator is really just impossible from a material's perspective.

So we we're still trying to figure out how to you know, violate the pieces of the earth, how how how much we can bake that stone to make it serve our purposes here maybe if it's well baked enough. So your earlier, earlier attempts to guess the tower's height are based in you know, older and Western view of history, one in which such wonders of the Bible were a matter of actual history and could conceivably be uncovered and found, and later attempts were more in the spirit of a

thought experiment. So I'm not gonna go through all of them. But if you crush the cubits, depending on you know, where you're getting your figures from, your tower height figures might hit any of the following sixt that doesn't sound like it reaches the heavens. Well, it's still big, still big, one point three miles high, one point six, three point six, four point six, and then eight miles So at this

point you're in territory with the birds. Yeah, but but you're uh, and the thing is that eight miles high, of course, you're still far short of that that space elevator that I mentioned earlier, and again the Burj Khalifa is uh two thousand, seven hundred and seventeen feet tall and that's roughly half a mile. So, as I said, all of this is just a matter of trying to

translate old systems of measurement into new. However, here's another approach, and this this came to us by late material scientist and author J. E. Gordon. He wrote a book back in the day titled Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down? Uh. And it's it's a wonderful book. You can I was looking through it on on Google Books. It's out there in various formats. You can pick up a used coffee really easily. Uh. And he's he's cited in a Uh.

He's often cited for his comments on the tower. His book is not primarily about the tower, but he touches on it a couple of times. Uh. He doesn't go all in, but he does share the basic idea. Quote. Now, brick and stone weigh about one and twenty pounds per cubic foot or two thousand uh kilograms per meter, and the crushing strength of these materials is generally rather better

than six thousand pounds for square inch. Elementary arithmetic shows us that a tower with parallel walls could have been built to a height of seven thousand feet that's two kilometers one point three miles before the bricks at the bottom would be crushed. So that's higher than I would have expected. Yeah, but he also points out that, yeah, with a broad enough base, you could have built as

high as Mount Everest. I mean, if you again, this is thought experiment, land, if you're just saying sky's a limit. I got this enormous plane, and somehow I can get the materials there. Sure you could build at least as high as Mount Everest at twenty nine thousand eight ft or five point four miles eight kilometers. So the pyramid approach, Yeah, just if you have enough space and enough slave labor

to do it, he says. Quote. Thus, a simple tower, preferably with a broad base and tapered toward the top, could well have been built to such a height that the men of Shannar would have run short of oxygen and had difficulty in breathing before the brick walls were crushed beneath their own dead weight. So there you go, a little physics breakdown on the Tower of Battle and what would what was conceivably or even inconceivably possible. So Robert,

you're telling me they really did build a tower to them? Uh, just just it's just an eye of what's possible, you know at that point, if you're gonna go ahead and build on those things. When I just impoured a mountain, you can just cut off a mountain at the base and drag it over to where you need it. Yeah, but you're not really it's not really flipping off God properly, right, because the whole thing is this is a mountain you built. So you're going with the angry Nimrod interpretation here where

he's got spite because of the flood. I do like it. I kind of want this to be an Aeronowski film, you know, the angry Russell Crow Nimrod who's on a mission of vengeance against God at the top of the tower. Are you not threatened? Al Right? Well, at this point we should we should get into the language. Okay, so this is gonna be the last thing we discussed here today. But yeah, the the idea of the confusion of tongues is clearly central to the Babel myth, Right, it's that

it's this ideological purpose. Like, like we discussed, it's an obvious fact of nature that people speak different languages in different places. Why is that? Why doesn't everybody speak the same language? It would be so much easier if everybody spoke the same language. So how come that in the case? Indeed, that's the basic question, like what why do we have

all these languages? To begin with? Uh, let's let's try and sort of answer that question, the same question that's being asked and answered and then answered by the myth but with their modern understanding. So, according to the Linguistic Society of America, humans currently have roughly six thousand, nine hundred and nine distinct languages. Each of these falls into

one of two hundred and fifty language families. For instance, the Indo European language group includes some two hundred languages, and they're not evenly spread out either. Europe has two hundred and thirty while Asia has two thousand, one hundred ninety seven. Papua New Guinea alone has eight hundred and thirty two. Yeah, and I know what you you might be thinking, I said, all right, so they're similar, die, Yeah, they sure they have just just eight hundred thirty two

shades of the same color. But no, these are in thirty to forty distinct language groups. So it just goes to show it's not it's not just based on how far people are spread, their number of other factors. Now, it's obvious to some extent that languages change over time, and you can probably guess that new languages are produced generally, not by people planning out a language, sitting down and

doing the esperanto kind of thing, cleon or what have you. Right, though created languages do exist, they're not generally spoken as people's native native tongue languages evolve, right, yeah, yeah, So that in the roots of realizing this go back to the rough observations of earlier man. So you take Greek and Latin, for instance, they show similarities and this led them any to assume that Latin came from Greek, but it didn't both emerge from from older Indo European tongues,

perhaps according to to some theorist Indo Hittite. Now, other similar languages were often dismissed as the same tongue. So, for instance, the Romans often considered just all bar barbarians spoke Barbarian, when, of course you had various groups and various languages in play. And by the Middle Ages there was an increased Western interest in the language, but this often entailed such a doomed ventures as the attempt to root all European tongues in Hebrew, and Hebrews not directly

related to any of them, because it's a Semitic language. Yeah, so I imagine that was a religiously motivated quest exactly, kind of like taking your myth on a stick and you know, running around through history. So language changes over time, sometimes fairly rapidly and in many ways. Just consider how different English is today compared to a few centuries ago with the Canterbury Tales. You know, you have to have a translation of it really to read it, or or

a proper understanding of this older version of English. And yet on the other hand, US languages like Japanese, which has apparently changed very little in a thousand years now, isn't that an interesting problem? Why do some languages change faster than others? Yeah? And indeed, and then you have to realize, well, there there's not just one change. There all these different changes. So there's lexical change phonetic and

phonological change, spelling changes, semantic changes, uh, syntactic changes. And on top of this, there's this concept of linguistic drift, both short term uneddirectional drift and long term cyclic drift. So we might have to have Christian jump in on a future episode because I know he's very interested in linguistic studies. Uh. But suffice to say that large scale linguistic shifts often occur in response to social, economic, and

political pressures. So invasion, displacement, colonization, um, you know, enslavement. The history books are full of examples. Uh. New technologies also require new words and new ways of talking to each other. But the breakup of language is more complicated than you might think. So you might think that if speaker of language A and speaker of language BE can

understand each other, then they speak the same tongue. But this isn't always the case, and in some cases speaker BE can understand speaker A, but not the other way around. So to come back to the Tower of Babble and the confusion of tongues here, UH is an instantaneous splintering of language possible and not really not the outside of some sort of magic or perhaps crazy ancient alien technology scheme right where they're like zapping language centers of the brain.

But certainly, if you don't interpret the Tower of Babble story to literally, you could say that God just simply did something else to displace people and cease the building of the tower with cataclysms, war, et cetera, and that these traumas and displacements are what splintered language in a way that matches up with our understanding. Yeah, I think this will go along with something I want to get

into in just a minute. When I look at at an interesting article about this that I came across, it makes it an interesting bit of sense, doesn't it when you when you think of the towers a means of reaching God or technological greatness. The displacement and spread of human civilization leads to the birth of numerous languages. Culture is in modes of thinking. They make such a unity, such vision that kind of humanist dream of of ruggle

the elder. It makes it just incredibly difficult to accomplish now, as we see in every corner of our world today. Right now. First, I want to look at this article that I found that I thought was interesting about the idea of the evolution of language and how that happens. Um and also comparisons between the way languages evolved in the way organisms evolved. But also we should keep in mind to come back to the idea that what if

the confusion of tongues has benefits as well. Now, first I just wanted to look at this interesting article from Plos Biology in two thousand and eight by John Whitfield that was called across the Curious Parallel of Language and species evolution. Now this this wasn't a study, This was like a feature article that was talking about some ongoing research at the time. I thought that was pretty cool.

So the author, John Whitfield, has um It starts off by talking about how in eighty seven Charles Darwin wrote a letter to his sister where he talked about the ideas of this linguist named Sir John Herschel. Now Herschel wasn't just a linguist. He was a polymath. He did all kinds of stuff. But Herschel had a thesis about language, and the thesis was languages, the languages that exist today were descended from a common ancestor. Now, the idea of

a common descent of languages. I think it seems fairly intuitive to us now, but it encountered problems in the nineteenth century, and one of which was uh that the evolution of Earth's diverse languages, as different as they were, would make the Earth much older than people generally believed it to be at the time for religious reasons such as Bishop Usher's Biblical chronology, which you know, made the

Earth about six to ten thousand years old. Right. So by Darwin's time, linguists already had some success tracing the genealogies of languages, so it was clear, for example, that many of the languages of Western Europe, such as French, Spanish, and Italian, had origins ancient Latin. That's not even that hard to observe, right You might imagine just sort of figuring this out by looking at the languages themselves, but one could also see the interbreeding of languages with with

different ancestors. For example, you've got modern English. This has a strong base in Germanic languages, but you also can see that it clearly has input from Romance languages like French and Latin and Spanish as well. It's also fairly clear how this usually happened since we had textual records reflecting changes in language use over time. So the basic principle was discent with modification. People pass on their languages to the next generation. But with each generation, small changes

creep in. New words appear, old words foality use, or become pronounced differently. New grammar rules start to come into use, and eventually enough of these changes accumulate that it would be difficult for a person speaking the ancient parent language to understand a person speaking the modern descendent language. That they would talk to each other and they wouldn't get it. And so Darwin started to wonder, I wonder if new species could evolve by descent with modification the same way

languages do. And now modern linguists have quantitative analytical tools that can help them understand how languages change over time, and you can use very similar tools to investigate changes in genomes over time. So a lot of this article then ends up comparing genetic change or genomic change to language change. What are what are the points of similarity

and what are the points of difference? Um and so Whitfield quotes an evolutionary biologists named Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, who says languages are extraordinarily like genomes. We think that they could be very that there could be very general laws of lexical evolution to rival those of genetic evolution. So there are ways in which language evolution and genomic evolution are similar. They're gonna be other ways that they're different, and we should acknowledge that in

a minute. But one way is that the most basic or most important components change the slowest. So in biology, this is gonna be genes that are used constantly by nearly all organisms. One example would be genes involved in protein synthesis. You've got to do this all the time, so they just change very slowly, and for this reason they can be used to trace genomic relationships way deep into history. And in linguistic this would be the words

you use all the time, like pronouns and numbers. If you think about the way language is change, if the language is going to be changing over time, what are the things that are most likely to have discontinuity from the way your parents spoke. It's gonna be like less common sayings or new expressions or something like that. Another parallel he talks about is that the varying rates of evolution in both languages in genomes that they can alter

over time. So uh. In biology, it looks like that there is generally a slow and steady rate of change in a line of descent that is then suddenly punctuated by occasionally brief periods of more rapid change. This might happen, for example, when you get various populations of the same species that are suddenly cut off from one another and unable to inter breed and forced into different living conditions. So you might think about our episode on the London

Underground mosquito. You've got the surface Coulex pipiens mosquito, and part of that population appears to break off into a subgroup that gets trapped into the London underground, which selects for different traits. You've got to like the dark, You've got to really have a taste for rat and human

blood instead of bird blood. Uh. And eventually, the version of Coulex pipiens that's that's accumulating these different adaptations is a different species within a surprisingly short amount of time, and they can no longer successfully breed and produce fertile offspring with one another. With the surface population, it looks

like a similar kind of thing happens with languages. Populations that speak them accumul late small changes over long periods of time, but there may be more rapid speciation events eventually after a population splits off. So if you take a large group of English speakers and you split them up into smaller groups, and you put them on different islands, so they never talk to each other, you can expect their rate of differentiation and how their language has change

is going to accelerate. Now this isn't exactly a dissenting opinion, but I want to throw this bit in from the Linguistic Society of America on the diversity of language compared to biological diversity. So the languages of the world seem amazingly diverse, but when you compare them to communication systems in general, they're all remarkably similar to one another. Quote.

Human language differs from the communicative behavior of every other known organism in a number of fundamental ways, all shared across languages, they say. Quote, human language is so different from any other known system in the natural world that the narrowly constrained ways in which one grammar can differ from another fade into insignificance. For a native of Milan, the differences between the speech of that city and that of Turin may loom large, but for a visitor from

Kula Lumpur, both are simply Italian. Similarly, the differences we find across the world in Grammars seem very important. But for an outside observer, say a biologist studying communication among living beings in general, or this is me, but dare say, you know, an angelic destroyer sent down or a Babylonian god quote, all our relatively minor variations on the single

theme of human language. That's interesting. Yeah, stuff that may appear very diverse to us because we are so highly attuned to the differences between it, just from an outside encoding perspective is not all that different. Yeah. They're all speaking Earth anyway, they're all speaking human. Yeah, so what drives language change? Like? Well, again we've touched on on on some of the reasons. But but what what you're you're taking your research show? Well, obviously this is not

at a settled issue. I mean, there are all kinds of things that drive changes in language. Um, some appear to be these fairly random kind of influences and changes in pronunciation and stuff like that. Sociolinguists and this is this is a point that um Whitfield makes in his article.

Sociolinguists would point out that sort of random artifacts of culture can influence language trends, and so they might give the example of the idiosyncratic speech patterns of a very high status person or social group get copied a lot, and that can become the sort of driving factor in the way languages change over time. Imagine if Marlon Brando's the coolest guy in America and suddenly all all the

men in America start mumbling their words like him. Or if you're if you're living in England and it's recently been conquered by French aristocrats, suddenly you might you might want to start incorporating more Francophonic features into your speech, so you talk more like the new bosses and the new rich people. Your company is purchased by a different company and they have different bits of business jargon, and

suddenly you're speaking like that at home. That forbid, that would be that would be grounds for the confusion of tongue in business. Uh. There are even ideas that genetics could influence language change. Not I think it's not strongly. It's not believed that this is strongly determinative by everybody that I know of who said, like, you know that

you have genes for speaking Chinese or something. But in a more subtle way, it appears that there could be certain types of genes that favor the development of certain types of languages. So, for example, it appears there could be the certain ancestral genes that correlate with the development of what's known as tonal languages versus non tonal languages. And a tonal language is one in which saying basically the same word, the same sequence of phonemes with a

different pitch or tone has a different meaning. Chinese is a good example of this. Yeah, Like they're multiple ways to say ma. We say my in our tongue and it means one thing, but it can mean you you say it wrong. You might think you're saying a mother in Chinese, but you're actually saying horse or himp. Is that a direct horse or himp? Well that's that's that's just three of them, mother, horse, and himp, But then their additionals as well. So can you do the different pronunciations?

How what does it sound like? Well, you have there's like rising around it. So there's like and there's there's like ma ma ma ma u. Those are just a few, but just just an idea of just some of the tones. And that's why a language like Mandarin Chinese is it can be so difficult for uh, for say, an English speaker to pick up on. I mean, that sounds amazingly difficult to learn if you don't come from a language that has tonal qualities to it. Yeah, we well, you know,

the thing is, we don't, and we do. I thought about this a lot because certainly your tone in saying certain words in English can can have a very important effect act on what you're saying. Uh, not so much changing the definition of a word, but changing the connotations. So so it's not yet it's not a direct comparison, but it's it's kind of like the the the the importance of tone in English taken to a different level altogether. Yeah,

that is interesting. But anyway, so the idea here is that, um, not so much that you would have a gene that tells you to speak a certain to speak a language like that, but that there are certain genes that appear to be geographically correlated with areas where people had developed languages with tonal features, so that could play a role.

But another interesting feature is the fact that if languages evolved like organisms, if this is, if this analogy is correct at all, they're more like the evolution of bacteria than the evolution of say, complex mammals, because languages can trade horizontally, right, The transmission of language is is not just vertical across generations. You don't just directly inherent your language from your parents. You largely do, but it's also horizontal.

You get new words, new speaking patterns, new grammatical rules from the people around you, and you can trade them off. So it is more like the horizontal gene transfer you'd see in microbial life. That's true, that's a good point. And then, of course I think it's not just the people around you. It's the TV programs around you as well. Uh and and and another extent, the books you read. You have all these these influences that are are taking what you were essentially given by those who reared you.

And uh, and you're you're recreating it every day. Yeah, So in the creation of new languages, I think the the analogy of evolution by natural selection or maybe not natural selection, evolution by some kind of selection. Evolution by vague selection is somewhat a good analogy in other ways it's not a perfect analogy. But I also have a question for any linguists out there listening. So we've talked about the difficulties of identifying, you know, or the idea

of a species in biology before. In biology, the species distinction is usually taken to mean that two different species are animals or organisms that cannot breed and produce fertile offspring. So if we follow the analogy between genomics and linguistics, what is the equivalent distinction between different species of language?

I mean, you might be tempted to say, well, it's when you can't understand one another, But there are varying degrees of understanding, right, you might sort of understand somebody. So anyway, if you have a good answer for that, you might want to email us it blow the mind at how stuff works dot com to let us know. All right, as we begin to close out here, and I want to talk very briefly about a book and an idea that I imagine a number of you out

there have been thinking about the whole time. And that's Neil Stevenson's Cyberpunk Classics No Crash. I've never read this, but I've always meant to. Oh yeah, this is the one, of course, It's it's a wild book. It's you've got so many fun elements going on in a hero protagonist

with samurai sword. But the part that's stuck with me the most, and the part that that that that jives with today's episode is this important plot point about about this uh, this this this thing that's referred to as the nam Shub of Inky who mentioned earlier this is the Sumerian god. So the idea here and this is like the this is the version of it that that

Stevenson plays within the book. Is he of this ancient Sumerian or language and it allowed brain function to be programmed using audio stimuli in conjunction with a d N a altering virus. So Sumerian culture in this scenario UH is organized around these programs known as ME, which were administered by priests. Oh yeah, the ME. So there in one of the things I mentioned earlier, the the Golden Age passage in the Sumerian epic. There, I think there

is a recital of m A. That's that's it. Yeah, that that's what he's playing off of in this So Inky this uh this this important figure this uh this God develops a counter virus known as the nam shub and then he delivers uh this to stop the Sumerian language from being processed by the brain, and this leads to the development of other less literal languages, giving birth

to the babble myth. So this would be a case where the confusion of languages as described by Inky confusing the tongues in this epic is actually a benevolent thing. So yeah, the idea that Stevenson is rolling out here is that if you have a mono linguistic culture, it's like having like a massive farm that's only one crop because you're susceptible to a single virus or pathogen or

parasite is wiping it out. They specifically mentioned say, you know, uh Nazism coming in, and if if it resonates with a few people, if everyone has the same language and essentially the same culture, then that that that harmful idea, that that that linguistic meme can just run rampant and eat everyone up. But if you have these it's like having a forest fire breakout in a global forest with you know, without any streams or planes to break it up,

everything's going to burn. I love this idea, and I think this is fascinating. I think it is a great case for preserving the diversity of human language and culture. I mean, I think sometimes it is tempting. I think, wouldn't it be great if the whole world had one language in one culture. It would be so easy for

us all to get along. We could do trade would be so much easier, we could just really you know, like it seems utopian when you think about it, but I absolutely see some merit in the idea that that would make us much more uniquely vulnerable to a particularly bad linguistic or cultural program that gets instituted that catches

on easily. I mean, it's easy to think about memes like Nazism or like a really awful interpretation of a religion or something like that, And there are ideas that can be captivating to people that they feel very entranced by and beholden to um, but they're utterly destructive. And if you have these divisions of culture and divisions of language where you can't play exactly the same linguistic meme

on somebody else's brain. It's a it's a little bit of an immunity barrier, or what if the what if the pathogen here is a is an intense desire to build a giant tower into the sky, and maybe ultimately the god or gods in the scenario saying well, look at these people, they're totally wasting their time building this tower to nowhere. We better break that up before they hurt themselves. The only humane thing to do is to knock it down, and thereafter called the land Overthrow. All right, Well,

there you have it, everybody. The Tower of Babel, artistic interpretations, mathematical interpretations, linguistic interpretations, and hey, there is a lot of awesome other Tower of Babel literature and legend out there that we didn't even have time to get into today. So if you want to write us about your favorite Tower of Babel stories from or or equivalent legends from other other types of literature mythological history, let us know

about that. That's right in the meantime, Heading over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that's what we will find all the podcast episodes, including the Great Flood episode that we mentioned earlier and London Underground Mosquito, London,

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