Also known as the Tower of Babylon, and called "
Etemenaki" by the Babylonians who built it, the
Tower of
Babylon was reportedly started by King
Nimrod (who may be
Gilgamesh, or
Ninus), grandson of
Ham, grandson of
Noah. King Nimrod wanted to subvert the Babylonians' worship of God so that they might worship him, instead. In a rare show of
Old Testament God kindness, God decided not to
smite the Babylonians, but instead to torment them by creating
language barriers. The Tower was fully completed under the reign of King
Nebuchadnezzar.
All of which seems unlikely, given that the Babylonians had their own pantheon of gods, and that the Tower was, in fact, a type of temple known as a ziggurat.
Modern day historians believe that the original Tower may be the Marduk Ziggurat, the remains of which can be found today in Iraq near the banks of the Euphrates. The ziggurat was square-shaped, measuring 300 feet on a side. The plains of Mesopotamia not exactly being high in building resources, the Tower was built out of sun-baked bricks made of clay and straw, and bound together with bitumen, probably imported from the Iranian plateau.
It was located a short distance from the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Also, King Nebuchadnezzar had two, count 'em, two palaces within the city.
What probably ended the tower for real was the conquest of Babylon by Persia's own King Xerxes. Under normal circumstances, ziggurats used complex drainage systems to prevent water damage. Under command of a distant king, upkeep of the Tower was neglected, pipes and channels clogged, and, being made mostly out of mud, it slowly disintegrated.