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Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from housetop dot com.

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Speaker 1: And the whole earth was of one language and of

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Speaker 1: one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed

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Speaker 1: from the east that they found a plain in the

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Speaker 1: land of Shinar, and they dwelt there, and they said

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Speaker 1: to one another, go to, let us make brick and

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Speaker 1: burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and

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Speaker 1: slime they had for mortar. And they said, go to,

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Speaker 1: let us build a city and a tower whose top

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Speaker 1: may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name,

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Speaker 1: lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the

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Speaker 1: whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the

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Speaker 1: city and the tower which the children of men built,

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Speaker 1: and the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and

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Speaker 1: they have all one language. And this they begin to do.

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Speaker 1: And now nothing will be restrained from them which they

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Speaker 1: have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down.

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Speaker 1: And they're confound their language that they may not understand

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Speaker 1: one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from

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Speaker 1: thence upon the face of all the earth, and they

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Speaker 1: left off to build the city. Therefore is the name

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Speaker 1: of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound

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Speaker 1: the language of all the earth? And from thence did

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Speaker 1: the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all

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Speaker 1: the earth. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And

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Speaker 1: that was a reading from the Book of Genesis in

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Speaker 1: the Bible. It is the story of the Tower of Babel. Robert,

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Speaker 1: I've got to ask you, what did this story look

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Speaker 1: like when you were a little kid. Inside your head? Oh,

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Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it's always kind of looked the same. Um,

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Speaker 1: I don't, I don't. I wish I did you picture

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Speaker 1: the tower? Yes, But I have to say I had

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Speaker 1: this book of Bible stories with illustrations for each one,

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Speaker 1: and I think it was kind of Gustaf Dora inspired.

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Speaker 1: It had a kind of spiraling, you know, almost a

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Speaker 1: seashell kind of looked to it. And I was always

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Speaker 1: taken by that. I was this was a fabulous book

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Speaker 1: in many respects because I remember it had it just

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Speaker 1: had all of these strange illustrations to them, especially the

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Speaker 1: more mystical Old Testament occurrences. Now, did it have a

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Speaker 1: direct translation of the Genesis account along with illustrations or

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Speaker 1: was it like adapted into a modern sort of retelling

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Speaker 1: of the So I think it was adapted because it

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Speaker 1: was kind of for kids, you know, So I didn't

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Speaker 1: have access in that book to the you know, the

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Speaker 1: the nice keen James version that we have here with

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Speaker 1: all the slime and mortar and weirdness and some other translations.

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Speaker 1: That word slime is rendered tar alright, So if you're

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Speaker 1: not familiar with it, the account of Genesis basically lays

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Speaker 1: it all out. So humans got smart, they got organized,

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Speaker 1: they got more than a little bit ambitious. They decided

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Speaker 1: to build a structure that would show of the world

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Speaker 1: just how amazing they really were. And uh, God wasn't

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Speaker 1: too crazy about this development. So in this, uh, this story,

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Speaker 1: in this myth, he blasts their language so that they

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Speaker 1: can't understand each other and scatters them far and wide.

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Speaker 1: Then the tower is never finished. Right, So this is

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Speaker 1: pretty straightforward about how this would work in the logic

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Speaker 1: of the story. Right, if you confuse the tongues, if

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Speaker 1: you ever, if everybody speaks the same language, they can

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Speaker 1: all work together. If you make them all speak different languages,

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Speaker 1: then they can't coordinate their activities, and thus the building

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Speaker 1: of the tower has to stop. Yeah, it's it's at

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Speaker 1: least gonna set back production of the tower somewhat because

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Speaker 1: you're gonna have to figure out how I mean in

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Speaker 1: this magical scenario, You're gonna have to figure out how

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Speaker 1: your language relates to their language. You're gonna have to

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Speaker 1: figure out some sort of common means of communicating, and

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Speaker 1: it's essentially have to reorganize the whole the whole venture.

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Speaker 1: Now this is coming right pretty much right after a

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Speaker 1: catastrophe in the Book of Genesis, because this is after

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Speaker 1: the flood narrative, right, so we had the whole earth

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Speaker 1: except for one family destroyed in the Great Flood. So

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Speaker 1: it's after the flood, and and so you've got people

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Speaker 1: rebuilding civilization. But they get a little haughty, and there

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Speaker 1: are multiple ways that you could interpret what they're doing

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Speaker 1: when they're building this tower up to heaven. As a child,

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Speaker 1: I think the way I read the story was, well,

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Speaker 1: they're prideful right there, saying look what we can accomplish.

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Speaker 1: Were showing off, and God did not like their pride

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Speaker 1: and punish them for it. More recently, when I look

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Speaker 1: at this story, I see an implied threat essentially that

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Speaker 1: they are attempting to physically scale to the heavens so

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Speaker 1: that they could challenge the gods. In one sense, they

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Speaker 1: are bridging heaven and earth. Yeah, it's like a yeah,

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Speaker 1: it really is, and so what's what's God to do?

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Speaker 1: I mean, there are some accounts I remember reading when

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Speaker 1: I was younger. They would even say that the workmen

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Speaker 1: on the tower, like on their lunch break, I guess,

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Speaker 1: would shoot angels with bows and arrows because it was

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Speaker 1: getting that high, you know, it was getting clo to

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Speaker 1: the heavenly domain. Yeah, when I when I was young,

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Speaker 1: and for the longest I think it was the definitely

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Speaker 1: the pride version, the idea that they just got too boastful, which,

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Speaker 1: on one hand, the message there ties in I guess

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Speaker 1: nicely with a lot of human endeavor. I don't get

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Speaker 1: too full of yourself, because God still got the final word.

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Speaker 1: But it also kind of makes God look like a

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Speaker 1: paranoid jerk where he's just like, oh, this tower is

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Speaker 1: getting a little too tall from my like and I'm

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Speaker 1: gonna smite that, Like why you're God, They're just building

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Speaker 1: a tower. That The behavior is more understandable if you

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Speaker 1: interpret it as an attempt to overthrow the gods, a

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Speaker 1: threat against their place in the sky. It also makes

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Speaker 1: more sense when you think about ancient cosmology with with

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Speaker 1: the idea that the heavens were actually a fairly low

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Speaker 1: plane that you could access through ascension in the air.

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Speaker 1: When when I was a kid, I had this story

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Speaker 1: in my head, and I was trying to picture it

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Speaker 1: as something that had happened. But I also had knowledge

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Speaker 1: of outer space travel and and how big the atmosphere

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Speaker 1: actually was, so I was trying to picture it like, Okay,

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Speaker 1: so they're building a tower that literally goes up to

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Speaker 1: space because that's where God is. Well, I didn't necessarily

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Speaker 1: think God was in space, but that was the only way,

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Speaker 1: knowing about space, that's the only way I could really

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Speaker 1: interpret it. And so I was picturing a tower that

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Speaker 1: just went up as far as you could see, which

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Speaker 1: is kind of ridiculous to picture. Now, if you see

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Speaker 1: the great artistic representations of the story, it's not really

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Speaker 1: that the tower reaches beyond where you can see, though

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Speaker 1: actually I guess in some of them it is. But

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Speaker 1: like later we'll be looking at a Peter bru Egels interpretation,

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Speaker 1: and it's more just kind of this massive project that

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Speaker 1: more reflects pride, I think. Yeah, And even with just

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Speaker 1: a basic almost subconscious understanding of engineering, you look at

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Speaker 1: those representations and you know this thing is not going

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Speaker 1: to reach a low Earth orbit or anything. Right now.

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Speaker 1: You can also look at the myth, you know, in

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Speaker 1: two basic ways as well. I guess you can say

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Speaker 1: that this was basically an etiological attempt, you know, to explain, well,

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Speaker 1: why do we have all these languages? Yeah, and ideologies

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Speaker 1: are extremely common and in ancient literature and ancient mythology,

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Speaker 1: and you find them all throughout the Bible. The Book

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Speaker 1: of Genesis is full of stories that tell you a

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Speaker 1: story about something that happened, and it sort of ends

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Speaker 1: with the punch line, and that's why these people are

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Speaker 1: now called this which relates to some fact about the story,

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Speaker 1: you know it would be like, And then they cut

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Speaker 1: off one guy's leg, and that's why this tribe is

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Speaker 1: now called the left footers. Yeah. And then but then

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Speaker 1: there's just not a real But then there's another level

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Speaker 1: too to our interpretation of this tale, this myth uh

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Speaker 1: as And and I think I think it's not too

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Speaker 1: much of a stretch to to think about it being

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Speaker 1: baked into the original purpose as well is that it

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Speaker 1: explains why people can't get along very well, why people

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Speaker 1: can't come can can very rarely come together on a

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Speaker 1: megaproject um and and stick with it like something's going

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Speaker 1: to fall apart. Uh. And you have to have extenuating

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Speaker 1: circumstances to allow something grandiose to happen to begin with. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: And in that vein, I can see how it's not

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Speaker 1: only an ideological story to explain why we have all

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Speaker 1: these different languages on Earth, why there's so much conflict,

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Speaker 1: but it also has some kind of ancient techno paranoia,

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Speaker 1: uh idea. Right, So there's actually a bit of discussion

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Speaker 1: of technological change in the story. They say, you know what,

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Speaker 1: they were burning those bricks thoroughly. This actually represented a

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Speaker 1: technological upgrade. And the architecture of ancient Mesopotamia, a lot

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Speaker 1: of it was built with mud bricks. These are sun

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Speaker 1: baked mud bricks that you would form together out of

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Speaker 1: clay and then allow to harden in the sun. And

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Speaker 1: these were you know, you could build out of them,

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Speaker 1: but they didn't. They weren't in it for the long haul. Later,

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Speaker 1: if you had fire baked bricks that you made at

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Speaker 1: a much higher temperature, they would be much sturdier. So

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Speaker 1: we're seeing here there's technological change. This technological change leads

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Speaker 1: to either on one interpretation, you know, Huber as people

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Speaker 1: being uh very haughty about what they can do with

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Speaker 1: their their new ovens and kilns now out, or it

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Speaker 1: leads to them saying, you know, we've got this new power,

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Speaker 1: we could ascend to the heavens and take over. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: they're like, how you touched on the sort of the

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Speaker 1: violence of making the bricks, because they're they're kind of

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Speaker 1: perpetrating an act of violence on the earth, remaking the

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Speaker 1: earth into an artificial mountain. And in so many mythologies,

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Speaker 1: I mean, the mountain is the mountains are where the

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Speaker 1: gods live. The mountain is the thing that bridges Earth

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Speaker 1: to the sky. Yeah. So eventually in this episode, we

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Speaker 1: want to take a quick look at about the diversification

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Speaker 1: of languages and where language speciation comes from. But before

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Speaker 1: we get into that, I think we just want to

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Speaker 1: talk about the myth itself because it's such an interesting story. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: we're gonna kick off with the myth. We're gonna talk

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Speaker 1: a little bit about art, and yeah, we're gonna get

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Speaker 1: into some engineering and linguistics. But first the myth and

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Speaker 1: uh and and as is the case with the number

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Speaker 1: of these Old Testament stories, and we went into this

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Speaker 1: a little bit when we we talked about the Great

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Speaker 1: Flood in a previous episode, like these are these are

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Speaker 1: tales that existed before the the Old Testament was really thing? Like,

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Speaker 1: these were tales that they were brought into this collection. Well,

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Speaker 1: you can, you can definitely look at it that way.

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Speaker 1: Another way to look at it is that, um, if

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Speaker 1: the tales in Genesis didn't necessarily come from other stories

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Speaker 1: that you'd find and say ancient Sumerian literature or something

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Speaker 1: like that, you might say that they had a common

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Speaker 1: ancestor you know that they they might not be direct

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Speaker 1: descendants of one another, but might be cousins that come

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Speaker 1: from more primeval stories. But yeah, it's hard to know exactly,

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Speaker 1: but you can see parallels in in other ancient Sumerian

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Speaker 1: mythology that are very interesting. And I want to get

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Speaker 1: into it a little bit, but first I just wanted

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Speaker 1: to take a peek at some of the translation notes,

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Speaker 1: which was this is one of my favorite things to

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Speaker 1: do about an Old Bible story is go look up

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Speaker 1: a fairly literal translations, such as like the New American

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Speaker 1: Standard version that's a trans English translation of the Bible that,

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Speaker 1: more so than most versions, tries to follow the literal

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Speaker 1: word for word progression of the text. Now, a lot

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Speaker 1: of times this doesn't necessarily render the best reading um,

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Speaker 1: but it is just more interesting to see what the

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Speaker 1: original language looked like, and then also look at there

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Speaker 1: there will be usually if there's like a if it's

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Speaker 1: a good online resource, there will be like footnotes you

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Speaker 1: can click that will tell you literally what the original

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Speaker 1: word was. So, for example, everywhere the word language appears

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Speaker 1: in this original story, it says the whole earth was

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Speaker 1: of one language and of one speech. Literally, that's the

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Speaker 1: whole earth was of one lip or had one lip.

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Speaker 1: So I'm imagining everybody sharing a lip or sort of

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Speaker 1: lip locking all the time when they're talking, and the

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Speaker 1: the one speech was of one set of words or

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Speaker 1: few words. And so when God speaks to God, God

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Speaker 1: is speaking to some kind of other heavenly beings one

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Speaker 1: would assume other gods in the earlier pantheon or angels.

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Speaker 1: God says, let us go down there and confuse their

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Speaker 1: lips so that they will not understand one another's lip.

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Speaker 1: But there's also another ideological feature of this story, which

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Speaker 1: is that it tries to explain the origin of the

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Speaker 1: term Babel. So you've got this line in verse nine

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Speaker 1: where it says, therefore is the name of it called

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Speaker 1: babble because the Lord did their confound the language of

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Speaker 1: all the earth, and thence did the Lord scatter them

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Speaker 1: abroad upon the face of the earth. So he's talking

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Speaker 1: about this place called Babel. Literally, this is probably referring

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Speaker 1: to Babylon. That's their word for it. But also there's

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Speaker 1: a joke in the name because the Hebrew word baalal

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Speaker 1: means confused or confound, So it's trying to say there's

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Speaker 1: some kind of cognate in the word they use for

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Speaker 1: the place Babylon and the word for confused. It's like, yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's why they call that place Babylon. It's because it's confused.

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Speaker 1: Old Testament jokes. You know why they call it Pittsburgh.

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Speaker 1: It's the pit. Yeah, there you go. It's the same spirit.

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Speaker 1: Or here's another one, Joe, which us state is um

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Speaker 1: is high in the middle and around on both ends.

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Speaker 1: I have no idea. Oh hioh, there you go. Uh man.

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Speaker 1: But back to ancient Babylon. Oh you got me there,

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Speaker 1: Robert I am slain, I die Horatio. So back to

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Speaker 1: the original myth. So we've got this Genesis version. But

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Speaker 1: there are also other versions of the same story. For example,

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Speaker 1: one appears in the Book of Jubilees, which is another

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Speaker 1: ancient Jewish text that is sort of a retelling of

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Speaker 1: a lot of the other Genesis stories. It's a it's

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Speaker 1: a retelling of the history of the Jewish people and

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Speaker 1: their relationship with God, and it's sort of like dictated

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Speaker 1: by angels, and they give just a few extra details

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Speaker 1: in the story. For example, in the Jubilees version, it says,

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Speaker 1: and they began to build, and in the fourth week

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Speaker 1: they made brick with fire, and the bricks served them

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Speaker 1: for stone, and the clay with which they cemented them

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Speaker 1: together was asphalt, which cometh out of the sea and

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Speaker 1: out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinnar.

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Speaker 1: So that's given us a little more detail about like

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Speaker 1: the technological origins of their instruction methods. More about the

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Speaker 1: construction methods. They specified the size of the tower and

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Speaker 1: they built it forty and three years. Where they're building

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Speaker 1: its breadth was two hundred and three bricks, and the

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Speaker 1: height of a brick was the third of one. It's

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Speaker 1: height amounted to five thousand, four hundred and thirty three

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Speaker 1: cubits and two palms, and the extent of one of

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Speaker 1: the walls was thirteen states and of the other thirty states.

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Speaker 1: So if Google's unit conversion program of length of the

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Speaker 1: length of a cubit is right, this means that the

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Speaker 1: tower would have been about eight thousand, one fifty ft tall.

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Speaker 1: And to put that in in in terms of modern buildings,

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Speaker 1: the Burge Khalifa in the United are Arab Emirates is

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Speaker 1: two thousand, seven hundred seventeen feet tall. So this would

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Speaker 1: have dwarfed the tallest building that has has ever existed,

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Speaker 1: the stall structure that's ever existed, by a substantial degree. Now,

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Speaker 1: I wonder how this compares to the alternate designs for

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Speaker 1: the Colossus of Chane Cargo we talked about in our

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Speaker 1: in our Chicago World's Fair episode. Remember the other proposed

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Speaker 1: structures before they had the ferris wheel, they were going

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Speaker 1: to be thousands and thousands of feet tall, many Birch

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Speaker 1: Khalifa's Yes, I don't know, it would be interesting to

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Speaker 1: go back super fans can listen and tell us what

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Speaker 1: we said. Uh. And then also we get another detail

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Speaker 1: in the Jubilees version about how God knocked the tower

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Speaker 1: down in the end, so he didn't just scatter the people,

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Speaker 1: but he crushed the tower. So it says, the Lord

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Speaker 1: send a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it

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Speaker 1: upon the earth, and behold it was between as Sure

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Speaker 1: and Babylon in the land of Shannar, and they called

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Speaker 1: its name Overthrow. So it looks like we get another

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Speaker 1: ideological legend there. There's some place that translates roughly to

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Speaker 1: overthrow apparently, and saying you know why we call it

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Speaker 1: overthrow because it's where God knocked down the tower. It

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Speaker 1: does put a totally different spin on the myth. Like

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Speaker 1: on one level, he just he's like, what do I

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Speaker 1: have to do to knock down this tower? I just

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Speaker 1: have to confuse their languages, snap of the fingers. It's done.

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Speaker 1: It takes care of itself. But in this version he

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Speaker 1: does that, but he's like, a heck, I'll not get

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Speaker 1: down to why I'm a giant toddler. Uh. So there

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Speaker 1: are also some interesting parallels here where you've got the

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Speaker 1: Sumerian got Inky, and one of his roles that has

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Speaker 1: been discovered in in recent decades is as the confuser

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Speaker 1: of languages in Sumerian mythology. So I want to refer

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Speaker 1: to a paper I came across by Samuel Noah Kramer,

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Speaker 1: who is a twentieth century Sumerian history expert, and he

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Speaker 1: wrote this paper called the Babble of Tongues a Sumerian

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Speaker 1: Version in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Now

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Speaker 1: this was from night so this is not a new discovery, um,

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Speaker 1: but but we do find that it when it comes

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Speaker 1: to studying the Tower of Babble, new research is is

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Speaker 1: a very relative term. There's not a lot of like

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Speaker 1: cutting edge study of this. This. There was some new

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Speaker 1: stuff at the time this came out, though, because he

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Speaker 1: had just recently gotten access to some new cune of

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Speaker 1: form tablets have filled in the gaps in a previously

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Speaker 1: known legend that that that had had incomplete sections because

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Speaker 1: of the deterioration of our sources. So he notes that

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Speaker 1: the biblical scholar E. A. Spicer had demonstrated in his

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Speaker 1: Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis that the Tower of Babel

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Speaker 1: narrative likely had a cune of form source, so another

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Speaker 1: Mesopotamian source going back to this other ancient Mesopotamian literature,

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Speaker 1: and Kramer was trying to bolster this view given recent

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Speaker 1: discoveries of his day of clay fragments filling in this

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Speaker 1: incomplete fragment from a Sumerian epic tale known as in

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Speaker 1: mer Car and the Lord of Arrata, and the details

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Speaker 1: of the narrative aren't especially important. Basically, it's about a

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Speaker 1: conflict between two rulers or kings. One is in mere

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Speaker 1: Car and he wants to get the king of Rata

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Speaker 1: to submit to him and pay tribute of gold and gems.

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Speaker 1: And there's one section known as the Golden Age passage,

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Speaker 1: and this is where an envoy from Rata is asked

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Speaker 1: to deliver this sort of formalized statement. It's kind of

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Speaker 1: like a hymn or a poem to his master. And

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Speaker 1: this is Kramer's translation of the part that was already

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Speaker 1: known when before these new tablet pieces were discovered. It

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Speaker 1: goes like this, Once upon a time, there was no snake,

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Speaker 1: there was no scorpion, there was no hyena, there was

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Speaker 1: no lion, there was no wild dog, no wolf. There

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Speaker 1: was no fear, no terror. Man had no rival in

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Speaker 1: those days. The lands of Saber and Hamazi, harmony tongued summer,

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Speaker 1: the great land of the decrees of prince ship Uri,

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Speaker 1: the land having all that is appropriate, the landmark to

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Speaker 1: resting in security, the whole universe, the people in unison,

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Speaker 1: to in Leal, and that's a Sumerian chief god to

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Speaker 1: in Leal. In one tongue spoke then Adah, the Lord Adah,

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Speaker 1: the Prince Adah, the king. In Key, Adah the Lord Adah,

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Speaker 1: the Prince, Adah, the king, and repeats it again, a

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Speaker 1: Da the Lord ada the Prince, a Da the King.

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Speaker 1: There's a lot of repetition in these um So that's

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Speaker 1: what they had already. But then there was this new

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Speaker 1: discovery that added in some new fragments. It went on

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Speaker 1: to say, in Key, which is another Sumerian guard, the

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Speaker 1: Lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy, the Lord of Wisdom,

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Speaker 1: who understands the land, the leader of the gods endowed

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Speaker 1: with wisdom, the Lord of airy. Do change the speech

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Speaker 1: in their mouths, brought contention into it, into the speech

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Speaker 1: of man that until then had been one. So here's

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Speaker 1: another version of the story. Of the confusion of tongues. Now,

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Speaker 1: this one lacks a lot of detail. It doesn't say

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Speaker 1: that humans were building a tower. It doesn't really give

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Speaker 1: a rationale for in Key changing the languages that people spoke.

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Speaker 1: It just says that people offered praise to in Leal

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Speaker 1: in one tongue. They all spoke the same language, and

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Speaker 1: then at some point this great figure in Key brought

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Speaker 1: contention into their languages and split the languages into different fragment. Now,

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Speaker 1: Kramer notes a difference from the Biblical account. Of course,

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Speaker 1: in the Biblical story, the gods confused the speech of

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Speaker 1: humankind because humankind is threatening to encroach into the heavens,

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Speaker 1: which is the domain of the gods, and it's a

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Speaker 1: conflict between between God and the humans that leads to

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Speaker 1: the confusion of tongues. But in the Sumerian version, as

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Speaker 1: I was saying, there's nothing apparent that the humans did

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Speaker 1: to have their speech confused. So Cramer suggests that any

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Speaker 1: Key confusing the tongues of humanity is a result of

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Speaker 1: his rivalry with the other god of the Sumerian pantheon

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Speaker 1: that's mentioned in the story the Big One in Leal,

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Speaker 1: rather than of a rivalry with humans. This is interesting

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Speaker 1: because it makes me think about the differences very broadly

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Speaker 1: between worshiping a pantheon of gods or a single god,

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Speaker 1: between being polytheistic and monotheistic. So if you just have

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Speaker 1: one god, well, well, let me take it from this direction.

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Speaker 1: If you have multiple gods, and it's possible that these

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Speaker 1: gods don't get along, and then you're just left with

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Speaker 1: the residual um chaos of their turmoil. In the same way,

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Speaker 1: might be an innocent bystanding yeah, yeah, in a way

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Speaker 1: that I think relates to modern experience, but even ancient experience,

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Speaker 1: where you know, what are you doing? You're just a

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Speaker 1: normal person trying to live your life. You're a farmer,

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Speaker 1: you're a craftsman, your podcast or whatever you are. And

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Speaker 1: the conflicts among the greats, among the kings, the governments

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Speaker 1: of the nations themselves, the way no input do you

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Speaker 1: have no input? But then you still have to suffer

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Speaker 1: what the wages of these conflicts. But it's not a

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Speaker 1: judgment thing, it's just that's how life works. But if

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Speaker 1: it's a single god, then then who else is there?

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Speaker 1: Like every every catastrophic event, every minor misfortune or blessing

404
00:21:48,000 --> 00:21:50,320
Speaker 1: is or or you know, positive effect is a is

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Speaker 1: a blessing or a curse. It's all a direct communication

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Speaker 1: with the divine being. Yeah, they're they're definitely shades of that,

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Speaker 1: I think in the division between monotheism and polytheism. But

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Speaker 1: one thing we see also in a lot of these

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Speaker 1: ancient accounts is that the line between monotheism and polytheism

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Speaker 1: is not quite such a stark division as one would expect.

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Speaker 1: I think that there are shades of monotheism and shades

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Speaker 1: of polytheism. Like in this ancient context, you may have

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Speaker 1: seen a lot of cases where there is sort of

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Speaker 1: a concept of a greater pantheon of God's but maybe

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Speaker 1: one God is strongly favored or something, uh or or

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Speaker 1: there is an idea that there are other heavenly beings,

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Speaker 1: but you wouldn't call them God quite in the same way,

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Speaker 1: like you've got a chief God who's the real God,

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Speaker 1: but then there are also these other powers in heaven

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Speaker 1: that aren't quite human. Yeah, you have these different angelic

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Speaker 1: forces or or on the opposite end, demonic forces, and

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Speaker 1: then you have these intermediaries as well, such as uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, saints or in in other modes of belief,

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Speaker 1: ancestors that can serve as as go betweens for you

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Speaker 1: and the hereafter. Yeah. So Cramer in nineteen in his

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Speaker 1: paper actually has a really interesting speculation in a footnote

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Speaker 1: about the difference in the motivation for the confusion of

428
00:23:05,000 --> 00:23:07,919
Speaker 1: tongues between the Sumerian epic and the Biblical account. And

429
00:23:07,960 --> 00:23:10,080
Speaker 1: it sort of goes along with what you were saying, Robert.

430
00:23:10,080 --> 00:23:14,359
Speaker 1: He says, quote, the biblical storyteller was no doubt inspired

431
00:23:14,400 --> 00:23:18,719
Speaker 1: to invent his moralistic explanation by the twofold aspect of

432
00:23:18,760 --> 00:23:21,479
Speaker 1: the Babylonian ziggurat. And in just a minute we're going

433
00:23:21,520 --> 00:23:24,240
Speaker 1: to get into the role that ziggurats may have played

434
00:23:24,320 --> 00:23:27,600
Speaker 1: in inspiring this story. But basically, a zigarat is an

435
00:23:27,600 --> 00:23:31,280
Speaker 1: ancient Mesopotamian structure, a big step pyramid with a flat top,

436
00:23:31,840 --> 00:23:34,200
Speaker 1: and so he says that this may have been an explanation.

437
00:23:34,240 --> 00:23:38,080
Speaker 1: He continues, Uh, the one aspect is the high rise,

438
00:23:38,200 --> 00:23:41,520
Speaker 1: sky reaching appearance of the structure in its prime that

439
00:23:41,600 --> 00:23:44,080
Speaker 1: could be interpreted as a threat to the gods in

440
00:23:44,119 --> 00:23:48,600
Speaker 1: their power. And the other thing, it's melancholy and pathetic

441
00:23:48,640 --> 00:23:51,720
Speaker 1: appearance when in a state of disrepair and collapse, which

442
00:23:51,840 --> 00:23:55,360
Speaker 1: was not infrequent that could be viewed as a punishment

443
00:23:55,400 --> 00:23:59,320
Speaker 1: by the angered gods or Yahweh for man's overreaching ambition.

444
00:24:00,040 --> 00:24:02,840
Speaker 1: The Mesopotamian, on the other hand, far from viewing the

445
00:24:02,920 --> 00:24:06,800
Speaker 1: Ziggarat as an outgrowth of man's rivalry with an antagonism

446
00:24:06,840 --> 00:24:09,800
Speaker 1: to the gods, actually deemed it to be a bond

447
00:24:09,960 --> 00:24:13,520
Speaker 1: between heaven and earth, man and God, and attributed its

448
00:24:13,600 --> 00:24:16,639
Speaker 1: ruin and decay to the inscrutable will of the gods

449
00:24:16,680 --> 00:24:21,119
Speaker 1: and their incontestable decisions. And so the different views of

450
00:24:21,119 --> 00:24:25,800
Speaker 1: these cultures upon seeing, for example, a ruined ziggurat would

451
00:24:25,800 --> 00:24:28,360
Speaker 1: be based on their different idea of what the ziggurat

452
00:24:28,480 --> 00:24:32,320
Speaker 1: was for. If if you're, say a monotheistic Yahwist, and

453
00:24:32,320 --> 00:24:34,679
Speaker 1: you see a ruined Ziggarat, you might not know that

454
00:24:34,720 --> 00:24:37,240
Speaker 1: this is for the people who built it, that it's

455
00:24:37,280 --> 00:24:40,000
Speaker 1: for some kind of positive connection they believe they have

456
00:24:40,160 --> 00:24:42,880
Speaker 1: with the gods. Yeah, I mean, of course, we can

457
00:24:42,880 --> 00:24:44,760
Speaker 1: think a plenty of examples of that, right where if

458
00:24:44,760 --> 00:24:47,560
Speaker 1: you're you have someone outside of a religion looking in,

459
00:24:48,080 --> 00:24:50,359
Speaker 1: and especially if they have their own religious viewpoints that

460
00:24:50,400 --> 00:24:53,720
Speaker 1: they're using to make the judgment, you can vastly misinterpret

461
00:24:53,840 --> 00:24:56,280
Speaker 1: what something's for, Like people saying oh, look at the

462
00:24:56,600 --> 00:24:59,760
Speaker 1: Look at those guys worshiping that Buddha or or look

463
00:24:59,760 --> 00:25:02,600
Speaker 1: at that mighty church that they've built, um, you know,

464
00:25:02,640 --> 00:25:05,959
Speaker 1: as a tribute to themselves. Like what's the difference between

465
00:25:06,400 --> 00:25:08,520
Speaker 1: you know, the humorists of a cathedral and the huborists

466
00:25:08,520 --> 00:25:11,200
Speaker 1: of this tower. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, like it.

467
00:25:11,200 --> 00:25:15,920
Speaker 1: It's definitely difficult to see the significance of religious artifacts

468
00:25:15,920 --> 00:25:17,879
Speaker 1: from the outside if you don't make an attempt to

469
00:25:17,960 --> 00:25:22,280
Speaker 1: understand what they mean. The practitioners to the Mesopotamians, these

470
00:25:22,320 --> 00:25:24,880
Speaker 1: zigarattes wouldn't have been an assault on heaven. They were.

471
00:25:24,960 --> 00:25:27,119
Speaker 1: They were an attempt to connect and bond with and

472
00:25:27,160 --> 00:25:30,000
Speaker 1: appease the heavens. But I guess it's time to look

473
00:25:30,000 --> 00:25:33,280
Speaker 1: at the zigarattes themselves, right, So I would say, I

474
00:25:33,560 --> 00:25:36,200
Speaker 1: don't want to you to come away from this episode

475
00:25:36,200 --> 00:25:38,960
Speaker 1: with the impression that, oh, the Tower of Babel was

476
00:25:39,040 --> 00:25:42,400
Speaker 1: a zigaratte and they just saw zigarattes and that's where

477
00:25:42,400 --> 00:25:44,800
Speaker 1: the story came from, because I'm not so certain, but

478
00:25:45,240 --> 00:25:48,439
Speaker 1: it has been widely speculated that the Tower of Babel

479
00:25:48,520 --> 00:25:51,600
Speaker 1: story could have been inspired by sites of ziggarattes, and

480
00:25:51,640 --> 00:25:53,840
Speaker 1: that may be true to some extent. I don't know

481
00:25:53,880 --> 00:25:55,840
Speaker 1: what you think about this, Robert Well, I guess some

482
00:25:55,960 --> 00:25:58,800
Speaker 1: of two minds on this. Like if I were to definitely, uh,

483
00:25:58,840 --> 00:26:00,480
Speaker 1: you know, get behind an idea of there being a

484
00:26:00,520 --> 00:26:03,560
Speaker 1: literal tower that inspired the tails, then I would probably

485
00:26:03,600 --> 00:26:06,600
Speaker 1: line up with a zigaratte explanation. But we kind of

486
00:26:06,600 --> 00:26:10,119
Speaker 1: get into that area we've gotten to in uh in

487
00:26:10,160 --> 00:26:13,960
Speaker 1: the discussion of fossils and dinosaurs and dragons, Right, did

488
00:26:13,960 --> 00:26:17,199
Speaker 1: people dream up dragons because they saw a triceratops fossil

489
00:26:17,720 --> 00:26:20,880
Speaker 1: or Griffin's Yeah, And we we argued in that episode

490
00:26:20,920 --> 00:26:23,720
Speaker 1: of the Stuff About Your Mind that, well, you can't

491
00:26:23,760 --> 00:26:27,040
Speaker 1: just say that nobody had creative energy in the old days,

492
00:26:27,040 --> 00:26:29,640
Speaker 1: that they weren't capable of creating myths out of other

493
00:26:29,720 --> 00:26:33,080
Speaker 1: things than just very literal sights and sounds. Yeah, And

494
00:26:33,160 --> 00:26:35,280
Speaker 1: I don't think it is wrong to try to look

495
00:26:35,320 --> 00:26:38,399
Speaker 1: for things that could have literally inspired the creation of

496
00:26:38,440 --> 00:26:41,960
Speaker 1: ancient of tropes and ancient literatures, such as monsters or

497
00:26:42,000 --> 00:26:44,040
Speaker 1: structures or things like that. It's not that I think

498
00:26:44,040 --> 00:26:46,359
Speaker 1: that is a worthless project, because in many cases it

499
00:26:46,400 --> 00:26:48,520
Speaker 1: may be that these things inspired people. But I just

500
00:26:49,200 --> 00:26:51,480
Speaker 1: I think we should never forget the role of creative

501
00:26:51,520 --> 00:26:55,760
Speaker 1: imagination in creating literature. Yeah, I mean there were towers around,

502
00:26:55,880 --> 00:26:59,000
Speaker 1: There were zigaratts around, and you can imagine someone creating

503
00:26:59,000 --> 00:27:01,800
Speaker 1: the story of out some people who build a tower,

504
00:27:02,160 --> 00:27:05,320
Speaker 1: and you don't actually need it that to be a

505
00:27:05,359 --> 00:27:07,960
Speaker 1: literal place in a literal tower for that kind of

506
00:27:08,000 --> 00:27:11,880
Speaker 1: story to come together. Yeah. But anyway, so let's look

507
00:27:11,880 --> 00:27:14,920
Speaker 1: at the zigarattes. So you've probably seen pictures of zigarettes before.

508
00:27:14,920 --> 00:27:18,320
Speaker 1: They're these huge, ancient Near Eastern stepped pyramids with a

509
00:27:18,400 --> 00:27:20,879
Speaker 1: flat top. So one thing you can do if you

510
00:27:20,960 --> 00:27:23,080
Speaker 1: haven't actually seen one is google one. But let's say

511
00:27:23,080 --> 00:27:26,560
Speaker 1: you can't google one picture the pyramids. Surely you've seen

512
00:27:26,600 --> 00:27:29,919
Speaker 1: that of ancient Egypt. And then take the top, the

513
00:27:29,960 --> 00:27:33,360
Speaker 1: pointy top off, so they've got a flat top, and

514
00:27:33,400 --> 00:27:36,280
Speaker 1: then uh, and then give them a couple of stairways

515
00:27:36,320 --> 00:27:39,040
Speaker 1: that are going up to the top. And some things

516
00:27:39,080 --> 00:27:41,159
Speaker 1: would probably originally have been on the top. I think

517
00:27:41,200 --> 00:27:43,520
Speaker 1: a lot of the replicas or ruins that exist today

518
00:27:43,600 --> 00:27:46,320
Speaker 1: don't have much on the top, but back then, and

519
00:27:46,359 --> 00:27:48,679
Speaker 1: there may have been a temple or a shrine to

520
00:27:48,800 --> 00:27:51,760
Speaker 1: a god such as mar Duke and uh, it may

521
00:27:51,800 --> 00:27:54,399
Speaker 1: have also been thought of as the dwelling place of

522
00:27:54,440 --> 00:27:56,520
Speaker 1: the God at the top of the zigaratte, like the

523
00:27:56,600 --> 00:27:59,200
Speaker 1: God comes down and sleeps on top of the zigaratte

524
00:27:59,320 --> 00:28:01,399
Speaker 1: or something like that. Yeah, I think it's very helpful

525
00:28:01,440 --> 00:28:04,040
Speaker 1: to again think of the ziggurat in terms of a

526
00:28:04,080 --> 00:28:07,840
Speaker 1: holy mountain. It is an artificial holy mountain. And so

527
00:28:08,040 --> 00:28:10,399
Speaker 1: since we know we have these things in the ancient

528
00:28:10,440 --> 00:28:13,480
Speaker 1: Near Eastern context, plenty of people have positive that the

529
00:28:13,600 --> 00:28:16,399
Speaker 1: story of the Tower of Babel may have been inspired

530
00:28:16,440 --> 00:28:18,919
Speaker 1: by the sight of a zigarat or the ruins of

531
00:28:18,920 --> 00:28:21,919
Speaker 1: a zigarat. And there's one candidate in particular that often

532
00:28:22,000 --> 00:28:25,240
Speaker 1: comes up right. Yes, the specific candidate here is the

533
00:28:25,280 --> 00:28:29,439
Speaker 1: Babylonian Tower temple north of the Marduk Temple, which in

534
00:28:29,640 --> 00:28:34,320
Speaker 1: Babylonian was called bab Elu or Gate of God. Yeah,

535
00:28:34,359 --> 00:28:38,040
Speaker 1: and the zigarat itself was known as the etim an

536
00:28:38,160 --> 00:28:41,600
Speaker 1: Key or the house of the foundation platform of Heaven

537
00:28:41,680 --> 00:28:44,560
Speaker 1: and the underworld. I've also seen it translated as house

538
00:28:44,560 --> 00:28:47,880
Speaker 1: of the foundation platform of Heaven and Earth. And one

539
00:28:47,880 --> 00:28:51,239
Speaker 1: thing to keep in mind about ancient ziggurats versus the

540
00:28:51,240 --> 00:28:56,400
Speaker 1: existing ruins and replicas is uh is that the ancient

541
00:28:56,560 --> 00:29:01,640
Speaker 1: versions were probably more beautiful like the generally more decorated,

542
00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:04,760
Speaker 1: for example, with this one particular place that at him

543
00:29:04,760 --> 00:29:08,280
Speaker 1: and an key. When Nebuchadnezzar the King came through and

544
00:29:08,360 --> 00:29:12,120
Speaker 1: restored this zigaratte, he covered the top with blue glazed

545
00:29:12,360 --> 00:29:15,600
Speaker 1: bricks and other types of decorations, some gold and things

546
00:29:15,640 --> 00:29:18,640
Speaker 1: like that. And the image of the zigaratte I have

547
00:29:18,720 --> 00:29:22,040
Speaker 1: in my mind is it's the modern version, right. It's

548
00:29:22,080 --> 00:29:25,000
Speaker 1: what either the replicas you would see in Iraq or

549
00:29:25,040 --> 00:29:28,560
Speaker 1: the actual ruins of some previous zigarattes that still exist

550
00:29:28,600 --> 00:29:31,880
Speaker 1: to some extent. Generally, when you think about them, they're

551
00:29:31,920 --> 00:29:35,720
Speaker 1: the exact same color as the sand all around them,

552
00:29:35,800 --> 00:29:38,840
Speaker 1: and sort of the same color as the sky, and

553
00:29:38,880 --> 00:29:41,640
Speaker 1: this tends to have a kind of brutal effect on

554
00:29:41,680 --> 00:29:43,479
Speaker 1: the eye, at least to me. I don't know how

555
00:29:43,480 --> 00:29:46,800
Speaker 1: you feel about this, Robert, but it's like, this massive, dense,

556
00:29:47,040 --> 00:29:51,240
Speaker 1: colorless edifice is almost like it was specifically programmed to

557
00:29:51,360 --> 00:29:53,880
Speaker 1: make you odd, but not in a good way, to

558
00:29:54,000 --> 00:29:57,560
Speaker 1: fill you with this kind of crushing dread. It's stifling

559
00:29:57,560 --> 00:30:00,520
Speaker 1: to the mind, and I think that's just because of

560
00:30:00,560 --> 00:30:02,960
Speaker 1: the lack of color. I don't know if you feel

561
00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:05,960
Speaker 1: the same way, um, but when I see recreations of

562
00:30:06,000 --> 00:30:09,160
Speaker 1: the same structures with color and decoration added. It doesn't

563
00:30:09,160 --> 00:30:11,120
Speaker 1: have that effect on me at all. It's more like

564
00:30:11,400 --> 00:30:13,920
Speaker 1: seeing these other types of ancient buildings that would be

565
00:30:13,960 --> 00:30:17,040
Speaker 1: fascinating and beautiful. Yeah, I mean I can get that.

566
00:30:17,120 --> 00:30:19,240
Speaker 1: It's it's kind of like when you look at ancient

567
00:30:19,320 --> 00:30:22,560
Speaker 1: statues and all you have or the like the pale

568
00:30:23,040 --> 00:30:27,320
Speaker 1: marble and the featureless faces and the blank eyes, and

569
00:30:27,360 --> 00:30:33,000
Speaker 1: it gives you the stoic sense of of hauntedness. But

570
00:30:33,080 --> 00:30:36,480
Speaker 1: of course in many cases statues were painted. They were

571
00:30:36,840 --> 00:30:39,000
Speaker 1: you know that they had color, they had pigments, they

572
00:30:39,040 --> 00:30:41,320
Speaker 1: had eyes, and it would have been a totally different

573
00:30:41,360 --> 00:30:44,480
Speaker 1: experience to the contemporary viewer of such a work. When

574
00:30:44,480 --> 00:30:48,880
Speaker 1: you see these ancient Assyrian statues, I think, I think

575
00:30:48,880 --> 00:30:51,720
Speaker 1: about seeing these in New York, the ancient Assyrian statues

576
00:30:51,760 --> 00:30:54,440
Speaker 1: that have carvings. They're not just statues, but they're like

577
00:30:54,480 --> 00:30:57,920
Speaker 1: walls with relief carvings to have all these people in them,

578
00:30:57,920 --> 00:31:00,840
Speaker 1: like these men with the huge braided beer. And when

579
00:31:00,880 --> 00:31:05,560
Speaker 1: I often think about those statues, they seem very scary

580
00:31:05,680 --> 00:31:08,760
Speaker 1: and ghostly to me because they don't have paint on

581
00:31:08,840 --> 00:31:12,200
Speaker 1: them anymore, or some versions don't, and so the eyes

582
00:31:12,320 --> 00:31:15,120
Speaker 1: are just blank. They have these eyes that you can

583
00:31:15,160 --> 00:31:17,240
Speaker 1: see the rounded edges of them, but they don't have

584
00:31:17,320 --> 00:31:19,760
Speaker 1: pupils or any colors in them. So it just looks

585
00:31:19,800 --> 00:31:24,560
Speaker 1: like these gray ghostmen marching towards you. But when you

586
00:31:24,600 --> 00:31:27,880
Speaker 1: see the painted versions or the restored painted versions, of

587
00:31:27,880 --> 00:31:31,000
Speaker 1: course the eyes have eye colors in them. Was like

588
00:31:31,000 --> 00:31:33,840
Speaker 1: whites of the eyes and pupils, and it looks very different.

589
00:31:33,880 --> 00:31:36,320
Speaker 1: It looks just more like art, you know of people.

590
00:31:37,320 --> 00:31:42,200
Speaker 1: In the Tower of Babel Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts A. R. George,

591
00:31:42,600 --> 00:31:45,840
Speaker 1: the author takes an exhaustive and I mean exhaustive look

592
00:31:46,080 --> 00:31:50,920
Speaker 1: at modern architectural interpretations for a Babylonian tower. Yeah, and

593
00:31:50,960 --> 00:31:53,320
Speaker 1: I believe this article is actually a review of a

594
00:31:53,400 --> 00:31:57,320
Speaker 1: book on the subject, right yeah, um, so, so what

595
00:31:57,320 --> 00:31:59,760
Speaker 1: what does he come up with? He's talking about the

596
00:31:59,800 --> 00:32:02,520
Speaker 1: idea that the Tower of Babel would have been inspired

597
00:32:02,600 --> 00:32:06,520
Speaker 1: by this Babylonian zigarat design or temple design. Yeah, so

598
00:32:06,600 --> 00:32:09,720
Speaker 1: he he looked. One of the sources of this paper

599
00:32:09,760 --> 00:32:14,120
Speaker 1: discusses is the the Napapulas a cylinder and this was

600
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:17,520
Speaker 1: found in Iraq in nine and it was named for

601
00:32:17,560 --> 00:32:21,360
Speaker 1: the seventh century BC, founder of the Neo Babylonian Empire,

602
00:32:21,560 --> 00:32:25,640
Speaker 1: who's exploits it details and it provides some details concerning

603
00:32:25,800 --> 00:32:33,600
Speaker 1: uh Napopolass completion of Assyrian king Charadin. He would have

604
00:32:33,640 --> 00:32:37,160
Speaker 1: been six eighty through six sixty nine BC. Of his

605
00:32:37,280 --> 00:32:41,160
Speaker 1: earlier Zigarat project. This was a baked brick tower base

606
00:32:41,240 --> 00:32:44,640
Speaker 1: of ninety one square. This matches up with the timeline

607
00:32:45,240 --> 00:32:48,960
Speaker 1: modeled on an even older structure of the same base area.

608
00:32:49,160 --> 00:32:50,680
Speaker 1: Now that's something I want to get into in just

609
00:32:50,720 --> 00:32:53,680
Speaker 1: a minute. But there you see the idea of structures

610
00:32:53,720 --> 00:32:57,400
Speaker 1: being built on top of one another in ancient Mesopotamia.

611
00:32:57,880 --> 00:33:00,240
Speaker 1: But it also mentions here so this is a ached

612
00:33:00,280 --> 00:33:03,160
Speaker 1: brick tower, which is part of the story of the

613
00:33:03,200 --> 00:33:05,720
Speaker 1: Tower of Babel is saying, hey, none of those sun

614
00:33:05,760 --> 00:33:08,760
Speaker 1: baked bricks anymore. Now, now we're firing these things to

615
00:33:08,800 --> 00:33:12,840
Speaker 1: make them really strong. Yeah. So this is one example

616
00:33:12,880 --> 00:33:15,720
Speaker 1: of the kind of buildings that that that historians and

617
00:33:15,840 --> 00:33:19,520
Speaker 1: archaeologists and sort of myth dissectors will will take a

618
00:33:19,560 --> 00:33:21,960
Speaker 1: look at. And like I said earlier, you get into

619
00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:24,640
Speaker 1: the problem though, where you're you're taking the myth and

620
00:33:24,680 --> 00:33:27,200
Speaker 1: you're kind of chasing around history with the myth like

621
00:33:27,320 --> 00:33:31,440
Speaker 1: myth on a stick approach, which is a fascinating exercise

622
00:33:31,520 --> 00:33:35,080
Speaker 1: and can certainly be illuminating, but you're still, in a

623
00:33:35,160 --> 00:33:38,840
Speaker 1: sense kind of putting the cart before the horse, right. Well, yeah,

624
00:33:38,840 --> 00:33:40,880
Speaker 1: I mean, it's what we were saying earlier. It's not

625
00:33:40,960 --> 00:33:42,960
Speaker 1: that I think it's a bad project to try to

626
00:33:43,000 --> 00:33:47,560
Speaker 1: look for physical inspirations for stories from history and mythology.

627
00:33:47,680 --> 00:33:51,040
Speaker 1: It's just that always don't forget we could have plenty

628
00:33:51,040 --> 00:33:53,800
Speaker 1: of creative imagination in here. It's not like the author

629
00:33:53,840 --> 00:33:58,200
Speaker 1: had to see something literally that they went and wrote

630
00:33:58,280 --> 00:34:00,240
Speaker 1: down and now we have to figure out what the

631
00:34:00,320 --> 00:34:04,280
Speaker 1: thing they saw was. And in terms of just large

632
00:34:04,400 --> 00:34:07,520
Speaker 1: building structures, large towers that we've been making these for

633
00:34:07,600 --> 00:34:10,000
Speaker 1: some time. You can you can look at Egypt's various

634
00:34:10,040 --> 00:34:13,080
Speaker 1: pyramids from the third millennium b C, of which there

635
00:34:13,080 --> 00:34:15,640
Speaker 1: are many, including both the ones that immediately pop into

636
00:34:15,680 --> 00:34:19,239
Speaker 1: your mind, and indeed there still stands the Zigarat of

637
00:34:19,520 --> 00:34:26,040
Speaker 1: or from BC, uh Sardinia's Uh Narugus sant Antinnie this

638
00:34:26,120 --> 00:34:29,760
Speaker 1: was from six b C. And the Ziggurat of dr

639
00:34:30,200 --> 00:34:33,799
Speaker 1: coagal Zoo from the fourteenth century BC. And these are

640
00:34:33,800 --> 00:34:36,640
Speaker 1: just a few to mention. So um I don't want

641
00:34:36,640 --> 00:34:38,680
Speaker 1: to make it sound like this was an age where

642
00:34:38,719 --> 00:34:41,520
Speaker 1: there was only ever one tower, right that that and

643
00:34:41,520 --> 00:34:44,200
Speaker 1: and these are just the large structures that survived to

644
00:34:44,280 --> 00:34:47,000
Speaker 1: us today. Certainly you could get the idea of a tower,

645
00:34:47,040 --> 00:34:49,400
Speaker 1: and that can inspire a myth about a tower based

646
00:34:49,400 --> 00:34:52,480
Speaker 1: on a much smaller construction. Yeah. Now I want to

647
00:34:52,520 --> 00:34:56,320
Speaker 1: look at another aspect of ancient Near Eastern architecture, or

648
00:34:56,360 --> 00:35:00,000
Speaker 1: at least ancient Near Eastern civic design that is relevant.

649
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:02,000
Speaker 1: And though I don't want to say that this is

650
00:35:02,200 --> 00:35:04,480
Speaker 1: necessarily what inspired the story, I just think it's kind

651
00:35:04,480 --> 00:35:07,880
Speaker 1: of interesting. So imagine you're the child of a trader

652
00:35:08,000 --> 00:35:10,960
Speaker 1: and you visit an ancient Mesopotamian city with your parents,

653
00:35:11,680 --> 00:35:14,759
Speaker 1: and the walls or these mud brick structures, but they're

654
00:35:14,760 --> 00:35:17,279
Speaker 1: they're huge, They're bigger than anything you normally see. It's

655
00:35:17,280 --> 00:35:21,439
Speaker 1: also powerful. It's rather overwhelming. And then you leave with

656
00:35:21,520 --> 00:35:24,120
Speaker 1: your your parents and go trade in many other places,

657
00:35:24,160 --> 00:35:26,239
Speaker 1: and you don't come back for many years. But then

658
00:35:26,280 --> 00:35:29,400
Speaker 1: you revisit the same city again when you're very old,

659
00:35:30,080 --> 00:35:33,600
Speaker 1: you might you just might notice something odd. Is the

660
00:35:33,680 --> 00:35:37,279
Speaker 1: city higher up off the surrounding desert than it was

661
00:35:37,320 --> 00:35:39,960
Speaker 1: when you visited all those years ago, or is that

662
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:45,719
Speaker 1: just your imagination? Not necessarily so. Ancient Mesopotamian architecture is

663
00:35:45,800 --> 00:35:50,439
Speaker 1: characterized by the slow accumulation of what's known as tells

664
00:35:50,440 --> 00:35:52,680
Speaker 1: like t e l or t e l l, meaning

665
00:35:52,760 --> 00:35:57,120
Speaker 1: hills or mounds and uh. An ancient Mesopotamian city had

666
00:35:57,239 --> 00:35:59,319
Speaker 1: these buildings like we were talking about, made out of

667
00:35:59,400 --> 00:36:02,839
Speaker 1: sun bay to mud bricks, which were useful, but they

668
00:36:02,840 --> 00:36:06,480
Speaker 1: were prone to fairly rapid deterioration in the elements. And

669
00:36:06,560 --> 00:36:10,360
Speaker 1: as these structures deteriorated over time, they were replaced, but

670
00:36:10,520 --> 00:36:15,200
Speaker 1: not necessarily removed, And so the trampled remains of old

671
00:36:15,239 --> 00:36:20,440
Speaker 1: and demolished mud brick structures became the foundation for new structures.

672
00:36:20,480 --> 00:36:23,799
Speaker 1: So as we cycled through generations of human architecture in

673
00:36:23,840 --> 00:36:27,279
Speaker 1: these cities, the ground level of the city rose up.

674
00:36:28,120 --> 00:36:31,120
Speaker 1: So in a sense, not only were human buildings growing

675
00:36:31,120 --> 00:36:34,239
Speaker 1: taller with the ages of Messopotamian city life, but the

676
00:36:34,280 --> 00:36:37,719
Speaker 1: city itself was rising up out of the earth. And

677
00:36:37,760 --> 00:36:40,280
Speaker 1: I just wonder would an ancient writer have been able

678
00:36:40,320 --> 00:36:42,480
Speaker 1: to notice such a thing. I'm not saying they would,

679
00:36:42,520 --> 00:36:45,399
Speaker 1: because it's definitely a slow process that takes place over

680
00:36:45,520 --> 00:36:48,439
Speaker 1: hundreds or thousands of years. Then again, if you come

681
00:36:48,520 --> 00:36:50,759
Speaker 1: upon a city in the desert where everything else is

682
00:36:50,760 --> 00:36:53,440
Speaker 1: pretty flat around, and suddenly just the city, part of

683
00:36:53,440 --> 00:36:56,400
Speaker 1: the city is on this mound risen up out of

684
00:36:56,440 --> 00:36:59,319
Speaker 1: the desert, I don't know. That's interesting. Yeah, And of

685
00:36:59,320 --> 00:37:01,520
Speaker 1: course it's very poetic as well. It's the idea of

686
00:37:01,520 --> 00:37:06,560
Speaker 1: I mean, civilization quite literally physically rising up. Yeah. And

687
00:37:06,640 --> 00:37:09,840
Speaker 1: I would like to emphasize that in the Biblical account,

688
00:37:10,160 --> 00:37:13,080
Speaker 1: it doesn't actually call the Tower of Babel the Tower

689
00:37:13,160 --> 00:37:17,120
Speaker 1: of Babel. That phrases our modern way of describing the story.

690
00:37:17,760 --> 00:37:20,680
Speaker 1: The phrase in the original story is the city and

691
00:37:20,760 --> 00:37:24,080
Speaker 1: the tower. Yes, all right, we're gonna take a quick break,

692
00:37:24,080 --> 00:37:25,719
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're gonna take a look

693
00:37:25,760 --> 00:37:29,760
Speaker 1: at a few different attempts to in in varying ways

694
00:37:30,280 --> 00:37:40,279
Speaker 1: make the tower real. Alright, we're back, Robert. There are

695
00:37:40,360 --> 00:37:44,279
Speaker 1: some awesome paintings of the Tower of Babel story. I

696
00:37:44,280 --> 00:37:47,960
Speaker 1: I love paintings of Biblical stories in general. That's one

697
00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:51,200
Speaker 1: of my favorite genres of ancient paintings, especially the ones

698
00:37:51,239 --> 00:37:54,600
Speaker 1: that are paintings of Old Testament stories. But but the

699
00:37:54,640 --> 00:37:57,239
Speaker 1: Tower of Babel paintings are great, and some of the

700
00:37:57,280 --> 00:38:01,880
Speaker 1: best ones have got to be the ones by Peter Brogel, right, Yes,

701
00:38:02,200 --> 00:38:06,200
Speaker 1: Peter Broigel the Elder in particular, sixteenth century Flemish artist,

702
00:38:06,719 --> 00:38:10,280
Speaker 1: and he actually created three different interpretations of the tower.

703
00:38:10,800 --> 00:38:14,560
Speaker 1: Two survived, both oil paintings on wood. And then there's

704
00:38:14,560 --> 00:38:16,960
Speaker 1: a lost painting that was on ivory. Oh I'd like

705
00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:20,279
Speaker 1: to see that, well, everyone would, but it's lost, Joe.

706
00:38:20,800 --> 00:38:24,359
Speaker 1: If you find it, let him let us know. Um

707
00:38:24,520 --> 00:38:28,160
Speaker 1: So the elephants came and took it back. Yeah, maybe

708
00:38:28,160 --> 00:38:31,640
Speaker 1: there's a justice in that. Uh So, So we're left

709
00:38:31,680 --> 00:38:34,680
Speaker 1: with two interpretations. And I think I had one of

710
00:38:34,680 --> 00:38:36,800
Speaker 1: these on my wall in college, Like these are famous

711
00:38:36,840 --> 00:38:38,839
Speaker 1: works of art, and it's the type of art unlike

712
00:38:38,880 --> 00:38:40,640
Speaker 1: some things I had on my wall in college. This

713
00:38:40,719 --> 00:38:42,480
Speaker 1: is ax. I would put this on my wall today.

714
00:38:43,120 --> 00:38:46,360
Speaker 1: It's that great a painting. Because you the two that

715
00:38:46,440 --> 00:38:50,160
Speaker 1: survive also play off each other in unique ways as

716
00:38:50,160 --> 00:38:55,280
Speaker 1: well discussed. So the first one is is often referred

717
00:38:55,280 --> 00:38:58,520
Speaker 1: to as the Great Tower of Babel. And in this

718
00:38:58,640 --> 00:39:01,840
Speaker 1: image we have this, uh this sort of half completed

719
00:39:01,920 --> 00:39:05,320
Speaker 1: tower rising up out of the landscape. You've got the

720
00:39:05,320 --> 00:39:07,400
Speaker 1: the ocean visible in the lower right hand. In the

721
00:39:07,400 --> 00:39:10,480
Speaker 1: lower left hand there's a king surrounded by some workers.

722
00:39:10,520 --> 00:39:14,600
Speaker 1: You see tiny ant like people scaling uh the edifice,

723
00:39:14,680 --> 00:39:17,759
Speaker 1: working on it, and the whole thing is clearly inspired

724
00:39:17,800 --> 00:39:21,480
Speaker 1: by Roman architecture. So instead of looking like a Zigarat

725
00:39:22,200 --> 00:39:26,120
Speaker 1: out of ancient Babylon, it instead looks it reminds one

726
00:39:26,120 --> 00:39:29,120
Speaker 1: of the Roman colosseum. Yeah. Yeah, it's like if the

727
00:39:29,200 --> 00:39:33,799
Speaker 1: Roman colosseum, uh like mated with a Zigarat, you might

728
00:39:33,880 --> 00:39:37,800
Speaker 1: get this result. I also love it's got this quality

729
00:39:37,880 --> 00:39:40,879
Speaker 1: that I always really enjoy in paintings, in that it's

730
00:39:41,600 --> 00:39:43,440
Speaker 1: I don't know what you call this. There are lots

731
00:39:43,440 --> 00:39:46,840
Speaker 1: of lots of little details going on all around it.

732
00:39:46,880 --> 00:39:50,160
Speaker 1: I'm I guess you might call this dizziness. But it's

733
00:39:50,200 --> 00:39:53,000
Speaker 1: not just buzziness. It's something about the fact that there

734
00:39:53,000 --> 00:39:56,919
Speaker 1: are all these little people doing their own thing far away. Yeah.

735
00:39:57,040 --> 00:39:58,839
Speaker 1: I mean it works on two levels, right, because on

736
00:39:58,840 --> 00:40:01,640
Speaker 1: one hand is will be z town and one hand

737
00:40:01,760 --> 00:40:04,600
Speaker 1: is busy town, and it's just finding cool things going

738
00:40:04,600 --> 00:40:07,920
Speaker 1: on and your imagination is just stoked by all these

739
00:40:07,920 --> 00:40:10,720
Speaker 1: little details. But then on the other, of course, uh,

740
00:40:10,960 --> 00:40:15,440
Speaker 1: the Flemish masters were were masters of their craft and

741
00:40:15,440 --> 00:40:19,120
Speaker 1: and nothing was just thrown in you know, half slap

742
00:40:19,120 --> 00:40:21,839
Speaker 1: in dilly dally like there's a there's a symbolism it played,

743
00:40:21,840 --> 00:40:24,920
Speaker 1: there's a purpose at play in play and uh, and

744
00:40:25,080 --> 00:40:30,280
Speaker 1: individuals like Brugo, we're attempting to convey certain ideas and messages,

745
00:40:30,320 --> 00:40:33,239
Speaker 1: at least to the informed viewers of the piece. Now,

746
00:40:33,280 --> 00:40:36,160
Speaker 1: the original story in the Bible does not tell you

747
00:40:36,200 --> 00:40:40,040
Speaker 1: that there's any particular king overseeing the construction of the tower.

748
00:40:40,080 --> 00:40:43,080
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that later readers didn't sort of

749
00:40:43,120 --> 00:40:45,840
Speaker 1: supplement that information and come up with a king to

750
00:40:45,920 --> 00:40:49,960
Speaker 1: be the guy in charge of this evil tower enterprise. Right. Yeah,

751
00:40:50,000 --> 00:40:52,040
Speaker 1: Indeed we have a king in the lower left hand corner,

752
00:40:52,040 --> 00:40:54,920
Speaker 1: as we mentioned, and uh, and many interpret this is

753
00:40:54,960 --> 00:40:58,279
Speaker 1: being King Nimrod. Yeah, King Nimrod, who the Bible says

754
00:40:58,400 --> 00:41:01,680
Speaker 1: was a mighty hunter. But or yah, yeah, nim Rob

755
00:41:01,760 --> 00:41:05,440
Speaker 1: the hunter. And so that's that's that's the potential read

756
00:41:05,520 --> 00:41:08,160
Speaker 1: on on this this painting. Now I'm going to dive

757
00:41:08,160 --> 00:41:09,840
Speaker 1: in a little deeper on this painting. The other the

758
00:41:09,840 --> 00:41:12,799
Speaker 1: other painting is the the Little Tower of Babel and

759
00:41:12,800 --> 00:41:16,160
Speaker 1: it's called that because it's a smaller work. And uh,

760
00:41:16,280 --> 00:41:18,560
Speaker 1: but let's start with this one, and I will include

761
00:41:18,640 --> 00:41:20,840
Speaker 1: images of both these paintings and the landing pig for

762
00:41:20,880 --> 00:41:23,040
Speaker 1: this episode stuff to blow your Mind dot com in

763
00:41:23,080 --> 00:41:25,960
Speaker 1: case you want to compare and look yourself. So I

764
00:41:26,040 --> 00:41:29,480
Speaker 1: was looking at a work by author s A Man's

765
00:41:29,520 --> 00:41:33,120
Speaker 1: Bach titled Peter Brugle's Tower of Babel. And as the

766
00:41:33,120 --> 00:41:37,000
Speaker 1: author points out, the the artist here is not really

767
00:41:37,040 --> 00:41:40,879
Speaker 1: telling the story of the Tower of Babel. He's not

768
00:41:41,320 --> 00:41:44,600
Speaker 1: He's not showing like in terms of action. It's just

769
00:41:44,680 --> 00:41:46,719
Speaker 1: people working on the tower and a king talking to

770
00:41:46,760 --> 00:41:49,879
Speaker 1: some people that you don't see language splinters. You don't

771
00:41:49,880 --> 00:41:53,080
Speaker 1: see a tower falling down. You don't see God coming

772
00:41:53,080 --> 00:41:56,000
Speaker 1: down with his holy troops to dish out some uh

773
00:41:56,480 --> 00:41:59,360
Speaker 1: some dialect. I don't even see well baked mud bricks

774
00:41:59,440 --> 00:42:04,839
Speaker 1: and sly for mortar. And it's again not completely clear

775
00:42:04,960 --> 00:42:08,960
Speaker 1: that it's it's Nimrod now. But prior to to Brugle

776
00:42:09,239 --> 00:42:13,560
Speaker 1: you had people like Flavius Josephus wrote about Nimrod in

777
00:42:13,920 --> 00:42:18,399
Speaker 1: Antiquities of the Jews. This was first century. See, there's

778
00:42:18,400 --> 00:42:22,440
Speaker 1: a whole story about Nimrod building this tower as vengeance

779
00:42:22,560 --> 00:42:25,839
Speaker 1: over the Great flood, like he wanted to get back

780
00:42:25,880 --> 00:42:28,800
Speaker 1: at God. Yeah, it's like God just wrecked all this havoc.

781
00:42:28,840 --> 00:42:30,399
Speaker 1: So it's like, all right, I'm coming for you God,

782
00:42:30,480 --> 00:42:32,759
Speaker 1: I'm building the tower. Now wait, was it just like

783
00:42:33,160 --> 00:42:35,759
Speaker 1: was it like spite against God? Or was it like

784
00:42:35,840 --> 00:42:38,759
Speaker 1: he was literally coming for him to wage war against him.

785
00:42:38,920 --> 00:42:42,000
Speaker 1: I took him to mean spite. But now, but I

786
00:42:42,080 --> 00:42:44,040
Speaker 1: really like the idea of him coming after him. And

787
00:42:44,280 --> 00:42:49,200
Speaker 1: that's pretty That's that's some action hero Like, uh, what

788
00:42:49,280 --> 00:42:52,560
Speaker 1: am I thinking of? That's like Bruce Willis in uh

789
00:42:52,560 --> 00:42:56,360
Speaker 1: in die Hard kind of another tower story, building a

790
00:42:56,440 --> 00:42:59,880
Speaker 1: causeway to the heavens. Yeah, so, um, he builds this

791
00:43:00,040 --> 00:43:04,760
Speaker 1: thing in Babylon and uh in the original And Brugle

792
00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:07,200
Speaker 1: may or may not have read the text. He might

793
00:43:07,320 --> 00:43:10,520
Speaker 1: have taken this detail from other artistic interpretations of the tower,

794
00:43:11,200 --> 00:43:13,840
Speaker 1: or it might it might not be a nod to

795
00:43:14,000 --> 00:43:17,480
Speaker 1: Nimrod at all. So the author of the article Mansbach

796
00:43:17,760 --> 00:43:23,120
Speaker 1: Here he cites Zigmat Wazbinski, who argues that Brugal deviates

797
00:43:23,160 --> 00:43:27,000
Speaker 1: from past traditions and shows the tower as rounded, reflecting

798
00:43:27,000 --> 00:43:31,160
Speaker 1: on modern urban design trends. So they're not building the tower, perhaps,

799
00:43:31,280 --> 00:43:34,560
Speaker 1: but rebuilding it in the form of a Babylon of

800
00:43:34,600 --> 00:43:37,800
Speaker 1: the West or a Roman Babylon and in this case,

801
00:43:38,200 --> 00:43:40,920
Speaker 1: he argues, the king that we're seeing is not Nimrod

802
00:43:40,920 --> 00:43:44,880
Speaker 1: but Alexander the Great, and this is it's an interesting

803
00:43:44,920 --> 00:43:46,680
Speaker 1: argument because it does get into the idea of like,

804
00:43:46,760 --> 00:43:49,240
Speaker 1: it's not just an illustration that he's doing, He's creating

805
00:43:49,239 --> 00:43:52,680
Speaker 1: a work of art. It is making some contemporary points

806
00:43:53,040 --> 00:43:57,040
Speaker 1: utilizing the symbology of an old story. Yeah, I hadn't

807
00:43:57,080 --> 00:43:59,360
Speaker 1: thought so much about the idea of the tower being round.

808
00:43:59,480 --> 00:44:01,680
Speaker 1: Now again, in the original story doesn't say what the

809
00:44:01,680 --> 00:44:04,920
Speaker 1: shaping tower is in the Genesis account an other uh,

810
00:44:04,920 --> 00:44:08,839
Speaker 1: in other later mythological adaptations, it might. But definitely if

811
00:44:08,880 --> 00:44:11,920
Speaker 1: you see it in medieval art, like I've seen an

812
00:44:11,960 --> 00:44:15,359
Speaker 1: ancient uh not ancient, a medieval painting of the Tower

813
00:44:15,400 --> 00:44:18,239
Speaker 1: of Babble where it's just a tall rectangle, looks like

814
00:44:18,280 --> 00:44:22,400
Speaker 1: a church church bell tower. Yeah, now, Man's bach. He

815
00:44:22,480 --> 00:44:26,680
Speaker 1: thinks that this this reading is a bit of an overread, uh,

816
00:44:26,920 --> 00:44:29,160
Speaker 1: the idea that this is Alexander the Grade and it's

817
00:44:29,239 --> 00:44:32,520
Speaker 1: really the rebuilding of Babble and Babble of the West.

818
00:44:32,960 --> 00:44:36,200
Speaker 1: But he does think the Brugal was still clear certainly

819
00:44:36,200 --> 00:44:40,160
Speaker 1: imparting a different meaning to humanists and progressives of the time.

820
00:44:40,200 --> 00:44:42,759
Speaker 1: To learned viewers, so that the king might not be

821
00:44:42,960 --> 00:44:49,000
Speaker 1: Nimrod or Alexander, but contemporary ruler Philip the Second of Spain, Yeah,

822
00:44:49,000 --> 00:44:52,279
Speaker 1: who had an ill reputation with his Flemish subjects. So

823
00:44:52,400 --> 00:44:55,600
Speaker 1: Spanish domination was pretty harsh at the time, especially on

824
00:44:55,760 --> 00:44:59,840
Speaker 1: Flemish liberal Catholics and Protestants. And Philip the Second, enhanced

825
00:45:00,000 --> 00:45:03,480
Speaker 1: of the powers of the Inquisition in fifty six, who

826
00:45:03,560 --> 00:45:07,400
Speaker 1: waged a campaign of suppression against Antwerp's Calvinists, and Philip

827
00:45:07,440 --> 00:45:10,920
Speaker 1: the Second, on top of this spoke neither French nor Dutch,

828
00:45:11,320 --> 00:45:15,439
Speaker 1: a further deepening the divide. So there's this disagreement, there's

829
00:45:15,440 --> 00:45:19,120
Speaker 1: this clash of cultures, and it's uh it's situated by

830
00:45:19,160 --> 00:45:24,040
Speaker 1: the linguistic differences in play. Interesting. So we've looked at

831
00:45:24,120 --> 00:45:27,839
Speaker 1: the Great Tower of Bebel by uh by Burgal here,

832
00:45:27,920 --> 00:45:31,279
Speaker 1: but there's another version that you mentioned earlier, this lesser's Tower,

833
00:45:31,440 --> 00:45:33,880
Speaker 1: the Little Tower of Bebel, and I've got a little

834
00:45:33,920 --> 00:45:37,520
Speaker 1: image of it here, yes, in our in our outline.

835
00:45:37,920 --> 00:45:40,439
Speaker 1: This is different, right, It's not just a smaller version

836
00:45:40,480 --> 00:45:44,520
Speaker 1: of the same painting. It's fundamentally different. It's got stuff missing,

837
00:45:44,560 --> 00:45:48,040
Speaker 1: like where's the king. Yeah, where's the sprawling city and

838
00:45:48,480 --> 00:45:51,120
Speaker 1: the crazy thing too. You can glance at it and

839
00:45:51,160 --> 00:45:54,600
Speaker 1: both just look like incomplete towers. But the second tower

840
00:45:55,200 --> 00:45:58,439
Speaker 1: is about two thirds complete. Perhaps, Yeah, it's a lot

841
00:45:58,480 --> 00:46:01,520
Speaker 1: more along the way. You see fewer people in it,

842
00:46:01,600 --> 00:46:04,279
Speaker 1: and it's more close to done. Yeah, And there's a

843
00:46:04,520 --> 00:46:08,680
Speaker 1: there's a religious procession winding its way upward, cheaper grazing

844
00:46:09,040 --> 00:46:12,200
Speaker 1: in the distance. Uh. In fact, they're grazing in areas

845
00:46:12,239 --> 00:46:16,439
Speaker 1: previously devoted in the former painting to utility buildings. So

846
00:46:17,280 --> 00:46:20,799
Speaker 1: arguably what we see here is a utopian vision of

847
00:46:20,880 --> 00:46:25,520
Speaker 1: what is possible for humanity when it is free from tyranny. Again,

848
00:46:25,560 --> 00:46:27,840
Speaker 1: the king has gone. There's no king in this painting.

849
00:46:27,960 --> 00:46:30,000
Speaker 1: Oh man, that that would mean the Tower of Babel

850
00:46:30,040 --> 00:46:33,160
Speaker 1: would be a very odd selection of story to predict

851
00:46:33,200 --> 00:46:37,000
Speaker 1: a genuine utopian vision. Well, but if you're a humanist, uh,

852
00:46:37,040 --> 00:46:40,759
Speaker 1: I mean not so like reappropriating the story exactly. Yeah.

853
00:46:40,800 --> 00:46:44,240
Speaker 1: So there is a hopefulness to this painting, the works

854
00:46:44,239 --> 00:46:47,000
Speaker 1: of humanity in a state of grace, about to transcend

855
00:46:47,040 --> 00:46:50,279
Speaker 1: the limits of of not only what we've accomplished before,

856
00:46:50,280 --> 00:46:52,680
Speaker 1: but the limits of the frame, the limits of the

857
00:46:52,680 --> 00:46:55,880
Speaker 1: the actual canvas that or the you know, or the

858
00:46:55,880 --> 00:46:58,800
Speaker 1: wood that he's working on here um the limits of

859
00:46:58,800 --> 00:47:01,239
Speaker 1: the artist's vision, even like this is a tower of

860
00:47:01,280 --> 00:47:05,840
Speaker 1: babble that may be completed. I you know, kings and

861
00:47:05,840 --> 00:47:10,000
Speaker 1: bureaucracy and all the than the negative aspects of the world.

862
00:47:10,040 --> 00:47:13,760
Speaker 1: To stay out of the affair Men's box, says this quote.

863
00:47:13,800 --> 00:47:16,400
Speaker 1: In some the Flemish painter has produced in this panel

864
00:47:16,400 --> 00:47:20,120
Speaker 1: a suggestive image of an ideal state, a symbolic communal

865
00:47:20,200 --> 00:47:24,960
Speaker 1: hive rising heavenward from a bucolic real landscape and bustling port.

866
00:47:25,520 --> 00:47:27,960
Speaker 1: And he has shown us the greatness and power of

867
00:47:28,040 --> 00:47:32,000
Speaker 1: human productivity made possible in the absence of a tyrant's

868
00:47:32,239 --> 00:47:36,279
Speaker 1: hebristic will. The artist has given his contemporaries and us

869
00:47:36,320 --> 00:47:40,400
Speaker 1: a glimpse of the humanists ideal city, a terrestrial utopia.

870
00:47:40,640 --> 00:47:43,680
Speaker 1: In a word, Brugle has provided a visual metaphor of

871
00:47:43,800 --> 00:47:48,360
Speaker 1: mankind in a state of grace. Babble has been remedied. Woa,

872
00:47:48,840 --> 00:47:51,840
Speaker 1: So there you go. Uh again, that's just some added

873
00:47:52,080 --> 00:47:56,839
Speaker 1: layers of interest to just to phenomenal paintings. So I

874
00:47:56,920 --> 00:47:59,560
Speaker 1: want to look at one more great work of art

875
00:47:59,640 --> 00:48:02,000
Speaker 1: to pick ing the Tower of Babel, and that is

876
00:48:02,120 --> 00:48:06,840
Speaker 1: an engraving by Gustav Dora known as the Confusion of Tongues,

877
00:48:06,920 --> 00:48:09,399
Speaker 1: and this was made in eighteen sixty five. I think,

878
00:48:10,120 --> 00:48:13,719
Speaker 1: uh it was. I've seen it described as a woodcut

879
00:48:13,800 --> 00:48:16,719
Speaker 1: or an engraving. Now, this is the the image that

880
00:48:16,840 --> 00:48:20,000
Speaker 1: I think was referenced in the childhood illustration that I

881
00:48:20,120 --> 00:48:23,160
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier that I grew up with, in that this

882
00:48:23,239 --> 00:48:27,160
Speaker 1: looks very much like just a spiral road up into

883
00:48:27,239 --> 00:48:32,400
Speaker 1: the heavens um And interestingly enough, Dora apparently based his

884
00:48:32,480 --> 00:48:35,600
Speaker 1: design on the minaret of the great Mosque It's Samara.

885
00:48:35,680 --> 00:48:39,120
Speaker 1: This is a ninth century mosque located in Samara, Iraq,

886
00:48:39,800 --> 00:48:42,080
Speaker 1: and it's still there to this day. Only the outer

887
00:48:42,239 --> 00:48:46,120
Speaker 1: wall and the minaret remain as the as the mosque

888
00:48:46,120 --> 00:48:49,800
Speaker 1: itself was destroyed in twelve seventy eight. Now I really

889
00:48:49,840 --> 00:48:52,799
Speaker 1: love this. I love Doris a virgin. Dora always sort

890
00:48:52,840 --> 00:48:55,160
Speaker 1: of does it for me. He's got these great illustrations

891
00:48:55,200 --> 00:48:59,200
Speaker 1: of the divine comedy that are just burned. I want

892
00:48:59,200 --> 00:49:01,040
Speaker 1: to talk about one of those in a second. But

893
00:49:02,040 --> 00:49:05,799
Speaker 1: the man the tower here I said earlier, I think

894
00:49:05,880 --> 00:49:09,640
Speaker 1: that none of the traditional artistic representations match what I

895
00:49:09,719 --> 00:49:11,880
Speaker 1: had in my mind as a kid, meaning a tower

896
00:49:11,920 --> 00:49:14,200
Speaker 1: that literally goes up to where you can't see it anymore,

897
00:49:14,280 --> 00:49:17,359
Speaker 1: so straight into space. Yeah, that's where this one really Uh.

898
00:49:17,960 --> 00:49:21,760
Speaker 1: Is different from the Brugle images because the Brugle towers

899
00:49:21,800 --> 00:49:24,120
Speaker 1: are incomplete to see where they break off and their

900
00:49:24,160 --> 00:49:27,680
Speaker 1: sky above them. This thing just vanishes into the heavens. Yeah. Well,

901
00:49:27,760 --> 00:49:30,120
Speaker 1: here you can see the tower has it's further along.

902
00:49:30,239 --> 00:49:33,000
Speaker 1: But this is the moment of confusion. It's not like

903
00:49:33,120 --> 00:49:36,000
Speaker 1: the king lording over the construction saying, look, what good

904
00:49:36,000 --> 00:49:39,400
Speaker 1: work we're doing here. It's surrounded by people who appear

905
00:49:39,440 --> 00:49:41,719
Speaker 1: to be in anguish, and you can guess that they're

906
00:49:41,719 --> 00:49:44,359
Speaker 1: in anguish because they've had their languages confused and they

907
00:49:44,360 --> 00:49:47,080
Speaker 1: can't understand one another anymore. There's a man in the

908
00:49:47,120 --> 00:49:50,480
Speaker 1: foreground reaching up to the heavens with like a plaintive

909
00:49:50,640 --> 00:49:53,399
Speaker 1: kind of posture, like why would you do this to me? Yeah,

910
00:49:53,400 --> 00:49:58,800
Speaker 1: it's kind of going stout there, what's happening? Uh? And

911
00:49:58,800 --> 00:50:01,160
Speaker 1: and of course it has that great black and white

912
00:50:01,160 --> 00:50:05,120
Speaker 1: pathos that you see in Doria's work. Um. One of

913
00:50:05,160 --> 00:50:08,880
Speaker 1: my favorite illustrations of his is from his illustration of

914
00:50:08,920 --> 00:50:11,560
Speaker 1: the Divine Comedy and the scene in Kanto seven, when

915
00:50:11,640 --> 00:50:15,320
Speaker 1: Dante and Virgil are passing by the demon Plutus, who's

916
00:50:15,360 --> 00:50:18,359
Speaker 1: also the you know, Greco Roman god of wealth. Uh,

917
00:50:18,680 --> 00:50:22,280
Speaker 1: but he's uttering the string of nonsense words. Plutus is saying,

918
00:50:22,360 --> 00:50:27,040
Speaker 1: Pope Satan, Pope Satan Aleppe, which is, at least in

919
00:50:27,719 --> 00:50:31,240
Speaker 1: the medieval Italian of the story, it's nonsense. The Dante's

920
00:50:31,239 --> 00:50:36,120
Speaker 1: Pilgrim doesn't understand what he's saying, but Virgil apparently does

921
00:50:36,239 --> 00:50:39,440
Speaker 1: understand what Plutus is saying and interprets his words as

922
00:50:39,440 --> 00:50:42,800
Speaker 1: a threat. And so it makes me recall this idea

923
00:50:42,840 --> 00:50:47,120
Speaker 1: of the confused tongues maybe uh even confused tongues in

924
00:50:47,200 --> 00:50:50,920
Speaker 1: the heavenly realms, Like would they speak a different language

925
00:50:50,960 --> 00:50:55,279
Speaker 1: in hell than they would in heaven or on earth. Yeah,

926
00:50:55,480 --> 00:50:57,480
Speaker 1: we're get We're getting. We're almost getting into speaking in

927
00:50:57,520 --> 00:50:59,560
Speaker 1: tongues territory here we have to, But we have to

928
00:50:59,600 --> 00:51:02,960
Speaker 1: save at rabbit hole for another day. I just wanted

929
00:51:02,960 --> 00:51:06,120
Speaker 1: to add one interesting modern interpretation that I came across

930
00:51:06,120 --> 00:51:08,800
Speaker 1: on the Internet the other day, and it's by artist

931
00:51:08,880 --> 00:51:15,839
Speaker 1: and animator Katsuhiro Otomo and collage artist Kosuke Kawamura. And

932
00:51:15,920 --> 00:51:19,960
Speaker 1: this is a version of Broygel's interpretation of the tower.

933
00:51:20,200 --> 00:51:22,279
Speaker 1: But it's got to cut away, so it's like those

934
00:51:22,320 --> 00:51:24,360
Speaker 1: old books, you know, the picture books where they have

935
00:51:24,400 --> 00:51:26,759
Speaker 1: a cross section of the Hanna War and they've got

936
00:51:26,760 --> 00:51:28,879
Speaker 1: to cut away of the tower where you can see

937
00:51:28,920 --> 00:51:31,759
Speaker 1: the inside. And I think it's great, this is worth

938
00:51:31,800 --> 00:51:35,319
Speaker 1: looking up. Nice he's a sort of extrapolating on the

939
00:51:35,360 --> 00:51:38,680
Speaker 1: design that Rugle's gone with with for the exterior, and yes,

940
00:51:39,000 --> 00:51:41,920
Speaker 1: trying to imagine what it would look like inside. Yeah. Nice.

941
00:51:42,040 --> 00:51:44,440
Speaker 1: And apparently one of these artists that I just mentioned

942
00:51:44,480 --> 00:51:48,480
Speaker 1: had something to do with the Kira so nice. Alright, Well,

943
00:51:48,480 --> 00:51:50,560
Speaker 1: we're gonna take another break, and when we come back,

944
00:51:50,719 --> 00:51:52,879
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at some I guess you could say

945
00:51:52,880 --> 00:51:55,920
Speaker 1: thought experiments on the dimensions of the tower if it,

946
00:51:56,200 --> 00:51:58,759
Speaker 1: if it were to exist. Yes, and then also at

947
00:51:59,160 --> 00:52:09,200
Speaker 1: the confusion of language. All right, we're back. So, as

948
00:52:09,239 --> 00:52:12,520
Speaker 1: we've discussed, the biblical account itself is vague, so you

949
00:52:12,560 --> 00:52:14,200
Speaker 1: have to go to these other accounts, such as the

950
00:52:14,840 --> 00:52:18,319
Speaker 1: Jubilee for even a starting point if you're gonna try

951
00:52:18,400 --> 00:52:21,839
Speaker 1: and put numbers behind what the Tower of Babble consists off,

952
00:52:22,080 --> 00:52:24,040
Speaker 1: and the Book of Jubilees does put numbers on it,

953
00:52:24,040 --> 00:52:26,759
Speaker 1: and I wonder if it's the only one. Other accounts

954
00:52:26,760 --> 00:52:29,280
Speaker 1: may put numbers on it as well, but I believe

955
00:52:29,280 --> 00:52:32,600
Speaker 1: it's the prime one. Certainly. If if you're gonna go

956
00:52:32,600 --> 00:52:35,120
Speaker 1: for an ancient text that has numbers, that's where you go.

957
00:52:35,160 --> 00:52:37,360
Speaker 1: And then you start busting out down those cubits and

958
00:52:37,400 --> 00:52:40,080
Speaker 1: making them into meters or feet, you know. Yeah, if

959
00:52:40,080 --> 00:52:43,239
Speaker 1: you want to mentions, crack open your jubilees. Yeah. Now,

960
00:52:43,400 --> 00:52:45,840
Speaker 1: one thing that the ways we mentioned that the biblical

961
00:52:45,840 --> 00:52:48,600
Speaker 1: account does say that they're reaching unto heaven, and that's

962
00:52:48,600 --> 00:52:52,520
Speaker 1: the thing that defies measurement, unless heaven is orbital access

963
00:52:52,560 --> 00:52:56,400
Speaker 1: to angelic space aliens, in which case we're talking a

964
00:52:56,480 --> 00:52:59,640
Speaker 1: space elevator, and we'd uh, we needed to reach a

965
00:52:59,760 --> 00:53:03,880
Speaker 1: g stationary orbit of thirty five thousand, eight hundred kilometers

966
00:53:04,040 --> 00:53:07,840
Speaker 1: or twenty two thousand, two hundred forty five miles. Uh.

967
00:53:08,040 --> 00:53:10,399
Speaker 1: That's a big tower. That's a big tower. And even

968
00:53:10,440 --> 00:53:14,040
Speaker 1: today we're waiting on carbon nano technology to catch up

969
00:53:14,040 --> 00:53:16,880
Speaker 1: with the dream man. I've heard some criticisms of even

970
00:53:16,920 --> 00:53:20,360
Speaker 1: that speculation. It's like even carbon carbon nanotubes are not

971
00:53:20,400 --> 00:53:22,880
Speaker 1: going to save us. Some people think that building a

972
00:53:22,880 --> 00:53:26,719
Speaker 1: space elevator is really just impossible from a material's perspective.

973
00:53:27,120 --> 00:53:29,560
Speaker 1: So we we're still trying to figure out how to

974
00:53:30,040 --> 00:53:34,320
Speaker 1: you know, violate the pieces of the earth, how how

975
00:53:34,360 --> 00:53:36,600
Speaker 1: how much we can bake that stone to make it

976
00:53:36,640 --> 00:53:39,919
Speaker 1: serve our purposes here maybe if it's well baked enough.

977
00:53:40,960 --> 00:53:43,759
Speaker 1: So your earlier, earlier attempts to guess the tower's height

978
00:53:44,400 --> 00:53:47,560
Speaker 1: are based in you know, older and Western view of history,

979
00:53:48,200 --> 00:53:50,520
Speaker 1: one in which such wonders of the Bible were a

980
00:53:50,560 --> 00:53:54,240
Speaker 1: matter of actual history and could conceivably be uncovered and found,

981
00:53:54,880 --> 00:53:56,840
Speaker 1: and later attempts were more in the spirit of a

982
00:53:56,840 --> 00:54:00,000
Speaker 1: thought experiment. So I'm not gonna go through all of them.

983
00:54:00,600 --> 00:54:03,239
Speaker 1: But if you crush the cubits, depending on you know,

984
00:54:03,719 --> 00:54:07,840
Speaker 1: where you're getting your figures from, your tower height figures

985
00:54:07,960 --> 00:54:12,520
Speaker 1: might hit any of the following sixt that doesn't sound

986
00:54:12,560 --> 00:54:15,399
Speaker 1: like it reaches the heavens. Well, it's still big, still big,

987
00:54:15,880 --> 00:54:20,640
Speaker 1: one point three miles high, one point six, three point six,

988
00:54:21,640 --> 00:54:26,040
Speaker 1: four point six, and then eight miles So at this

989
00:54:26,080 --> 00:54:29,840
Speaker 1: point you're in territory with the birds. Yeah, but but

990
00:54:30,000 --> 00:54:32,919
Speaker 1: you're uh, and the thing is that eight miles high,

991
00:54:32,920 --> 00:54:35,920
Speaker 1: of course, you're still far short of that that space

992
00:54:35,960 --> 00:54:40,000
Speaker 1: elevator that I mentioned earlier, and again the Burj Khalifa

993
00:54:40,480 --> 00:54:43,319
Speaker 1: is uh two thousand, seven hundred and seventeen feet tall

994
00:54:43,360 --> 00:54:46,160
Speaker 1: and that's roughly half a mile. So, as I said,

995
00:54:46,160 --> 00:54:47,840
Speaker 1: all of this is just a matter of trying to

996
00:54:47,880 --> 00:54:52,640
Speaker 1: translate old systems of measurement into new. However, here's another approach,

997
00:54:52,760 --> 00:54:56,759
Speaker 1: and this this came to us by late material scientist

998
00:54:56,880 --> 00:55:00,200
Speaker 1: and author J. E. Gordon. He wrote a book back

999
00:55:00,200 --> 00:55:05,040
Speaker 1: in the day titled Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down? Uh.

1000
00:55:05,120 --> 00:55:07,640
Speaker 1: And it's it's a wonderful book. You can I was

1001
00:55:07,680 --> 00:55:10,239
Speaker 1: looking through it on on Google Books. It's out there

1002
00:55:10,239 --> 00:55:12,280
Speaker 1: in various formats. You can pick up a used coffee

1003
00:55:12,280 --> 00:55:15,920
Speaker 1: really easily. Uh. And he's he's cited in a Uh.

1004
00:55:15,960 --> 00:55:18,840
Speaker 1: He's often cited for his comments on the tower. His

1005
00:55:18,920 --> 00:55:22,160
Speaker 1: book is not primarily about the tower, but he touches

1006
00:55:22,160 --> 00:55:24,839
Speaker 1: on it a couple of times. Uh. He doesn't go

1007
00:55:24,960 --> 00:55:29,160
Speaker 1: all in, but he does share the basic idea. Quote. Now,

1008
00:55:29,200 --> 00:55:32,040
Speaker 1: brick and stone weigh about one and twenty pounds per

1009
00:55:32,040 --> 00:55:37,640
Speaker 1: cubic foot or two thousand uh kilograms per meter, and

1010
00:55:37,680 --> 00:55:40,720
Speaker 1: the crushing strength of these materials is generally rather better

1011
00:55:40,800 --> 00:55:45,240
Speaker 1: than six thousand pounds for square inch. Elementary arithmetic shows

1012
00:55:45,360 --> 00:55:48,399
Speaker 1: us that a tower with parallel walls could have been

1013
00:55:48,400 --> 00:55:51,160
Speaker 1: built to a height of seven thousand feet that's two

1014
00:55:51,200 --> 00:55:54,120
Speaker 1: kilometers one point three miles before the bricks at the

1015
00:55:54,160 --> 00:55:58,120
Speaker 1: bottom would be crushed. So that's higher than I would

1016
00:55:58,160 --> 00:56:01,120
Speaker 1: have expected. Yeah, but he also points out that, yeah,

1017
00:56:01,160 --> 00:56:03,680
Speaker 1: with a broad enough base, you could have built as

1018
00:56:03,719 --> 00:56:05,960
Speaker 1: high as Mount Everest. I mean, if you again, this

1019
00:56:06,040 --> 00:56:08,879
Speaker 1: is thought experiment, land, if you're just saying sky's a limit.

1020
00:56:08,920 --> 00:56:11,920
Speaker 1: I got this enormous plane, and somehow I can get

1021
00:56:11,920 --> 00:56:15,080
Speaker 1: the materials there. Sure you could build at least as

1022
00:56:15,120 --> 00:56:19,080
Speaker 1: high as Mount Everest at twenty nine thousand eight ft

1023
00:56:19,120 --> 00:56:24,760
Speaker 1: or five point four miles eight kilometers. So the pyramid approach, Yeah,

1024
00:56:25,080 --> 00:56:27,480
Speaker 1: just if you have enough space and enough slave labor

1025
00:56:27,520 --> 00:56:30,800
Speaker 1: to do it, he says. Quote. Thus, a simple tower,

1026
00:56:30,840 --> 00:56:33,799
Speaker 1: preferably with a broad base and tapered toward the top,

1027
00:56:34,040 --> 00:56:36,520
Speaker 1: could well have been built to such a height that

1028
00:56:36,600 --> 00:56:40,000
Speaker 1: the men of Shannar would have run short of oxygen

1029
00:56:40,280 --> 00:56:43,239
Speaker 1: and had difficulty in breathing before the brick walls were

1030
00:56:43,239 --> 00:56:46,600
Speaker 1: crushed beneath their own dead weight. So there you go,

1031
00:56:46,640 --> 00:56:49,400
Speaker 1: a little physics breakdown on the Tower of Battle and

1032
00:56:49,400 --> 00:56:53,600
Speaker 1: what would what was conceivably or even inconceivably possible. So Robert,

1033
00:56:53,680 --> 00:56:58,520
Speaker 1: you're telling me they really did build a tower to them? Uh,

1034
00:56:58,840 --> 00:57:03,360
Speaker 1: just just it's just an eye of what's possible, you

1035
00:57:03,400 --> 00:57:05,120
Speaker 1: know at that point, if you're gonna go ahead and

1036
00:57:05,120 --> 00:57:07,200
Speaker 1: build on those things. When I just impoured a mountain,

1037
00:57:07,360 --> 00:57:09,080
Speaker 1: you can just cut off a mountain at the base

1038
00:57:09,120 --> 00:57:11,160
Speaker 1: and drag it over to where you need it. Yeah,

1039
00:57:11,200 --> 00:57:14,239
Speaker 1: but you're not really it's not really flipping off God properly, right,

1040
00:57:14,280 --> 00:57:16,240
Speaker 1: because the whole thing is this is a mountain you built.

1041
00:57:16,360 --> 00:57:19,680
Speaker 1: So you're going with the angry Nimrod interpretation here where

1042
00:57:19,840 --> 00:57:22,680
Speaker 1: he's got spite because of the flood. I do like it.

1043
00:57:22,720 --> 00:57:25,080
Speaker 1: I kind of want this to be an Aeronowski film,

1044
00:57:25,160 --> 00:57:29,520
Speaker 1: you know, the angry Russell Crow Nimrod who's on a

1045
00:57:29,560 --> 00:57:32,120
Speaker 1: mission of vengeance against God at the top of the tower.

1046
00:57:32,400 --> 00:57:37,480
Speaker 1: Are you not threatened? Al Right? Well, at this point

1047
00:57:37,560 --> 00:57:40,400
Speaker 1: we should we should get into the language. Okay, so

1048
00:57:40,440 --> 00:57:42,600
Speaker 1: this is gonna be the last thing we discussed here today.

1049
00:57:42,640 --> 00:57:45,440
Speaker 1: But yeah, the the idea of the confusion of tongues

1050
00:57:45,560 --> 00:57:50,200
Speaker 1: is clearly central to the Babel myth, Right, it's that

1051
00:57:50,360 --> 00:57:53,880
Speaker 1: it's this ideological purpose. Like, like we discussed, it's an

1052
00:57:53,880 --> 00:57:57,760
Speaker 1: obvious fact of nature that people speak different languages in

1053
00:57:57,800 --> 00:58:01,000
Speaker 1: different places. Why is that? Why doesn't everybody speak the

1054
00:58:01,000 --> 00:58:03,280
Speaker 1: same language? It would be so much easier if everybody

1055
00:58:03,320 --> 00:58:07,080
Speaker 1: spoke the same language. So how come that in the case? Indeed,

1056
00:58:07,520 --> 00:58:09,440
Speaker 1: that's the basic question, like what why do we have

1057
00:58:09,480 --> 00:58:12,439
Speaker 1: all these languages? To begin with? Uh, let's let's try

1058
00:58:12,440 --> 00:58:14,919
Speaker 1: and sort of answer that question, the same question that's

1059
00:58:14,920 --> 00:58:17,240
Speaker 1: being asked and answered and then answered by the myth

1060
00:58:17,520 --> 00:58:20,640
Speaker 1: but with their modern understanding. So, according to the Linguistic

1061
00:58:20,720 --> 00:58:24,959
Speaker 1: Society of America, humans currently have roughly six thousand, nine

1062
00:58:25,000 --> 00:58:28,760
Speaker 1: hundred and nine distinct languages. Each of these falls into

1063
00:58:28,920 --> 00:58:32,000
Speaker 1: one of two hundred and fifty language families. For instance,

1064
00:58:32,080 --> 00:58:36,040
Speaker 1: the Indo European language group includes some two hundred languages,

1065
00:58:36,600 --> 00:58:39,680
Speaker 1: and they're not evenly spread out either. Europe has two

1066
00:58:39,760 --> 00:58:42,680
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty while Asia has two thousand, one hundred

1067
00:58:42,760 --> 00:58:46,560
Speaker 1: ninety seven. Papua New Guinea alone has eight hundred and

1068
00:58:46,600 --> 00:58:49,240
Speaker 1: thirty two. Yeah, and I know what you you might

1069
00:58:49,280 --> 00:58:51,680
Speaker 1: be thinking, I said, all right, so they're similar, die, Yeah,

1070
00:58:51,720 --> 00:58:54,400
Speaker 1: they sure they have just just eight hundred thirty two

1071
00:58:55,040 --> 00:58:57,400
Speaker 1: shades of the same color. But no, these are in

1072
00:58:57,480 --> 00:59:01,880
Speaker 1: thirty to forty distinct language groups. So it just goes

1073
00:59:01,920 --> 00:59:04,680
Speaker 1: to show it's not it's not just based on how

1074
00:59:04,720 --> 00:59:08,000
Speaker 1: far people are spread, their number of other factors. Now,

1075
00:59:08,200 --> 00:59:12,640
Speaker 1: it's obvious to some extent that languages change over time,

1076
00:59:12,720 --> 00:59:16,600
Speaker 1: and you can probably guess that new languages are produced generally,

1077
00:59:16,640 --> 00:59:19,560
Speaker 1: not by people planning out a language, sitting down and

1078
00:59:19,600 --> 00:59:24,120
Speaker 1: doing the esperanto kind of thing, cleon or what have you. Right,

1079
00:59:24,160 --> 00:59:27,280
Speaker 1: though created languages do exist, they're not generally spoken as

1080
00:59:27,320 --> 00:59:32,800
Speaker 1: people's native native tongue languages evolve, right, yeah, yeah, So

1081
00:59:32,880 --> 00:59:36,240
Speaker 1: that in the roots of realizing this go back to

1082
00:59:36,320 --> 00:59:40,680
Speaker 1: the rough observations of earlier man. So you take Greek

1083
00:59:40,680 --> 00:59:43,880
Speaker 1: and Latin, for instance, they show similarities and this led

1084
00:59:43,960 --> 00:59:46,800
Speaker 1: them any to assume that Latin came from Greek, but

1085
00:59:46,880 --> 00:59:50,560
Speaker 1: it didn't both emerge from from older Indo European tongues,

1086
00:59:51,240 --> 00:59:55,120
Speaker 1: perhaps according to to some theorist Indo Hittite. Now, other

1087
00:59:55,160 --> 00:59:58,600
Speaker 1: similar languages were often dismissed as the same tongue. So,

1088
00:59:58,680 --> 01:00:02,160
Speaker 1: for instance, the Romans often considered just all bar barbarians

1089
01:00:02,200 --> 01:00:05,040
Speaker 1: spoke Barbarian, when, of course you had various groups and

1090
01:00:05,160 --> 01:00:08,320
Speaker 1: various languages in play. And by the Middle Ages there

1091
01:00:08,360 --> 01:00:11,240
Speaker 1: was an increased Western interest in the language, but this

1092
01:00:11,360 --> 01:00:14,000
Speaker 1: often entailed such a doomed ventures as the attempt to

1093
01:00:14,080 --> 01:00:17,880
Speaker 1: root all European tongues in Hebrew, and Hebrews not directly

1094
01:00:17,920 --> 01:00:21,120
Speaker 1: related to any of them, because it's a Semitic language. Yeah,

1095
01:00:21,200 --> 01:00:25,200
Speaker 1: so I imagine that was a religiously motivated quest exactly,

1096
01:00:25,320 --> 01:00:27,360
Speaker 1: kind of like taking your myth on a stick and

1097
01:00:27,400 --> 01:00:31,479
Speaker 1: you know, running around through history. So language changes over time,

1098
01:00:31,560 --> 01:00:35,320
Speaker 1: sometimes fairly rapidly and in many ways. Just consider how

1099
01:00:35,360 --> 01:00:38,800
Speaker 1: different English is today compared to a few centuries ago

1100
01:00:38,880 --> 01:00:41,520
Speaker 1: with the Canterbury Tales. You know, you have to have

1101
01:00:41,600 --> 01:00:43,880
Speaker 1: a translation of it really to read it, or or

1102
01:00:43,920 --> 01:00:47,320
Speaker 1: a proper understanding of this older version of English. And

1103
01:00:47,400 --> 01:00:49,920
Speaker 1: yet on the other hand, US languages like Japanese, which

1104
01:00:49,960 --> 01:00:53,360
Speaker 1: has apparently changed very little in a thousand years now,

1105
01:00:53,440 --> 01:00:57,960
Speaker 1: isn't that an interesting problem? Why do some languages change

1106
01:00:58,040 --> 01:01:01,040
Speaker 1: faster than others? Yeah? And indeed, and then you have

1107
01:01:01,120 --> 01:01:03,800
Speaker 1: to realize, well, there there's not just one change. There

1108
01:01:04,400 --> 01:01:08,280
Speaker 1: all these different changes. So there's lexical change phonetic and

1109
01:01:08,760 --> 01:01:13,760
Speaker 1: phonological change, spelling changes, semantic changes, uh, syntactic changes. And

1110
01:01:13,800 --> 01:01:16,360
Speaker 1: on top of this, there's this concept of linguistic drift,

1111
01:01:16,680 --> 01:01:21,480
Speaker 1: both short term uneddirectional drift and long term cyclic drift.

1112
01:01:22,360 --> 01:01:24,920
Speaker 1: So we might have to have Christian jump in on

1113
01:01:24,960 --> 01:01:26,720
Speaker 1: a future episode because I know he's very interested in

1114
01:01:27,320 --> 01:01:32,120
Speaker 1: linguistic studies. Uh. But suffice to say that large scale

1115
01:01:32,200 --> 01:01:36,080
Speaker 1: linguistic shifts often occur in response to social, economic, and

1116
01:01:36,120 --> 01:01:42,480
Speaker 1: political pressures. So invasion, displacement, colonization, um, you know, enslavement.

1117
01:01:42,520 --> 01:01:45,800
Speaker 1: The history books are full of examples. Uh. New technologies

1118
01:01:45,880 --> 01:01:48,760
Speaker 1: also require new words and new ways of talking to

1119
01:01:48,800 --> 01:01:52,440
Speaker 1: each other. But the breakup of language is more complicated

1120
01:01:52,440 --> 01:01:54,480
Speaker 1: than you might think. So you might think that if

1121
01:01:54,480 --> 01:01:56,960
Speaker 1: speaker of language A and speaker of language BE can

1122
01:01:57,040 --> 01:01:59,760
Speaker 1: understand each other, then they speak the same tongue. But

1123
01:02:00,000 --> 01:02:02,640
Speaker 1: this isn't always the case, and in some cases speaker

1124
01:02:02,680 --> 01:02:05,800
Speaker 1: BE can understand speaker A, but not the other way around.

1125
01:02:06,920 --> 01:02:08,560
Speaker 1: So to come back to the Tower of Babble and

1126
01:02:08,600 --> 01:02:13,640
Speaker 1: the confusion of tongues here, UH is an instantaneous splintering

1127
01:02:13,640 --> 01:02:17,320
Speaker 1: of language possible and not really not the outside of

1128
01:02:17,360 --> 01:02:21,080
Speaker 1: some sort of magic or perhaps crazy ancient alien technology

1129
01:02:21,200 --> 01:02:24,920
Speaker 1: scheme right where they're like zapping language centers of the brain.

1130
01:02:25,600 --> 01:02:28,040
Speaker 1: But certainly, if you don't interpret the Tower of Babble

1131
01:02:28,120 --> 01:02:30,480
Speaker 1: story to literally, you could say that God just simply

1132
01:02:30,480 --> 01:02:33,200
Speaker 1: did something else to displace people and cease the building

1133
01:02:33,200 --> 01:02:36,080
Speaker 1: of the tower with cataclysms, war, et cetera, and that

1134
01:02:36,200 --> 01:02:39,520
Speaker 1: these traumas and displacements are what splintered language in a

1135
01:02:39,560 --> 01:02:42,440
Speaker 1: way that matches up with our understanding. Yeah, I think

1136
01:02:42,520 --> 01:02:43,960
Speaker 1: this will go along with something I want to get

1137
01:02:43,960 --> 01:02:45,760
Speaker 1: into in just a minute. When I look at at

1138
01:02:45,800 --> 01:02:48,960
Speaker 1: an interesting article about this that I came across, it

1139
01:02:49,040 --> 01:02:50,720
Speaker 1: makes it an interesting bit of sense, doesn't it when

1140
01:02:50,720 --> 01:02:52,200
Speaker 1: you when you think of the towers a means of

1141
01:02:52,320 --> 01:02:56,680
Speaker 1: reaching God or technological greatness. The displacement and spread of

1142
01:02:56,760 --> 01:03:00,000
Speaker 1: human civilization leads to the birth of numerous languages. Culture

1143
01:03:00,120 --> 01:03:02,560
Speaker 1: is in modes of thinking. They make such a unity,

1144
01:03:02,640 --> 01:03:05,720
Speaker 1: such vision that kind of humanist dream of of ruggle

1145
01:03:05,800 --> 01:03:09,120
Speaker 1: the elder. It makes it just incredibly difficult to accomplish now,

1146
01:03:09,160 --> 01:03:11,840
Speaker 1: as we see in every corner of our world today.

1147
01:03:12,000 --> 01:03:14,200
Speaker 1: Right now. First, I want to look at this article

1148
01:03:14,320 --> 01:03:16,560
Speaker 1: that I found that I thought was interesting about the

1149
01:03:16,600 --> 01:03:19,680
Speaker 1: idea of the evolution of language and how that happens.

1150
01:03:20,240 --> 01:03:23,800
Speaker 1: Um and also comparisons between the way languages evolved in

1151
01:03:23,840 --> 01:03:26,360
Speaker 1: the way organisms evolved. But also we should keep in

1152
01:03:26,400 --> 01:03:28,840
Speaker 1: mind to come back to the idea that what if

1153
01:03:28,880 --> 01:03:34,000
Speaker 1: the confusion of tongues has benefits as well. Now, first

1154
01:03:34,480 --> 01:03:36,960
Speaker 1: I just wanted to look at this interesting article from

1155
01:03:37,400 --> 01:03:40,440
Speaker 1: Plos Biology in two thousand and eight by John Whitfield

1156
01:03:41,000 --> 01:03:43,800
Speaker 1: that was called across the Curious Parallel of Language and

1157
01:03:43,880 --> 01:03:47,360
Speaker 1: species evolution. Now this this wasn't a study, This was

1158
01:03:47,360 --> 01:03:49,960
Speaker 1: like a feature article that was talking about some ongoing

1159
01:03:49,960 --> 01:03:52,200
Speaker 1: research at the time. I thought that was pretty cool.

1160
01:03:52,680 --> 01:03:56,680
Speaker 1: So the author, John Whitfield, has um It starts off

1161
01:03:56,720 --> 01:04:01,080
Speaker 1: by talking about how in eighty seven Charles Darwin wrote

1162
01:04:01,080 --> 01:04:03,560
Speaker 1: a letter to his sister where he talked about the

1163
01:04:03,640 --> 01:04:07,440
Speaker 1: ideas of this linguist named Sir John Herschel. Now Herschel

1164
01:04:07,520 --> 01:04:09,880
Speaker 1: wasn't just a linguist. He was a polymath. He did

1165
01:04:09,880 --> 01:04:13,160
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff. But Herschel had a thesis about language,

1166
01:04:13,160 --> 01:04:16,920
Speaker 1: and the thesis was languages, the languages that exist today

1167
01:04:17,040 --> 01:04:21,520
Speaker 1: were descended from a common ancestor. Now, the idea of

1168
01:04:21,560 --> 01:04:23,840
Speaker 1: a common descent of languages. I think it seems fairly

1169
01:04:23,880 --> 01:04:27,000
Speaker 1: intuitive to us now, but it encountered problems in the

1170
01:04:27,080 --> 01:04:29,920
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, and one of which was uh that the

1171
01:04:30,000 --> 01:04:33,320
Speaker 1: evolution of Earth's diverse languages, as different as they were,

1172
01:04:33,920 --> 01:04:37,520
Speaker 1: would make the Earth much older than people generally believed

1173
01:04:37,560 --> 01:04:39,560
Speaker 1: it to be at the time for religious reasons such

1174
01:04:39,560 --> 01:04:42,800
Speaker 1: as Bishop Usher's Biblical chronology, which you know, made the

1175
01:04:42,840 --> 01:04:47,000
Speaker 1: Earth about six to ten thousand years old. Right. So

1176
01:04:47,120 --> 01:04:50,640
Speaker 1: by Darwin's time, linguists already had some success tracing the

1177
01:04:50,680 --> 01:04:54,000
Speaker 1: genealogies of languages, so it was clear, for example, that

1178
01:04:54,080 --> 01:04:58,040
Speaker 1: many of the languages of Western Europe, such as French, Spanish,

1179
01:04:58,080 --> 01:05:01,760
Speaker 1: and Italian, had origins ancient Latin. That's not even that

1180
01:05:01,880 --> 01:05:04,760
Speaker 1: hard to observe, right You might imagine just sort of

1181
01:05:04,840 --> 01:05:08,360
Speaker 1: figuring this out by looking at the languages themselves, but

1182
01:05:08,480 --> 01:05:12,120
Speaker 1: one could also see the interbreeding of languages with with

1183
01:05:12,200 --> 01:05:15,720
Speaker 1: different ancestors. For example, you've got modern English. This has

1184
01:05:15,760 --> 01:05:18,720
Speaker 1: a strong base in Germanic languages, but you also can

1185
01:05:18,760 --> 01:05:21,680
Speaker 1: see that it clearly has input from Romance languages like

1186
01:05:21,720 --> 01:05:26,000
Speaker 1: French and Latin and Spanish as well. It's also fairly

1187
01:05:26,000 --> 01:05:29,720
Speaker 1: clear how this usually happened since we had textual records

1188
01:05:29,760 --> 01:05:33,280
Speaker 1: reflecting changes in language use over time. So the basic

1189
01:05:33,320 --> 01:05:38,200
Speaker 1: principle was discent with modification. People pass on their languages

1190
01:05:38,240 --> 01:05:42,080
Speaker 1: to the next generation. But with each generation, small changes

1191
01:05:42,240 --> 01:05:45,880
Speaker 1: creep in. New words appear, old words foality use, or

1192
01:05:46,040 --> 01:05:49,760
Speaker 1: become pronounced differently. New grammar rules start to come into use,

1193
01:05:49,800 --> 01:05:52,720
Speaker 1: and eventually enough of these changes accumulate that it would

1194
01:05:52,760 --> 01:05:55,880
Speaker 1: be difficult for a person speaking the ancient parent language

1195
01:05:56,320 --> 01:05:59,880
Speaker 1: to understand a person speaking the modern descendent language. That

1196
01:06:00,040 --> 01:06:02,080
Speaker 1: they would talk to each other and they wouldn't get it.

1197
01:06:02,320 --> 01:06:05,720
Speaker 1: And so Darwin started to wonder, I wonder if new

1198
01:06:05,800 --> 01:06:09,360
Speaker 1: species could evolve by descent with modification the same way

1199
01:06:09,480 --> 01:06:15,080
Speaker 1: languages do. And now modern linguists have quantitative analytical tools

1200
01:06:15,160 --> 01:06:17,919
Speaker 1: that can help them understand how languages change over time,

1201
01:06:18,200 --> 01:06:21,600
Speaker 1: and you can use very similar tools to investigate changes

1202
01:06:21,640 --> 01:06:24,440
Speaker 1: in genomes over time. So a lot of this article

1203
01:06:24,520 --> 01:06:29,240
Speaker 1: then ends up comparing genetic change or genomic change to

1204
01:06:29,720 --> 01:06:32,720
Speaker 1: language change. What are what are the points of similarity

1205
01:06:32,760 --> 01:06:36,240
Speaker 1: and what are the points of difference? Um and so

1206
01:06:36,520 --> 01:06:39,720
Speaker 1: Whitfield quotes an evolutionary biologists named Mark Pagel of the

1207
01:06:39,800 --> 01:06:43,640
Speaker 1: University of Reading, who says languages are extraordinarily like genomes.

1208
01:06:43,640 --> 01:06:45,600
Speaker 1: We think that they could be very that there could

1209
01:06:45,600 --> 01:06:49,800
Speaker 1: be very general laws of lexical evolution to rival those

1210
01:06:49,840 --> 01:06:53,960
Speaker 1: of genetic evolution. So there are ways in which language

1211
01:06:54,000 --> 01:06:57,240
Speaker 1: evolution and genomic evolution are similar. They're gonna be other

1212
01:06:57,240 --> 01:06:59,480
Speaker 1: ways that they're different, and we should acknowledge that in

1213
01:06:59,520 --> 01:07:02,640
Speaker 1: a minute. But one way is that the most basic

1214
01:07:02,840 --> 01:07:07,520
Speaker 1: or most important components change the slowest. So in biology,

1215
01:07:07,600 --> 01:07:10,080
Speaker 1: this is gonna be genes that are used constantly by

1216
01:07:10,160 --> 01:07:13,360
Speaker 1: nearly all organisms. One example would be genes involved in

1217
01:07:13,440 --> 01:07:15,920
Speaker 1: protein synthesis. You've got to do this all the time,

1218
01:07:16,320 --> 01:07:19,080
Speaker 1: so they just change very slowly, and for this reason

1219
01:07:19,120 --> 01:07:22,440
Speaker 1: they can be used to trace genomic relationships way deep

1220
01:07:22,480 --> 01:07:25,480
Speaker 1: into history. And in linguistic this would be the words

1221
01:07:25,520 --> 01:07:30,080
Speaker 1: you use all the time, like pronouns and numbers. If

1222
01:07:30,120 --> 01:07:32,640
Speaker 1: you think about the way language is change, if the

1223
01:07:32,720 --> 01:07:35,120
Speaker 1: language is going to be changing over time, what are

1224
01:07:35,160 --> 01:07:38,480
Speaker 1: the things that are most likely to have discontinuity from

1225
01:07:38,480 --> 01:07:41,640
Speaker 1: the way your parents spoke. It's gonna be like less

1226
01:07:41,680 --> 01:07:46,480
Speaker 1: common sayings or new expressions or something like that. Another

1227
01:07:46,520 --> 01:07:49,400
Speaker 1: parallel he talks about is that the varying rates of

1228
01:07:49,480 --> 01:07:54,200
Speaker 1: evolution in both languages in genomes that they can alter

1229
01:07:54,400 --> 01:07:58,720
Speaker 1: over time. So uh. In biology, it looks like that

1230
01:07:58,840 --> 01:08:01,920
Speaker 1: there is generally a slow and steady rate of change

1231
01:08:01,920 --> 01:08:04,960
Speaker 1: in a line of descent that is then suddenly punctuated

1232
01:08:05,040 --> 01:08:09,000
Speaker 1: by occasionally brief periods of more rapid change. This might happen,

1233
01:08:09,040 --> 01:08:12,080
Speaker 1: for example, when you get various populations of the same

1234
01:08:12,120 --> 01:08:14,800
Speaker 1: species that are suddenly cut off from one another and

1235
01:08:14,920 --> 01:08:18,680
Speaker 1: unable to inter breed and forced into different living conditions.

1236
01:08:19,040 --> 01:08:21,000
Speaker 1: So you might think about our episode on the London

1237
01:08:21,080 --> 01:08:25,519
Speaker 1: Underground mosquito. You've got the surface Coulex pipiens mosquito, and

1238
01:08:25,720 --> 01:08:28,559
Speaker 1: part of that population appears to break off into a

1239
01:08:28,600 --> 01:08:32,160
Speaker 1: subgroup that gets trapped into the London underground, which selects

1240
01:08:32,160 --> 01:08:34,360
Speaker 1: for different traits. You've got to like the dark, You've

1241
01:08:34,400 --> 01:08:36,679
Speaker 1: got to really have a taste for rat and human

1242
01:08:36,720 --> 01:08:40,240
Speaker 1: blood instead of bird blood. Uh. And eventually, the version

1243
01:08:40,240 --> 01:08:45,280
Speaker 1: of Coulex pipiens that's that's accumulating these different adaptations is

1244
01:08:45,280 --> 01:08:48,479
Speaker 1: a different species within a surprisingly short amount of time,

1245
01:08:48,760 --> 01:08:51,839
Speaker 1: and they can no longer successfully breed and produce fertile

1246
01:08:51,840 --> 01:08:55,439
Speaker 1: offspring with one another. With the surface population, it looks

1247
01:08:55,439 --> 01:08:58,880
Speaker 1: like a similar kind of thing happens with languages. Populations

1248
01:08:58,920 --> 01:09:02,040
Speaker 1: that speak them accumul late small changes over long periods

1249
01:09:02,040 --> 01:09:05,280
Speaker 1: of time, but there may be more rapid speciation events

1250
01:09:05,680 --> 01:09:09,120
Speaker 1: eventually after a population splits off. So if you take

1251
01:09:09,120 --> 01:09:12,080
Speaker 1: a large group of English speakers and you split them

1252
01:09:12,160 --> 01:09:15,919
Speaker 1: up into smaller groups, and you put them on different islands,

1253
01:09:16,000 --> 01:09:18,160
Speaker 1: so they never talk to each other, you can expect

1254
01:09:18,320 --> 01:09:21,840
Speaker 1: their rate of differentiation and how their language has change

1255
01:09:21,920 --> 01:09:25,759
Speaker 1: is going to accelerate. Now this isn't exactly a dissenting opinion,

1256
01:09:25,800 --> 01:09:27,360
Speaker 1: but I want to throw this bit in from the

1257
01:09:27,439 --> 01:09:30,839
Speaker 1: Linguistic Society of America on the diversity of language compared

1258
01:09:30,880 --> 01:09:34,400
Speaker 1: to biological diversity. So the languages of the world seem

1259
01:09:34,439 --> 01:09:37,519
Speaker 1: amazingly diverse, but when you compare them to communication systems

1260
01:09:37,560 --> 01:09:42,000
Speaker 1: in general, they're all remarkably similar to one another. Quote.

1261
01:09:42,160 --> 01:09:46,160
Speaker 1: Human language differs from the communicative behavior of every other

1262
01:09:46,320 --> 01:09:50,040
Speaker 1: known organism in a number of fundamental ways, all shared

1263
01:09:50,720 --> 01:09:54,719
Speaker 1: across languages, they say. Quote, human language is so different

1264
01:09:54,760 --> 01:09:57,720
Speaker 1: from any other known system in the natural world that

1265
01:09:57,800 --> 01:10:00,599
Speaker 1: the narrowly constrained ways in which one grammar can differ

1266
01:10:00,920 --> 01:10:04,639
Speaker 1: from another fade into insignificance. For a native of Milan,

1267
01:10:04,880 --> 01:10:07,320
Speaker 1: the differences between the speech of that city and that

1268
01:10:07,400 --> 01:10:11,040
Speaker 1: of Turin may loom large, but for a visitor from

1269
01:10:11,120 --> 01:10:15,519
Speaker 1: Kula Lumpur, both are simply Italian. Similarly, the differences we

1270
01:10:15,560 --> 01:10:19,120
Speaker 1: find across the world in Grammars seem very important. But

1271
01:10:19,240 --> 01:10:22,519
Speaker 1: for an outside observer, say a biologist studying communication among

1272
01:10:22,560 --> 01:10:25,519
Speaker 1: living beings in general, or this is me, but dare say,

1273
01:10:25,560 --> 01:10:29,040
Speaker 1: you know, an angelic destroyer sent down or a Babylonian

1274
01:10:29,120 --> 01:10:33,400
Speaker 1: god quote, all our relatively minor variations on the single

1275
01:10:33,520 --> 01:10:36,960
Speaker 1: theme of human language. That's interesting. Yeah, stuff that may

1276
01:10:37,000 --> 01:10:41,080
Speaker 1: appear very diverse to us because we are so highly

1277
01:10:41,240 --> 01:10:44,360
Speaker 1: attuned to the differences between it, just from an outside

1278
01:10:44,800 --> 01:10:47,920
Speaker 1: encoding perspective is not all that different. Yeah. They're all

1279
01:10:47,920 --> 01:10:51,360
Speaker 1: speaking Earth anyway, they're all speaking human. Yeah, so what

1280
01:10:51,600 --> 01:10:55,120
Speaker 1: drives language change? Like? Well, again we've touched on on

1281
01:10:55,280 --> 01:10:57,639
Speaker 1: on some of the reasons. But but what what you're

1282
01:10:57,680 --> 01:11:00,120
Speaker 1: you're taking your research show? Well, obviously this is not

1283
01:11:00,200 --> 01:11:02,080
Speaker 1: at a settled issue. I mean, there are all kinds

1284
01:11:02,080 --> 01:11:05,840
Speaker 1: of things that drive changes in language. Um, some appear

1285
01:11:05,960 --> 01:11:09,599
Speaker 1: to be these fairly random kind of influences and changes

1286
01:11:09,600 --> 01:11:13,120
Speaker 1: in pronunciation and stuff like that. Sociolinguists and this is

1287
01:11:13,240 --> 01:11:16,200
Speaker 1: this is a point that um Whitfield makes in his article.

1288
01:11:16,439 --> 01:11:19,800
Speaker 1: Sociolinguists would point out that sort of random artifacts of

1289
01:11:19,920 --> 01:11:23,639
Speaker 1: culture can influence language trends, and so they might give

1290
01:11:23,680 --> 01:11:27,280
Speaker 1: the example of the idiosyncratic speech patterns of a very

1291
01:11:27,360 --> 01:11:31,200
Speaker 1: high status person or social group get copied a lot,

1292
01:11:31,680 --> 01:11:35,000
Speaker 1: and that can become the sort of driving factor in

1293
01:11:35,040 --> 01:11:38,600
Speaker 1: the way languages change over time. Imagine if Marlon Brando's

1294
01:11:38,640 --> 01:11:41,840
Speaker 1: the coolest guy in America and suddenly all all the

1295
01:11:41,880 --> 01:11:45,479
Speaker 1: men in America start mumbling their words like him. Or

1296
01:11:45,520 --> 01:11:48,759
Speaker 1: if you're if you're living in England and it's recently

1297
01:11:48,800 --> 01:11:52,320
Speaker 1: been conquered by French aristocrats, suddenly you might you might

1298
01:11:52,360 --> 01:11:55,799
Speaker 1: want to start incorporating more Francophonic features into your speech,

1299
01:11:55,840 --> 01:11:58,200
Speaker 1: so you talk more like the new bosses and the

1300
01:11:58,240 --> 01:12:01,880
Speaker 1: new rich people. Your company is purchased by a different

1301
01:12:01,920 --> 01:12:05,439
Speaker 1: company and they have different bits of business jargon, and

1302
01:12:05,439 --> 01:12:10,280
Speaker 1: suddenly you're speaking like that at home. That forbid, that

1303
01:12:10,320 --> 01:12:12,439
Speaker 1: would be that would be grounds for the confusion of

1304
01:12:12,479 --> 01:12:17,240
Speaker 1: tongue in business. Uh. There are even ideas that genetics

1305
01:12:17,240 --> 01:12:21,280
Speaker 1: could influence language change. Not I think it's not strongly.

1306
01:12:21,800 --> 01:12:24,959
Speaker 1: It's not believed that this is strongly determinative by everybody

1307
01:12:24,960 --> 01:12:26,640
Speaker 1: that I know of who said, like, you know that

1308
01:12:26,680 --> 01:12:31,040
Speaker 1: you have genes for speaking Chinese or something. But in

1309
01:12:31,080 --> 01:12:33,519
Speaker 1: a more subtle way, it appears that there could be

1310
01:12:33,600 --> 01:12:38,120
Speaker 1: certain types of genes that favor the development of certain

1311
01:12:38,160 --> 01:12:41,200
Speaker 1: types of languages. So, for example, it appears there could

1312
01:12:41,200 --> 01:12:44,600
Speaker 1: be the certain ancestral genes that correlate with the development

1313
01:12:44,640 --> 01:12:48,320
Speaker 1: of what's known as tonal languages versus non tonal languages.

1314
01:12:48,560 --> 01:12:51,360
Speaker 1: And a tonal language is one in which saying basically

1315
01:12:51,360 --> 01:12:55,280
Speaker 1: the same word, the same sequence of phonemes with a

1316
01:12:55,280 --> 01:12:58,600
Speaker 1: different pitch or tone has a different meaning. Chinese is

1317
01:12:58,600 --> 01:13:01,800
Speaker 1: a good example of this. Yeah, Like they're multiple ways

1318
01:13:01,840 --> 01:13:04,240
Speaker 1: to say ma. We say my in our tongue and

1319
01:13:04,240 --> 01:13:07,559
Speaker 1: it means one thing, but it can mean you you

1320
01:13:07,560 --> 01:13:09,639
Speaker 1: say it wrong. You might think you're saying a mother

1321
01:13:09,680 --> 01:13:12,800
Speaker 1: in Chinese, but you're actually saying horse or himp. Is

1322
01:13:12,840 --> 01:13:15,760
Speaker 1: that a direct horse or himp? Well that's that's that's

1323
01:13:15,800 --> 01:13:17,640
Speaker 1: just three of them, mother, horse, and himp, But then

1324
01:13:17,640 --> 01:13:21,160
Speaker 1: their additionals as well. So can you do the different pronunciations?

1325
01:13:21,240 --> 01:13:23,599
Speaker 1: How what does it sound like? Well, you have there's

1326
01:13:23,680 --> 01:13:26,400
Speaker 1: like rising around it. So there's like and there's there's

1327
01:13:26,439 --> 01:13:30,920
Speaker 1: like ma ma ma ma u. Those are just a few,

1328
01:13:30,960 --> 01:13:32,679
Speaker 1: but just just an idea of just some of the tones.

1329
01:13:32,760 --> 01:13:36,439
Speaker 1: And that's why a language like Mandarin Chinese is it

1330
01:13:36,479 --> 01:13:40,360
Speaker 1: can be so difficult for uh, for say, an English

1331
01:13:40,360 --> 01:13:43,400
Speaker 1: speaker to pick up on. I mean, that sounds amazingly

1332
01:13:43,439 --> 01:13:45,959
Speaker 1: difficult to learn if you don't come from a language

1333
01:13:46,000 --> 01:13:49,160
Speaker 1: that has tonal qualities to it. Yeah, we well, you know,

1334
01:13:49,200 --> 01:13:51,880
Speaker 1: the thing is, we don't, and we do. I thought

1335
01:13:51,880 --> 01:13:55,840
Speaker 1: about this a lot because certainly your tone in saying

1336
01:13:55,880 --> 01:13:59,719
Speaker 1: certain words in English can can have a very important

1337
01:13:59,720 --> 01:14:03,880
Speaker 1: effect act on what you're saying. Uh, not so much

1338
01:14:03,960 --> 01:14:07,040
Speaker 1: changing the definition of a word, but changing the connotations.

1339
01:14:07,760 --> 01:14:10,280
Speaker 1: So so it's not yet it's not a direct comparison,

1340
01:14:10,360 --> 01:14:12,800
Speaker 1: but it's it's kind of like the the the the

1341
01:14:12,800 --> 01:14:19,320
Speaker 1: importance of tone in English taken to a different level altogether. Yeah,

1342
01:14:19,360 --> 01:14:23,320
Speaker 1: that is interesting. But anyway, so the idea here is that, um,

1343
01:14:23,479 --> 01:14:25,439
Speaker 1: not so much that you would have a gene that

1344
01:14:25,520 --> 01:14:28,919
Speaker 1: tells you to speak a certain to speak a language

1345
01:14:28,960 --> 01:14:31,479
Speaker 1: like that, but that there are certain genes that appear

1346
01:14:31,560 --> 01:14:36,840
Speaker 1: to be geographically correlated with areas where people had developed

1347
01:14:36,920 --> 01:14:40,400
Speaker 1: languages with tonal features, so that could play a role.

1348
01:14:40,880 --> 01:14:44,040
Speaker 1: But another interesting feature is the fact that if languages

1349
01:14:44,040 --> 01:14:46,960
Speaker 1: evolved like organisms, if this is, if this analogy is

1350
01:14:47,000 --> 01:14:51,280
Speaker 1: correct at all, they're more like the evolution of bacteria

1351
01:14:51,320 --> 01:14:56,680
Speaker 1: than the evolution of say, complex mammals, because languages can

1352
01:14:56,720 --> 01:15:00,439
Speaker 1: trade horizontally, right, The transmission of language is is not

1353
01:15:00,560 --> 01:15:04,720
Speaker 1: just vertical across generations. You don't just directly inherent your

1354
01:15:04,800 --> 01:15:08,800
Speaker 1: language from your parents. You largely do, but it's also horizontal.

1355
01:15:08,920 --> 01:15:12,639
Speaker 1: You get new words, new speaking patterns, new grammatical rules

1356
01:15:13,000 --> 01:15:15,800
Speaker 1: from the people around you, and you can trade them off.

1357
01:15:15,880 --> 01:15:19,040
Speaker 1: So it is more like the horizontal gene transfer you'd

1358
01:15:19,080 --> 01:15:22,120
Speaker 1: see in microbial life. That's true, that's a good point.

1359
01:15:22,760 --> 01:15:24,040
Speaker 1: And then, of course I think it's not just the

1360
01:15:24,040 --> 01:15:27,040
Speaker 1: people around you. It's the TV programs around you as well.

1361
01:15:27,200 --> 01:15:29,960
Speaker 1: Uh and and and another extent, the books you read.

1362
01:15:30,560 --> 01:15:33,240
Speaker 1: You have all these these influences that are are taking

1363
01:15:33,240 --> 01:15:36,800
Speaker 1: what you were essentially given by those who reared you.

1364
01:15:37,280 --> 01:15:40,320
Speaker 1: And uh, and you're you're recreating it every day. Yeah,

1365
01:15:40,479 --> 01:15:43,040
Speaker 1: So in the creation of new languages, I think the

1366
01:15:43,040 --> 01:15:46,559
Speaker 1: the analogy of evolution by natural selection or maybe not

1367
01:15:46,640 --> 01:15:50,040
Speaker 1: natural selection, evolution by some kind of selection. Evolution by

1368
01:15:50,120 --> 01:15:53,400
Speaker 1: vague selection is somewhat a good analogy in other ways

1369
01:15:53,439 --> 01:15:56,840
Speaker 1: it's not a perfect analogy. But I also have a

1370
01:15:56,920 --> 01:15:59,720
Speaker 1: question for any linguists out there listening. So we've talked

1371
01:15:59,720 --> 01:16:02,679
Speaker 1: about the difficulties of identifying, you know, or the idea

1372
01:16:02,680 --> 01:16:06,439
Speaker 1: of a species in biology before. In biology, the species

1373
01:16:06,479 --> 01:16:09,719
Speaker 1: distinction is usually taken to mean that two different species

1374
01:16:09,720 --> 01:16:14,520
Speaker 1: are animals or organisms that cannot breed and produce fertile offspring.

1375
01:16:15,080 --> 01:16:18,440
Speaker 1: So if we follow the analogy between genomics and linguistics,

1376
01:16:18,920 --> 01:16:23,320
Speaker 1: what is the equivalent distinction between different species of language?

1377
01:16:23,640 --> 01:16:25,519
Speaker 1: I mean, you might be tempted to say, well, it's

1378
01:16:25,520 --> 01:16:28,160
Speaker 1: when you can't understand one another, But there are varying

1379
01:16:28,320 --> 01:16:32,560
Speaker 1: degrees of understanding, right, you might sort of understand somebody.

1380
01:16:32,960 --> 01:16:35,000
Speaker 1: So anyway, if you have a good answer for that,

1381
01:16:35,320 --> 01:16:37,320
Speaker 1: you might want to email us it blow the mind

1382
01:16:37,320 --> 01:16:39,080
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com to let us know.

1383
01:16:39,520 --> 01:16:41,560
Speaker 1: All right, as we begin to close out here, and

1384
01:16:41,720 --> 01:16:44,519
Speaker 1: I want to talk very briefly about a book and

1385
01:16:44,560 --> 01:16:46,640
Speaker 1: an idea that I imagine a number of you out

1386
01:16:46,640 --> 01:16:48,760
Speaker 1: there have been thinking about the whole time. And that's

1387
01:16:48,840 --> 01:16:52,760
Speaker 1: Neil Stevenson's Cyberpunk Classics No Crash. I've never read this,

1388
01:16:52,800 --> 01:16:54,680
Speaker 1: but I've always meant to. Oh yeah, this is the one,

1389
01:16:54,680 --> 01:16:56,519
Speaker 1: of course, It's it's a wild book. It's you've got

1390
01:16:56,520 --> 01:16:59,720
Speaker 1: so many fun elements going on in a hero protagonist

1391
01:16:59,760 --> 01:17:04,160
Speaker 1: with samurai sword. But the part that's stuck with me

1392
01:17:04,240 --> 01:17:07,200
Speaker 1: the most, and the part that that that that jives

1393
01:17:07,240 --> 01:17:12,559
Speaker 1: with today's episode is this important plot point about about

1394
01:17:12,600 --> 01:17:14,920
Speaker 1: this uh, this this this thing that's referred to as

1395
01:17:14,960 --> 01:17:18,720
Speaker 1: the nam Shub of Inky who mentioned earlier this is

1396
01:17:18,720 --> 01:17:21,920
Speaker 1: the Sumerian god. So the idea here and this is

1397
01:17:21,960 --> 01:17:23,760
Speaker 1: like the this is the version of it that that

1398
01:17:23,840 --> 01:17:26,679
Speaker 1: Stevenson plays within the book. Is he of this ancient

1399
01:17:26,760 --> 01:17:30,519
Speaker 1: Sumerian or language and it allowed brain function to be

1400
01:17:30,600 --> 01:17:34,720
Speaker 1: programmed using audio stimuli in conjunction with a d N

1401
01:17:34,800 --> 01:17:40,120
Speaker 1: a altering virus. So Sumerian culture in this scenario UH

1402
01:17:40,360 --> 01:17:43,680
Speaker 1: is organized around these programs known as ME, which were

1403
01:17:43,680 --> 01:17:47,000
Speaker 1: administered by priests. Oh yeah, the ME. So there in

1404
01:17:47,280 --> 01:17:52,120
Speaker 1: one of the things I mentioned earlier, the the Golden

1405
01:17:52,120 --> 01:17:54,680
Speaker 1: Age passage in the Sumerian epic. There, I think there

1406
01:17:54,760 --> 01:17:58,080
Speaker 1: is a recital of m A. That's that's it. Yeah,

1407
01:17:58,320 --> 01:18:00,479
Speaker 1: that that's what he's playing off of in this So

1408
01:18:01,280 --> 01:18:04,600
Speaker 1: Inky this uh this this important figure this uh this

1409
01:18:04,800 --> 01:18:09,000
Speaker 1: God develops a counter virus known as the nam shub

1410
01:18:09,280 --> 01:18:13,240
Speaker 1: and then he delivers uh this to stop the Sumerian

1411
01:18:13,320 --> 01:18:16,400
Speaker 1: language from being processed by the brain, and this leads

1412
01:18:16,400 --> 01:18:20,800
Speaker 1: to the development of other less literal languages, giving birth

1413
01:18:20,840 --> 01:18:23,240
Speaker 1: to the babble myth. So this would be a case

1414
01:18:23,320 --> 01:18:28,320
Speaker 1: where the confusion of languages as described by Inky confusing

1415
01:18:28,400 --> 01:18:32,080
Speaker 1: the tongues in this epic is actually a benevolent thing.

1416
01:18:32,560 --> 01:18:35,200
Speaker 1: So yeah, the idea that Stevenson is rolling out here

1417
01:18:35,360 --> 01:18:38,400
Speaker 1: is that if you have a mono linguistic culture, it's

1418
01:18:38,439 --> 01:18:41,759
Speaker 1: like having like a massive farm that's only one crop

1419
01:18:42,320 --> 01:18:45,880
Speaker 1: because you're susceptible to a single virus or pathogen or

1420
01:18:46,000 --> 01:18:50,519
Speaker 1: parasite is wiping it out. They specifically mentioned say, you know,

1421
01:18:50,840 --> 01:18:55,640
Speaker 1: uh Nazism coming in, and if if it resonates with

1422
01:18:55,680 --> 01:18:57,800
Speaker 1: a few people, if everyone has the same language and

1423
01:18:57,880 --> 01:19:01,839
Speaker 1: essentially the same culture, then that that that harmful idea,

1424
01:19:01,920 --> 01:19:05,320
Speaker 1: that that that linguistic meme can just run rampant and

1425
01:19:05,360 --> 01:19:07,920
Speaker 1: eat everyone up. But if you have these it's like

1426
01:19:08,000 --> 01:19:11,120
Speaker 1: having a forest fire breakout in a global forest with

1427
01:19:11,840 --> 01:19:14,760
Speaker 1: you know, without any streams or planes to break it up,

1428
01:19:14,960 --> 01:19:18,640
Speaker 1: everything's going to burn. I love this idea, and I

1429
01:19:18,680 --> 01:19:20,799
Speaker 1: think this is fascinating. I think it is a great

1430
01:19:20,840 --> 01:19:24,799
Speaker 1: case for preserving the diversity of human language and culture.

1431
01:19:24,840 --> 01:19:27,720
Speaker 1: I mean, I think sometimes it is tempting. I think,

1432
01:19:27,720 --> 01:19:30,280
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be great if the whole world had one

1433
01:19:30,360 --> 01:19:32,600
Speaker 1: language in one culture. It would be so easy for

1434
01:19:32,720 --> 01:19:35,599
Speaker 1: us all to get along. We could do trade would

1435
01:19:35,640 --> 01:19:37,439
Speaker 1: be so much easier, we could just really you know,

1436
01:19:38,000 --> 01:19:40,840
Speaker 1: like it seems utopian when you think about it, but

1437
01:19:41,040 --> 01:19:44,400
Speaker 1: I absolutely see some merit in the idea that that

1438
01:19:44,439 --> 01:19:48,800
Speaker 1: would make us much more uniquely vulnerable to a particularly

1439
01:19:49,000 --> 01:19:55,360
Speaker 1: bad linguistic or cultural program that gets instituted that catches

1440
01:19:55,400 --> 01:19:59,120
Speaker 1: on easily. I mean, it's easy to think about memes

1441
01:19:59,120 --> 01:20:02,439
Speaker 1: like Nazism or like a really awful interpretation of a

1442
01:20:02,520 --> 01:20:06,559
Speaker 1: religion or something like that, And there are ideas that

1443
01:20:06,600 --> 01:20:10,120
Speaker 1: can be captivating to people that they feel very entranced

1444
01:20:10,120 --> 01:20:14,280
Speaker 1: by and beholden to um, but they're utterly destructive. And

1445
01:20:14,400 --> 01:20:17,680
Speaker 1: if you have these divisions of culture and divisions of

1446
01:20:17,760 --> 01:20:21,280
Speaker 1: language where you can't play exactly the same linguistic meme

1447
01:20:21,360 --> 01:20:24,200
Speaker 1: on somebody else's brain. It's a it's a little bit

1448
01:20:24,200 --> 01:20:27,200
Speaker 1: of an immunity barrier, or what if the what if

1449
01:20:27,000 --> 01:20:30,680
Speaker 1: the pathogen here is a is an intense desire to

1450
01:20:30,720 --> 01:20:33,640
Speaker 1: build a giant tower into the sky, and maybe ultimately

1451
01:20:34,280 --> 01:20:36,240
Speaker 1: the god or gods in the scenario saying well, look

1452
01:20:36,280 --> 01:20:38,200
Speaker 1: at these people, they're totally wasting their time building this

1453
01:20:38,320 --> 01:20:41,080
Speaker 1: tower to nowhere. We better break that up before they

1454
01:20:41,160 --> 01:20:44,880
Speaker 1: hurt themselves. The only humane thing to do is to

1455
01:20:44,960 --> 01:20:50,599
Speaker 1: knock it down, and thereafter called the land Overthrow. All right, Well,

1456
01:20:50,600 --> 01:20:55,160
Speaker 1: there you have it, everybody. The Tower of Babel, artistic interpretations,

1457
01:20:55,200 --> 01:20:59,720
Speaker 1: mathematical interpretations, linguistic interpretations, and hey, there is a lot

1458
01:20:59,760 --> 01:21:03,680
Speaker 1: of awesome other Tower of Babel literature and legend out

1459
01:21:03,680 --> 01:21:05,679
Speaker 1: there that we didn't even have time to get into today.

1460
01:21:05,720 --> 01:21:07,639
Speaker 1: So if you want to write us about your favorite

1461
01:21:07,720 --> 01:21:11,519
Speaker 1: Tower of Babel stories from or or equivalent legends from

1462
01:21:11,520 --> 01:21:14,960
Speaker 1: other other types of literature mythological history, let us know

1463
01:21:15,040 --> 01:21:17,080
Speaker 1: about that. That's right in the meantime, Heading over to

1464
01:21:17,120 --> 01:21:18,559
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that's what we

1465
01:21:18,560 --> 01:21:22,320
Speaker 1: will find all the podcast episodes, including the Great Flood

1466
01:21:22,360 --> 01:21:26,519
Speaker 1: episode that we mentioned earlier and London Underground Mosquito, London,

1467
01:21:26,560 --> 01:21:28,840
Speaker 1: ut Aground Mosquito as well. You'll find those episodes and

1468
01:21:28,880 --> 01:21:31,519
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, along with blog post, videos,

1469
01:21:31,600 --> 01:21:33,800
Speaker 1: and links out to our various social media accounts such

1470
01:21:33,800 --> 01:21:37,880
Speaker 1: as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, all of those things, and

1471
01:21:37,960 --> 01:21:39,960
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with us, as always,

1472
01:21:39,960 --> 01:21:42,040
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how

1473
01:21:42,080 --> 01:21:55,080
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Well more on this and thousands

1474
01:21:55,120 --> 01:22:01,880
Speaker 1: of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot Com,

1475
01:22:01,880 --> 01:22:13,799
Speaker 1: a lot of little they starts start sport