Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from housetop dot com.
Speaker 1: And the whole earth was of one language and of
Speaker 1: one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed
Speaker 1: from the east that they found a plain in the
Speaker 1: land of Shinar, and they dwelt there, and they said
Speaker 1: to one another, go to, let us make brick and
Speaker 1: burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and
Speaker 1: slime they had for mortar. And they said, go to,
Speaker 1: let us build a city and a tower whose top
Speaker 1: may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name,
Speaker 1: lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the
Speaker 1: whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the
Speaker 1: city and the tower which the children of men built,
Speaker 1: and the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and
Speaker 1: they have all one language. And this they begin to do.
Speaker 1: And now nothing will be restrained from them which they
Speaker 1: have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down.
Speaker 1: And they're confound their language that they may not understand
Speaker 1: one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from
Speaker 1: thence upon the face of all the earth, and they
Speaker 1: left off to build the city. Therefore is the name
Speaker 1: of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound
Speaker 1: the language of all the earth? And from thence did
Speaker 1: the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all
Speaker 1: the earth. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: that was a reading from the Book of Genesis in
Speaker 1: the Bible. It is the story of the Tower of Babel. Robert,
Speaker 1: I've got to ask you, what did this story look
Speaker 1: like when you were a little kid. Inside your head? Oh,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it's always kind of looked the same. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't. I wish I did you picture
Speaker 1: the tower? Yes, But I have to say I had
Speaker 1: this book of Bible stories with illustrations for each one,
Speaker 1: and I think it was kind of Gustaf Dora inspired.
Speaker 1: It had a kind of spiraling, you know, almost a
Speaker 1: seashell kind of looked to it. And I was always
Speaker 1: taken by that. I was this was a fabulous book
Speaker 1: in many respects because I remember it had it just
Speaker 1: had all of these strange illustrations to them, especially the
Speaker 1: more mystical Old Testament occurrences. Now, did it have a
Speaker 1: direct translation of the Genesis account along with illustrations or
Speaker 1: was it like adapted into a modern sort of retelling
Speaker 1: of the So I think it was adapted because it
Speaker 1: was kind of for kids, you know, So I didn't
Speaker 1: have access in that book to the you know, the
Speaker 1: the nice keen James version that we have here with
Speaker 1: all the slime and mortar and weirdness and some other translations.
Speaker 1: That word slime is rendered tar alright, So if you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with it, the account of Genesis basically lays
Speaker 1: it all out. So humans got smart, they got organized,
Speaker 1: they got more than a little bit ambitious. They decided
Speaker 1: to build a structure that would show of the world
Speaker 1: just how amazing they really were. And uh, God wasn't
Speaker 1: too crazy about this development. So in this, uh, this story,
Speaker 1: in this myth, he blasts their language so that they
Speaker 1: can't understand each other and scatters them far and wide.
Speaker 1: Then the tower is never finished. Right, So this is
Speaker 1: pretty straightforward about how this would work in the logic
Speaker 1: of the story. Right, if you confuse the tongues, if
Speaker 1: you ever, if everybody speaks the same language, they can
Speaker 1: all work together. If you make them all speak different languages,
Speaker 1: then they can't coordinate their activities, and thus the building
Speaker 1: of the tower has to stop. Yeah, it's it's at
Speaker 1: least gonna set back production of the tower somewhat because
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to figure out how I mean in
Speaker 1: this magical scenario, You're gonna have to figure out how
Speaker 1: your language relates to their language. You're gonna have to
Speaker 1: figure out some sort of common means of communicating, and
Speaker 1: it's essentially have to reorganize the whole the whole venture.
Speaker 1: Now this is coming right pretty much right after a
Speaker 1: catastrophe in the Book of Genesis, because this is after
Speaker 1: the flood narrative, right, so we had the whole earth
Speaker 1: except for one family destroyed in the Great Flood. So
Speaker 1: it's after the flood, and and so you've got people
Speaker 1: rebuilding civilization. But they get a little haughty, and there
Speaker 1: are multiple ways that you could interpret what they're doing
Speaker 1: when they're building this tower up to heaven. As a child,
Speaker 1: I think the way I read the story was, well,
Speaker 1: they're prideful right there, saying look what we can accomplish.
Speaker 1: Were showing off, and God did not like their pride
Speaker 1: and punish them for it. More recently, when I look
Speaker 1: at this story, I see an implied threat essentially that
Speaker 1: they are attempting to physically scale to the heavens so
Speaker 1: that they could challenge the gods. In one sense, they
Speaker 1: are bridging heaven and earth. Yeah, it's like a yeah,
Speaker 1: it really is, and so what's what's God to do?
Speaker 1: I mean, there are some accounts I remember reading when
Speaker 1: I was younger. They would even say that the workmen
Speaker 1: on the tower, like on their lunch break, I guess,
Speaker 1: would shoot angels with bows and arrows because it was
Speaker 1: getting that high, you know, it was getting clo to
Speaker 1: the heavenly domain. Yeah, when I when I was young,
Speaker 1: and for the longest I think it was the definitely
Speaker 1: the pride version, the idea that they just got too boastful, which,
Speaker 1: on one hand, the message there ties in I guess
Speaker 1: nicely with a lot of human endeavor. I don't get
Speaker 1: too full of yourself, because God still got the final word.
Speaker 1: But it also kind of makes God look like a
Speaker 1: paranoid jerk where he's just like, oh, this tower is
Speaker 1: getting a little too tall from my like and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna smite that, Like why you're God, They're just building
Speaker 1: a tower. That The behavior is more understandable if you
Speaker 1: interpret it as an attempt to overthrow the gods, a
Speaker 1: threat against their place in the sky. It also makes
Speaker 1: more sense when you think about ancient cosmology with with
Speaker 1: the idea that the heavens were actually a fairly low
Speaker 1: plane that you could access through ascension in the air.
Speaker 1: When when I was a kid, I had this story
Speaker 1: in my head, and I was trying to picture it
Speaker 1: as something that had happened. But I also had knowledge
Speaker 1: of outer space travel and and how big the atmosphere
Speaker 1: actually was, so I was trying to picture it like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so they're building a tower that literally goes up to
Speaker 1: space because that's where God is. Well, I didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: think God was in space, but that was the only way,
Speaker 1: knowing about space, that's the only way I could really
Speaker 1: interpret it. And so I was picturing a tower that
Speaker 1: just went up as far as you could see, which
Speaker 1: is kind of ridiculous to picture. Now, if you see
Speaker 1: the great artistic representations of the story, it's not really
Speaker 1: that the tower reaches beyond where you can see, though
Speaker 1: actually I guess in some of them it is. But
Speaker 1: like later we'll be looking at a Peter bru Egels interpretation,
Speaker 1: and it's more just kind of this massive project that
Speaker 1: more reflects pride, I think. Yeah, And even with just
Speaker 1: a basic almost subconscious understanding of engineering, you look at
Speaker 1: those representations and you know this thing is not going
Speaker 1: to reach a low Earth orbit or anything. Right now.
Speaker 1: You can also look at the myth, you know, in
Speaker 1: two basic ways as well. I guess you can say
Speaker 1: that this was basically an etiological attempt, you know, to explain, well,
Speaker 1: why do we have all these languages? Yeah, and ideologies
Speaker 1: are extremely common and in ancient literature and ancient mythology,
Speaker 1: and you find them all throughout the Bible. The Book
Speaker 1: of Genesis is full of stories that tell you a
Speaker 1: story about something that happened, and it sort of ends
Speaker 1: with the punch line, and that's why these people are
Speaker 1: now called this which relates to some fact about the story,
Speaker 1: you know it would be like, And then they cut
Speaker 1: off one guy's leg, and that's why this tribe is
Speaker 1: now called the left footers. Yeah. And then but then
Speaker 1: there's just not a real But then there's another level
Speaker 1: too to our interpretation of this tale, this myth uh
Speaker 1: as And and I think I think it's not too
Speaker 1: much of a stretch to to think about it being
Speaker 1: baked into the original purpose as well is that it
Speaker 1: explains why people can't get along very well, why people
Speaker 1: can't come can can very rarely come together on a
Speaker 1: megaproject um and and stick with it like something's going
Speaker 1: to fall apart. Uh. And you have to have extenuating
Speaker 1: circumstances to allow something grandiose to happen to begin with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And in that vein, I can see how it's not
Speaker 1: only an ideological story to explain why we have all
Speaker 1: these different languages on Earth, why there's so much conflict,
Speaker 1: but it also has some kind of ancient techno paranoia,
Speaker 1: uh idea. Right, So there's actually a bit of discussion
Speaker 1: of technological change in the story. They say, you know what,
Speaker 1: they were burning those bricks thoroughly. This actually represented a
Speaker 1: technological upgrade. And the architecture of ancient Mesopotamia, a lot
Speaker 1: of it was built with mud bricks. These are sun
Speaker 1: baked mud bricks that you would form together out of
Speaker 1: clay and then allow to harden in the sun. And
Speaker 1: these were you know, you could build out of them,
Speaker 1: but they didn't. They weren't in it for the long haul. Later,
Speaker 1: if you had fire baked bricks that you made at
Speaker 1: a much higher temperature, they would be much sturdier. So
Speaker 1: we're seeing here there's technological change. This technological change leads
Speaker 1: to either on one interpretation, you know, Huber as people
Speaker 1: being uh very haughty about what they can do with
Speaker 1: their their new ovens and kilns now out, or it
Speaker 1: leads to them saying, you know, we've got this new power,
Speaker 1: we could ascend to the heavens and take over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're like, how you touched on the sort of the
Speaker 1: violence of making the bricks, because they're they're kind of
Speaker 1: perpetrating an act of violence on the earth, remaking the
Speaker 1: earth into an artificial mountain. And in so many mythologies,
Speaker 1: I mean, the mountain is the mountains are where the
Speaker 1: gods live. The mountain is the thing that bridges Earth
Speaker 1: to the sky. Yeah. So eventually in this episode, we
Speaker 1: want to take a quick look at about the diversification
Speaker 1: of languages and where language speciation comes from. But before
Speaker 1: we get into that, I think we just want to
Speaker 1: talk about the myth itself because it's such an interesting story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna kick off with the myth. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about art, and yeah, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: into some engineering and linguistics. But first the myth and
Speaker 1: uh and and as is the case with the number
Speaker 1: of these Old Testament stories, and we went into this
Speaker 1: a little bit when we we talked about the Great
Speaker 1: Flood in a previous episode, like these are these are
Speaker 1: tales that existed before the the Old Testament was really thing? Like,
Speaker 1: these were tales that they were brought into this collection. Well,
Speaker 1: you can, you can definitely look at it that way.
Speaker 1: Another way to look at it is that, um, if
Speaker 1: the tales in Genesis didn't necessarily come from other stories
Speaker 1: that you'd find and say ancient Sumerian literature or something
Speaker 1: like that, you might say that they had a common
Speaker 1: ancestor you know that they they might not be direct
Speaker 1: descendants of one another, but might be cousins that come
Speaker 1: from more primeval stories. But yeah, it's hard to know exactly,
Speaker 1: but you can see parallels in in other ancient Sumerian
Speaker 1: mythology that are very interesting. And I want to get
Speaker 1: into it a little bit, but first I just wanted
Speaker 1: to take a peek at some of the translation notes,
Speaker 1: which was this is one of my favorite things to
Speaker 1: do about an Old Bible story is go look up
Speaker 1: a fairly literal translations, such as like the New American
Speaker 1: Standard version that's a trans English translation of the Bible that,
Speaker 1: more so than most versions, tries to follow the literal
Speaker 1: word for word progression of the text. Now, a lot
Speaker 1: of times this doesn't necessarily render the best reading um,
Speaker 1: but it is just more interesting to see what the
Speaker 1: original language looked like, and then also look at there
Speaker 1: there will be usually if there's like a if it's
Speaker 1: a good online resource, there will be like footnotes you
Speaker 1: can click that will tell you literally what the original
Speaker 1: word was. So, for example, everywhere the word language appears
Speaker 1: in this original story, it says the whole earth was
Speaker 1: of one language and of one speech. Literally, that's the
Speaker 1: whole earth was of one lip or had one lip.
Speaker 1: So I'm imagining everybody sharing a lip or sort of
Speaker 1: lip locking all the time when they're talking, and the
Speaker 1: the one speech was of one set of words or
Speaker 1: few words. And so when God speaks to God, God
Speaker 1: is speaking to some kind of other heavenly beings one
Speaker 1: would assume other gods in the earlier pantheon or angels.
Speaker 1: God says, let us go down there and confuse their
Speaker 1: lips so that they will not understand one another's lip.
Speaker 1: But there's also another ideological feature of this story, which
Speaker 1: is that it tries to explain the origin of the
Speaker 1: term Babel. So you've got this line in verse nine
Speaker 1: where it says, therefore is the name of it called
Speaker 1: babble because the Lord did their confound the language of
Speaker 1: all the earth, and thence did the Lord scatter them
Speaker 1: abroad upon the face of the earth. So he's talking
Speaker 1: about this place called Babel. Literally, this is probably referring
Speaker 1: to Babylon. That's their word for it. But also there's
Speaker 1: a joke in the name because the Hebrew word baalal
Speaker 1: means confused or confound, So it's trying to say there's
Speaker 1: some kind of cognate in the word they use for
Speaker 1: the place Babylon and the word for confused. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why they call that place Babylon. It's because it's confused.
Speaker 1: Old Testament jokes. You know why they call it Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1: It's the pit. Yeah, there you go. It's the same spirit.
Speaker 1: Or here's another one, Joe, which us state is um
Speaker 1: is high in the middle and around on both ends.
Speaker 1: I have no idea. Oh hioh, there you go. Uh man.
Speaker 1: But back to ancient Babylon. Oh you got me there,
Speaker 1: Robert I am slain, I die Horatio. So back to
Speaker 1: the original myth. So we've got this Genesis version. But
Speaker 1: there are also other versions of the same story. For example,
Speaker 1: one appears in the Book of Jubilees, which is another
Speaker 1: ancient Jewish text that is sort of a retelling of
Speaker 1: a lot of the other Genesis stories. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a retelling of the history of the Jewish people and
Speaker 1: their relationship with God, and it's sort of like dictated
Speaker 1: by angels, and they give just a few extra details
Speaker 1: in the story. For example, in the Jubilees version, it says,
Speaker 1: and they began to build, and in the fourth week
Speaker 1: they made brick with fire, and the bricks served them
Speaker 1: for stone, and the clay with which they cemented them
Speaker 1: together was asphalt, which cometh out of the sea and
Speaker 1: out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinnar.
Speaker 1: So that's given us a little more detail about like
Speaker 1: the technological origins of their instruction methods. More about the
Speaker 1: construction methods. They specified the size of the tower and
Speaker 1: they built it forty and three years. Where they're building
Speaker 1: its breadth was two hundred and three bricks, and the
Speaker 1: height of a brick was the third of one. It's
Speaker 1: height amounted to five thousand, four hundred and thirty three
Speaker 1: cubits and two palms, and the extent of one of
Speaker 1: the walls was thirteen states and of the other thirty states.
Speaker 1: So if Google's unit conversion program of length of the
Speaker 1: length of a cubit is right, this means that the
Speaker 1: tower would have been about eight thousand, one fifty ft tall.
Speaker 1: And to put that in in in terms of modern buildings,
Speaker 1: the Burge Khalifa in the United are Arab Emirates is
Speaker 1: two thousand, seven hundred seventeen feet tall. So this would
Speaker 1: have dwarfed the tallest building that has has ever existed,
Speaker 1: the stall structure that's ever existed, by a substantial degree. Now,
Speaker 1: I wonder how this compares to the alternate designs for
Speaker 1: the Colossus of Chane Cargo we talked about in our
Speaker 1: in our Chicago World's Fair episode. Remember the other proposed
Speaker 1: structures before they had the ferris wheel, they were going
Speaker 1: to be thousands and thousands of feet tall, many Birch
Speaker 1: Khalifa's Yes, I don't know, it would be interesting to
Speaker 1: go back super fans can listen and tell us what
Speaker 1: we said. Uh. And then also we get another detail
Speaker 1: in the Jubilees version about how God knocked the tower
Speaker 1: down in the end, so he didn't just scatter the people,
Speaker 1: but he crushed the tower. So it says, the Lord
Speaker 1: send a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it
Speaker 1: upon the earth, and behold it was between as Sure
Speaker 1: and Babylon in the land of Shannar, and they called
Speaker 1: its name Overthrow. So it looks like we get another
Speaker 1: ideological legend there. There's some place that translates roughly to
Speaker 1: overthrow apparently, and saying you know why we call it
Speaker 1: overthrow because it's where God knocked down the tower. It
Speaker 1: does put a totally different spin on the myth. Like
Speaker 1: on one level, he just he's like, what do I
Speaker 1: have to do to knock down this tower? I just
Speaker 1: have to confuse their languages, snap of the fingers. It's done.
Speaker 1: It takes care of itself. But in this version he
Speaker 1: does that, but he's like, a heck, I'll not get
Speaker 1: down to why I'm a giant toddler. Uh. So there
Speaker 1: are also some interesting parallels here where you've got the
Speaker 1: Sumerian got Inky, and one of his roles that has
Speaker 1: been discovered in in recent decades is as the confuser
Speaker 1: of languages in Sumerian mythology. So I want to refer
Speaker 1: to a paper I came across by Samuel Noah Kramer,
Speaker 1: who is a twentieth century Sumerian history expert, and he
Speaker 1: wrote this paper called the Babble of Tongues a Sumerian
Speaker 1: Version in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Now
Speaker 1: this was from night so this is not a new discovery, um,
Speaker 1: but but we do find that it when it comes
Speaker 1: to studying the Tower of Babble, new research is is
Speaker 1: a very relative term. There's not a lot of like
Speaker 1: cutting edge study of this. This. There was some new
Speaker 1: stuff at the time this came out, though, because he
Speaker 1: had just recently gotten access to some new cune of
Speaker 1: form tablets have filled in the gaps in a previously
Speaker 1: known legend that that that had had incomplete sections because
Speaker 1: of the deterioration of our sources. So he notes that
Speaker 1: the biblical scholar E. A. Spicer had demonstrated in his
Speaker 1: Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis that the Tower of Babel
Speaker 1: narrative likely had a cune of form source, so another
Speaker 1: Mesopotamian source going back to this other ancient Mesopotamian literature,
Speaker 1: and Kramer was trying to bolster this view given recent
Speaker 1: discoveries of his day of clay fragments filling in this
Speaker 1: incomplete fragment from a Sumerian epic tale known as in
Speaker 1: mer Car and the Lord of Arrata, and the details
Speaker 1: of the narrative aren't especially important. Basically, it's about a
Speaker 1: conflict between two rulers or kings. One is in mere
Speaker 1: Car and he wants to get the king of Rata
Speaker 1: to submit to him and pay tribute of gold and gems.
Speaker 1: And there's one section known as the Golden Age passage,
Speaker 1: and this is where an envoy from Rata is asked
Speaker 1: to deliver this sort of formalized statement. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like a hymn or a poem to his master. And
Speaker 1: this is Kramer's translation of the part that was already
Speaker 1: known when before these new tablet pieces were discovered. It
Speaker 1: goes like this, Once upon a time, there was no snake,
Speaker 1: there was no scorpion, there was no hyena, there was
Speaker 1: no lion, there was no wild dog, no wolf. There
Speaker 1: was no fear, no terror. Man had no rival in
Speaker 1: those days. The lands of Saber and Hamazi, harmony tongued summer,
Speaker 1: the great land of the decrees of prince ship Uri,
Speaker 1: the land having all that is appropriate, the landmark to
Speaker 1: resting in security, the whole universe, the people in unison,
Speaker 1: to in Leal, and that's a Sumerian chief god to
Speaker 1: in Leal. In one tongue spoke then Adah, the Lord Adah,
Speaker 1: the Prince Adah, the king. In Key, Adah the Lord Adah,
Speaker 1: the Prince, Adah, the king, and repeats it again, a
Speaker 1: Da the Lord ada the Prince, a Da the King.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of repetition in these um So that's
Speaker 1: what they had already. But then there was this new
Speaker 1: discovery that added in some new fragments. It went on
Speaker 1: to say, in Key, which is another Sumerian guard, the
Speaker 1: Lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy, the Lord of Wisdom,
Speaker 1: who understands the land, the leader of the gods endowed
Speaker 1: with wisdom, the Lord of airy. Do change the speech
Speaker 1: in their mouths, brought contention into it, into the speech
Speaker 1: of man that until then had been one. So here's
Speaker 1: another version of the story. Of the confusion of tongues. Now,
Speaker 1: this one lacks a lot of detail. It doesn't say
Speaker 1: that humans were building a tower. It doesn't really give
Speaker 1: a rationale for in Key changing the languages that people spoke.
Speaker 1: It just says that people offered praise to in Leal
Speaker 1: in one tongue. They all spoke the same language, and
Speaker 1: then at some point this great figure in Key brought
Speaker 1: contention into their languages and split the languages into different fragment. Now,
Speaker 1: Kramer notes a difference from the Biblical account. Of course,
Speaker 1: in the Biblical story, the gods confused the speech of
Speaker 1: humankind because humankind is threatening to encroach into the heavens,
Speaker 1: which is the domain of the gods, and it's a
Speaker 1: conflict between between God and the humans that leads to
Speaker 1: the confusion of tongues. But in the Sumerian version, as
Speaker 1: I was saying, there's nothing apparent that the humans did
Speaker 1: to have their speech confused. So Cramer suggests that any
Speaker 1: Key confusing the tongues of humanity is a result of
Speaker 1: his rivalry with the other god of the Sumerian pantheon
Speaker 1: that's mentioned in the story the Big One in Leal,
Speaker 1: rather than of a rivalry with humans. This is interesting
Speaker 1: because it makes me think about the differences very broadly
Speaker 1: between worshiping a pantheon of gods or a single god,
Speaker 1: between being polytheistic and monotheistic. So if you just have
Speaker 1: one god, well, well, let me take it from this direction.
Speaker 1: If you have multiple gods, and it's possible that these
Speaker 1: gods don't get along, and then you're just left with
Speaker 1: the residual um chaos of their turmoil. In the same way,
Speaker 1: might be an innocent bystanding yeah, yeah, in a way
Speaker 1: that I think relates to modern experience, but even ancient experience,
Speaker 1: where you know, what are you doing? You're just a
Speaker 1: normal person trying to live your life. You're a farmer,
Speaker 1: you're a craftsman, your podcast or whatever you are. And
Speaker 1: the conflicts among the greats, among the kings, the governments
Speaker 1: of the nations themselves, the way no input do you
Speaker 1: have no input? But then you still have to suffer
Speaker 1: what the wages of these conflicts. But it's not a
Speaker 1: judgment thing, it's just that's how life works. But if
Speaker 1: it's a single god, then then who else is there?
Speaker 1: Like every every catastrophic event, every minor misfortune or blessing
Speaker 1: is or or you know, positive effect is a is
Speaker 1: a blessing or a curse. It's all a direct communication
Speaker 1: with the divine being. Yeah, they're they're definitely shades of that,
Speaker 1: I think in the division between monotheism and polytheism. But
Speaker 1: one thing we see also in a lot of these
Speaker 1: ancient accounts is that the line between monotheism and polytheism
Speaker 1: is not quite such a stark division as one would expect.
Speaker 1: I think that there are shades of monotheism and shades
Speaker 1: of polytheism. Like in this ancient context, you may have
Speaker 1: seen a lot of cases where there is sort of
Speaker 1: a concept of a greater pantheon of God's but maybe
Speaker 1: one God is strongly favored or something, uh or or
Speaker 1: there is an idea that there are other heavenly beings,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't call them God quite in the same way,
Speaker 1: like you've got a chief God who's the real God,
Speaker 1: but then there are also these other powers in heaven
Speaker 1: that aren't quite human. Yeah, you have these different angelic
Speaker 1: forces or or on the opposite end, demonic forces, and
Speaker 1: then you have these intermediaries as well, such as uh,
Speaker 1: you know, saints or in in other modes of belief,
Speaker 1: ancestors that can serve as as go betweens for you
Speaker 1: and the hereafter. Yeah. So Cramer in nineteen in his
Speaker 1: paper actually has a really interesting speculation in a footnote
Speaker 1: about the difference in the motivation for the confusion of
Speaker 1: tongues between the Sumerian epic and the Biblical account. And
Speaker 1: it sort of goes along with what you were saying, Robert.
Speaker 1: He says, quote, the biblical storyteller was no doubt inspired
Speaker 1: to invent his moralistic explanation by the twofold aspect of
Speaker 1: the Babylonian ziggurat. And in just a minute we're going
Speaker 1: to get into the role that ziggurats may have played
Speaker 1: in inspiring this story. But basically, a zigarat is an
Speaker 1: ancient Mesopotamian structure, a big step pyramid with a flat top,
Speaker 1: and so he says that this may have been an explanation.
Speaker 1: He continues, Uh, the one aspect is the high rise,
Speaker 1: sky reaching appearance of the structure in its prime that
Speaker 1: could be interpreted as a threat to the gods in
Speaker 1: their power. And the other thing, it's melancholy and pathetic
Speaker 1: appearance when in a state of disrepair and collapse, which
Speaker 1: was not infrequent that could be viewed as a punishment
Speaker 1: by the angered gods or Yahweh for man's overreaching ambition.
Speaker 1: The Mesopotamian, on the other hand, far from viewing the
Speaker 1: Ziggarat as an outgrowth of man's rivalry with an antagonism
Speaker 1: to the gods, actually deemed it to be a bond
Speaker 1: between heaven and earth, man and God, and attributed its
Speaker 1: ruin and decay to the inscrutable will of the gods
Speaker 1: and their incontestable decisions. And so the different views of
Speaker 1: these cultures upon seeing, for example, a ruined ziggurat would
Speaker 1: be based on their different idea of what the ziggurat
Speaker 1: was for. If if you're, say a monotheistic Yahwist, and
Speaker 1: you see a ruined Ziggarat, you might not know that
Speaker 1: this is for the people who built it, that it's
Speaker 1: for some kind of positive connection they believe they have
Speaker 1: with the gods. Yeah, I mean, of course, we can
Speaker 1: think a plenty of examples of that, right where if
Speaker 1: you're you have someone outside of a religion looking in,
Speaker 1: and especially if they have their own religious viewpoints that
Speaker 1: they're using to make the judgment, you can vastly misinterpret
Speaker 1: what something's for, Like people saying oh, look at the
Speaker 1: Look at those guys worshiping that Buddha or or look
Speaker 1: at that mighty church that they've built, um, you know,
Speaker 1: as a tribute to themselves. Like what's the difference between
Speaker 1: you know, the humorists of a cathedral and the huborists
Speaker 1: of this tower. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, like it.
Speaker 1: It's definitely difficult to see the significance of religious artifacts
Speaker 1: from the outside if you don't make an attempt to
Speaker 1: understand what they mean. The practitioners to the Mesopotamians, these
Speaker 1: zigarattes wouldn't have been an assault on heaven. They were.
Speaker 1: They were an attempt to connect and bond with and
Speaker 1: appease the heavens. But I guess it's time to look
Speaker 1: at the zigarattes themselves, right, So I would say, I
Speaker 1: don't want to you to come away from this episode
Speaker 1: with the impression that, oh, the Tower of Babel was
Speaker 1: a zigaratte and they just saw zigarattes and that's where
Speaker 1: the story came from, because I'm not so certain, but
Speaker 1: it has been widely speculated that the Tower of Babel
Speaker 1: story could have been inspired by sites of ziggarattes, and
Speaker 1: that may be true to some extent. I don't know
Speaker 1: what you think about this, Robert Well, I guess some
Speaker 1: of two minds on this. Like if I were to definitely, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, get behind an idea of there being a
Speaker 1: literal tower that inspired the tails, then I would probably
Speaker 1: line up with a zigaratte explanation. But we kind of
Speaker 1: get into that area we've gotten to in uh in
Speaker 1: the discussion of fossils and dinosaurs and dragons, Right, did
Speaker 1: people dream up dragons because they saw a triceratops fossil
Speaker 1: or Griffin's Yeah, And we we argued in that episode
Speaker 1: of the Stuff About Your Mind that, well, you can't
Speaker 1: just say that nobody had creative energy in the old days,
Speaker 1: that they weren't capable of creating myths out of other
Speaker 1: things than just very literal sights and sounds. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I don't think it is wrong to try to look
Speaker 1: for things that could have literally inspired the creation of
Speaker 1: ancient of tropes and ancient literatures, such as monsters or
Speaker 1: structures or things like that. It's not that I think
Speaker 1: that is a worthless project, because in many cases it
Speaker 1: may be that these things inspired people. But I just
Speaker 1: I think we should never forget the role of creative
Speaker 1: imagination in creating literature. Yeah, I mean there were towers around,
Speaker 1: There were zigaratts around, and you can imagine someone creating
Speaker 1: the story of out some people who build a tower,
Speaker 1: and you don't actually need it that to be a
Speaker 1: literal place in a literal tower for that kind of
Speaker 1: story to come together. Yeah. But anyway, so let's look
Speaker 1: at the zigarattes. So you've probably seen pictures of zigarettes before.
Speaker 1: They're these huge, ancient Near Eastern stepped pyramids with a
Speaker 1: flat top. So one thing you can do if you
Speaker 1: haven't actually seen one is google one. But let's say
Speaker 1: you can't google one picture the pyramids. Surely you've seen
Speaker 1: that of ancient Egypt. And then take the top, the
Speaker 1: pointy top off, so they've got a flat top, and
Speaker 1: then uh, and then give them a couple of stairways
Speaker 1: that are going up to the top. And some things
Speaker 1: would probably originally have been on the top. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of the replicas or ruins that exist today
Speaker 1: don't have much on the top, but back then, and
Speaker 1: there may have been a temple or a shrine to
Speaker 1: a god such as mar Duke and uh, it may
Speaker 1: have also been thought of as the dwelling place of
Speaker 1: the God at the top of the zigaratte, like the
Speaker 1: God comes down and sleeps on top of the zigaratte
Speaker 1: or something like that. Yeah, I think it's very helpful
Speaker 1: to again think of the ziggurat in terms of a
Speaker 1: holy mountain. It is an artificial holy mountain. And so
Speaker 1: since we know we have these things in the ancient
Speaker 1: Near Eastern context, plenty of people have positive that the
Speaker 1: story of the Tower of Babel may have been inspired
Speaker 1: by the sight of a zigarat or the ruins of
Speaker 1: a zigarat. And there's one candidate in particular that often
Speaker 1: comes up right. Yes, the specific candidate here is the
Speaker 1: Babylonian Tower temple north of the Marduk Temple, which in
Speaker 1: Babylonian was called bab Elu or Gate of God. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the zigarat itself was known as the etim an
Speaker 1: Key or the house of the foundation platform of Heaven
Speaker 1: and the underworld. I've also seen it translated as house
Speaker 1: of the foundation platform of Heaven and Earth. And one
Speaker 1: thing to keep in mind about ancient ziggurats versus the
Speaker 1: existing ruins and replicas is uh is that the ancient
Speaker 1: versions were probably more beautiful like the generally more decorated,
Speaker 1: for example, with this one particular place that at him
Speaker 1: and an key. When Nebuchadnezzar the King came through and
Speaker 1: restored this zigaratte, he covered the top with blue glazed
Speaker 1: bricks and other types of decorations, some gold and things
Speaker 1: like that. And the image of the zigaratte I have
Speaker 1: in my mind is it's the modern version, right. It's
Speaker 1: what either the replicas you would see in Iraq or
Speaker 1: the actual ruins of some previous zigarattes that still exist
Speaker 1: to some extent. Generally, when you think about them, they're
Speaker 1: the exact same color as the sand all around them,
Speaker 1: and sort of the same color as the sky, and
Speaker 1: this tends to have a kind of brutal effect on
Speaker 1: the eye, at least to me. I don't know how
Speaker 1: you feel about this, Robert, but it's like, this massive, dense,
Speaker 1: colorless edifice is almost like it was specifically programmed to
Speaker 1: make you odd, but not in a good way, to
Speaker 1: fill you with this kind of crushing dread. It's stifling
Speaker 1: to the mind, and I think that's just because of
Speaker 1: the lack of color. I don't know if you feel
Speaker 1: the same way, um, but when I see recreations of
Speaker 1: the same structures with color and decoration added. It doesn't
Speaker 1: have that effect on me at all. It's more like
Speaker 1: seeing these other types of ancient buildings that would be
Speaker 1: fascinating and beautiful. Yeah, I mean I can get that.
Speaker 1: It's it's kind of like when you look at ancient
Speaker 1: statues and all you have or the like the pale
Speaker 1: marble and the featureless faces and the blank eyes, and
Speaker 1: it gives you the stoic sense of of hauntedness. But
Speaker 1: of course in many cases statues were painted. They were
Speaker 1: you know that they had color, they had pigments, they
Speaker 1: had eyes, and it would have been a totally different
Speaker 1: experience to the contemporary viewer of such a work. When
Speaker 1: you see these ancient Assyrian statues, I think, I think
Speaker 1: about seeing these in New York, the ancient Assyrian statues
Speaker 1: that have carvings. They're not just statues, but they're like
Speaker 1: walls with relief carvings to have all these people in them,
Speaker 1: like these men with the huge braided beer. And when
Speaker 1: I often think about those statues, they seem very scary
Speaker 1: and ghostly to me because they don't have paint on
Speaker 1: them anymore, or some versions don't, and so the eyes
Speaker 1: are just blank. They have these eyes that you can
Speaker 1: see the rounded edges of them, but they don't have
Speaker 1: pupils or any colors in them. So it just looks
Speaker 1: like these gray ghostmen marching towards you. But when you
Speaker 1: see the painted versions or the restored painted versions, of
Speaker 1: course the eyes have eye colors in them. Was like
Speaker 1: whites of the eyes and pupils, and it looks very different.
Speaker 1: It looks just more like art, you know of people.
Speaker 1: In the Tower of Babel Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts A. R. George,
Speaker 1: the author takes an exhaustive and I mean exhaustive look
Speaker 1: at modern architectural interpretations for a Babylonian tower. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I believe this article is actually a review of a
Speaker 1: book on the subject, right yeah, um, so, so what
Speaker 1: what does he come up with? He's talking about the
Speaker 1: idea that the Tower of Babel would have been inspired
Speaker 1: by this Babylonian zigarat design or temple design. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he he looked. One of the sources of this paper
Speaker 1: discusses is the the Napapulas a cylinder and this was
Speaker 1: found in Iraq in nine and it was named for
Speaker 1: the seventh century BC, founder of the Neo Babylonian Empire,
Speaker 1: who's exploits it details and it provides some details concerning
Speaker 1: uh Napopolass completion of Assyrian king Charadin. He would have
Speaker 1: been six eighty through six sixty nine BC. Of his
Speaker 1: earlier Zigarat project. This was a baked brick tower base
Speaker 1: of ninety one square. This matches up with the timeline
Speaker 1: modeled on an even older structure of the same base area.
Speaker 1: Now that's something I want to get into in just
Speaker 1: a minute. But there you see the idea of structures
Speaker 1: being built on top of one another in ancient Mesopotamia.
Speaker 1: But it also mentions here so this is a ached
Speaker 1: brick tower, which is part of the story of the
Speaker 1: Tower of Babel is saying, hey, none of those sun
Speaker 1: baked bricks anymore. Now, now we're firing these things to
Speaker 1: make them really strong. Yeah. So this is one example
Speaker 1: of the kind of buildings that that that historians and
Speaker 1: archaeologists and sort of myth dissectors will will take a
Speaker 1: look at. And like I said earlier, you get into
Speaker 1: the problem though, where you're you're taking the myth and
Speaker 1: you're kind of chasing around history with the myth like
Speaker 1: myth on a stick approach, which is a fascinating exercise
Speaker 1: and can certainly be illuminating, but you're still, in a
Speaker 1: sense kind of putting the cart before the horse, right. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's what we were saying earlier. It's not
Speaker 1: that I think it's a bad project to try to
Speaker 1: look for physical inspirations for stories from history and mythology.
Speaker 1: It's just that always don't forget we could have plenty
Speaker 1: of creative imagination in here. It's not like the author
Speaker 1: had to see something literally that they went and wrote
Speaker 1: down and now we have to figure out what the
Speaker 1: thing they saw was. And in terms of just large
Speaker 1: building structures, large towers that we've been making these for
Speaker 1: some time. You can you can look at Egypt's various
Speaker 1: pyramids from the third millennium b C, of which there
Speaker 1: are many, including both the ones that immediately pop into
Speaker 1: your mind, and indeed there still stands the Zigarat of
Speaker 1: or from BC, uh Sardinia's Uh Narugus sant Antinnie this
Speaker 1: was from six b C. And the Ziggurat of dr
Speaker 1: coagal Zoo from the fourteenth century BC. And these are
Speaker 1: just a few to mention. So um I don't want
Speaker 1: to make it sound like this was an age where
Speaker 1: there was only ever one tower, right that that and
Speaker 1: and these are just the large structures that survived to
Speaker 1: us today. Certainly you could get the idea of a tower,
Speaker 1: and that can inspire a myth about a tower based
Speaker 1: on a much smaller construction. Yeah. Now I want to
Speaker 1: look at another aspect of ancient Near Eastern architecture, or
Speaker 1: at least ancient Near Eastern civic design that is relevant.
Speaker 1: And though I don't want to say that this is
Speaker 1: necessarily what inspired the story, I just think it's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. So imagine you're the child of a trader
Speaker 1: and you visit an ancient Mesopotamian city with your parents,
Speaker 1: and the walls or these mud brick structures, but they're
Speaker 1: they're huge, They're bigger than anything you normally see. It's
Speaker 1: also powerful. It's rather overwhelming. And then you leave with
Speaker 1: your your parents and go trade in many other places,
Speaker 1: and you don't come back for many years. But then
Speaker 1: you revisit the same city again when you're very old,
Speaker 1: you might you just might notice something odd. Is the
Speaker 1: city higher up off the surrounding desert than it was
Speaker 1: when you visited all those years ago, or is that
Speaker 1: just your imagination? Not necessarily so. Ancient Mesopotamian architecture is
Speaker 1: characterized by the slow accumulation of what's known as tells
Speaker 1: like t e l or t e l l, meaning
Speaker 1: hills or mounds and uh. An ancient Mesopotamian city had
Speaker 1: these buildings like we were talking about, made out of
Speaker 1: sun bay to mud bricks, which were useful, but they
Speaker 1: were prone to fairly rapid deterioration in the elements. And
Speaker 1: as these structures deteriorated over time, they were replaced, but
Speaker 1: not necessarily removed, And so the trampled remains of old
Speaker 1: and demolished mud brick structures became the foundation for new structures.
Speaker 1: So as we cycled through generations of human architecture in
Speaker 1: these cities, the ground level of the city rose up.
Speaker 1: So in a sense, not only were human buildings growing
Speaker 1: taller with the ages of Messopotamian city life, but the
Speaker 1: city itself was rising up out of the earth. And
Speaker 1: I just wonder would an ancient writer have been able
Speaker 1: to notice such a thing. I'm not saying they would,
Speaker 1: because it's definitely a slow process that takes place over
Speaker 1: hundreds or thousands of years. Then again, if you come
Speaker 1: upon a city in the desert where everything else is
Speaker 1: pretty flat around, and suddenly just the city, part of
Speaker 1: the city is on this mound risen up out of
Speaker 1: the desert, I don't know. That's interesting. Yeah, And of
Speaker 1: course it's very poetic as well. It's the idea of
Speaker 1: I mean, civilization quite literally physically rising up. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I would like to emphasize that in the Biblical account,
Speaker 1: it doesn't actually call the Tower of Babel the Tower
Speaker 1: of Babel. That phrases our modern way of describing the story.
Speaker 1: The phrase in the original story is the city and
Speaker 1: the tower. Yes, all right, we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're gonna take a look
Speaker 1: at a few different attempts to in in varying ways
Speaker 1: make the tower real. Alright, we're back, Robert. There are
Speaker 1: some awesome paintings of the Tower of Babel story. I
Speaker 1: I love paintings of Biblical stories in general. That's one
Speaker 1: of my favorite genres of ancient paintings, especially the ones
Speaker 1: that are paintings of Old Testament stories. But but the
Speaker 1: Tower of Babel paintings are great, and some of the
Speaker 1: best ones have got to be the ones by Peter Brogel, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: Peter Broigel the Elder in particular, sixteenth century Flemish artist,
Speaker 1: and he actually created three different interpretations of the tower.
Speaker 1: Two survived, both oil paintings on wood. And then there's
Speaker 1: a lost painting that was on ivory. Oh I'd like
Speaker 1: to see that, well, everyone would, but it's lost, Joe.
Speaker 1: If you find it, let him let us know. Um
Speaker 1: So the elephants came and took it back. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: there's a justice in that. Uh So, So we're left
Speaker 1: with two interpretations. And I think I had one of
Speaker 1: these on my wall in college, Like these are famous
Speaker 1: works of art, and it's the type of art unlike
Speaker 1: some things I had on my wall in college. This
Speaker 1: is ax. I would put this on my wall today.
Speaker 1: It's that great a painting. Because you the two that
Speaker 1: survive also play off each other in unique ways as
Speaker 1: well discussed. So the first one is is often referred
Speaker 1: to as the Great Tower of Babel. And in this
Speaker 1: image we have this, uh this sort of half completed
Speaker 1: tower rising up out of the landscape. You've got the
Speaker 1: the ocean visible in the lower right hand. In the
Speaker 1: lower left hand there's a king surrounded by some workers.
Speaker 1: You see tiny ant like people scaling uh the edifice,
Speaker 1: working on it, and the whole thing is clearly inspired
Speaker 1: by Roman architecture. So instead of looking like a Zigarat
Speaker 1: out of ancient Babylon, it instead looks it reminds one
Speaker 1: of the Roman colosseum. Yeah. Yeah, it's like if the
Speaker 1: Roman colosseum, uh like mated with a Zigarat, you might
Speaker 1: get this result. I also love it's got this quality
Speaker 1: that I always really enjoy in paintings, in that it's
Speaker 1: I don't know what you call this. There are lots
Speaker 1: of lots of little details going on all around it.
Speaker 1: I'm I guess you might call this dizziness. But it's
Speaker 1: not just buzziness. It's something about the fact that there
Speaker 1: are all these little people doing their own thing far away. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean it works on two levels, right, because on
Speaker 1: one hand is will be z town and one hand
Speaker 1: is busy town, and it's just finding cool things going
Speaker 1: on and your imagination is just stoked by all these
Speaker 1: little details. But then on the other, of course, uh,
Speaker 1: the Flemish masters were were masters of their craft and
Speaker 1: and nothing was just thrown in you know, half slap
Speaker 1: in dilly dally like there's a there's a symbolism it played,
Speaker 1: there's a purpose at play in play and uh, and
Speaker 1: individuals like Brugo, we're attempting to convey certain ideas and messages,
Speaker 1: at least to the informed viewers of the piece. Now,
Speaker 1: the original story in the Bible does not tell you
Speaker 1: that there's any particular king overseeing the construction of the tower.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that later readers didn't sort of
Speaker 1: supplement that information and come up with a king to
Speaker 1: be the guy in charge of this evil tower enterprise. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Indeed we have a king in the lower left hand corner,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned, and uh, and many interpret this is
Speaker 1: being King Nimrod. Yeah, King Nimrod, who the Bible says
Speaker 1: was a mighty hunter. But or yah, yeah, nim Rob
Speaker 1: the hunter. And so that's that's that's the potential read
Speaker 1: on on this this painting. Now I'm going to dive
Speaker 1: in a little deeper on this painting. The other the
Speaker 1: other painting is the the Little Tower of Babel and
Speaker 1: it's called that because it's a smaller work. And uh,
Speaker 1: but let's start with this one, and I will include
Speaker 1: images of both these paintings and the landing pig for
Speaker 1: this episode stuff to blow your Mind dot com in
Speaker 1: case you want to compare and look yourself. So I
Speaker 1: was looking at a work by author s A Man's
Speaker 1: Bach titled Peter Brugle's Tower of Babel. And as the
Speaker 1: author points out, the the artist here is not really
Speaker 1: telling the story of the Tower of Babel. He's not
Speaker 1: He's not showing like in terms of action. It's just
Speaker 1: people working on the tower and a king talking to
Speaker 1: some people that you don't see language splinters. You don't
Speaker 1: see a tower falling down. You don't see God coming
Speaker 1: down with his holy troops to dish out some uh
Speaker 1: some dialect. I don't even see well baked mud bricks
Speaker 1: and sly for mortar. And it's again not completely clear
Speaker 1: that it's it's Nimrod now. But prior to to Brugle
Speaker 1: you had people like Flavius Josephus wrote about Nimrod in
Speaker 1: Antiquities of the Jews. This was first century. See, there's
Speaker 1: a whole story about Nimrod building this tower as vengeance
Speaker 1: over the Great flood, like he wanted to get back
Speaker 1: at God. Yeah, it's like God just wrecked all this havoc.
Speaker 1: So it's like, all right, I'm coming for you God,
Speaker 1: I'm building the tower. Now wait, was it just like
Speaker 1: was it like spite against God? Or was it like
Speaker 1: he was literally coming for him to wage war against him.
Speaker 1: I took him to mean spite. But now, but I
Speaker 1: really like the idea of him coming after him. And
Speaker 1: that's pretty That's that's some action hero Like, uh, what
Speaker 1: am I thinking of? That's like Bruce Willis in uh
Speaker 1: in die Hard kind of another tower story, building a
Speaker 1: causeway to the heavens. Yeah, so, um, he builds this
Speaker 1: thing in Babylon and uh in the original And Brugle
Speaker 1: may or may not have read the text. He might
Speaker 1: have taken this detail from other artistic interpretations of the tower,
Speaker 1: or it might it might not be a nod to
Speaker 1: Nimrod at all. So the author of the article Mansbach
Speaker 1: Here he cites Zigmat Wazbinski, who argues that Brugal deviates
Speaker 1: from past traditions and shows the tower as rounded, reflecting
Speaker 1: on modern urban design trends. So they're not building the tower, perhaps,
Speaker 1: but rebuilding it in the form of a Babylon of
Speaker 1: the West or a Roman Babylon and in this case,
Speaker 1: he argues, the king that we're seeing is not Nimrod
Speaker 1: but Alexander the Great, and this is it's an interesting
Speaker 1: argument because it does get into the idea of like,
Speaker 1: it's not just an illustration that he's doing, He's creating
Speaker 1: a work of art. It is making some contemporary points
Speaker 1: utilizing the symbology of an old story. Yeah, I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought so much about the idea of the tower being round.
Speaker 1: Now again, in the original story doesn't say what the
Speaker 1: shaping tower is in the Genesis account an other uh,
Speaker 1: in other later mythological adaptations, it might. But definitely if
Speaker 1: you see it in medieval art, like I've seen an
Speaker 1: ancient uh not ancient, a medieval painting of the Tower
Speaker 1: of Babble where it's just a tall rectangle, looks like
Speaker 1: a church church bell tower. Yeah, now, Man's bach. He
Speaker 1: thinks that this this reading is a bit of an overread, uh,
Speaker 1: the idea that this is Alexander the Grade and it's
Speaker 1: really the rebuilding of Babble and Babble of the West.
Speaker 1: But he does think the Brugal was still clear certainly
Speaker 1: imparting a different meaning to humanists and progressives of the time.
Speaker 1: To learned viewers, so that the king might not be
Speaker 1: Nimrod or Alexander, but contemporary ruler Philip the Second of Spain, Yeah,
Speaker 1: who had an ill reputation with his Flemish subjects. So
Speaker 1: Spanish domination was pretty harsh at the time, especially on
Speaker 1: Flemish liberal Catholics and Protestants. And Philip the Second, enhanced
Speaker 1: of the powers of the Inquisition in fifty six, who
Speaker 1: waged a campaign of suppression against Antwerp's Calvinists, and Philip
Speaker 1: the Second, on top of this spoke neither French nor Dutch,
Speaker 1: a further deepening the divide. So there's this disagreement, there's
Speaker 1: this clash of cultures, and it's uh it's situated by
Speaker 1: the linguistic differences in play. Interesting. So we've looked at
Speaker 1: the Great Tower of Bebel by uh by Burgal here,
Speaker 1: but there's another version that you mentioned earlier, this lesser's Tower,
Speaker 1: the Little Tower of Bebel, and I've got a little
Speaker 1: image of it here, yes, in our in our outline.
Speaker 1: This is different, right, It's not just a smaller version
Speaker 1: of the same painting. It's fundamentally different. It's got stuff missing,
Speaker 1: like where's the king. Yeah, where's the sprawling city and
Speaker 1: the crazy thing too. You can glance at it and
Speaker 1: both just look like incomplete towers. But the second tower
Speaker 1: is about two thirds complete. Perhaps, Yeah, it's a lot
Speaker 1: more along the way. You see fewer people in it,
Speaker 1: and it's more close to done. Yeah, And there's a
Speaker 1: there's a religious procession winding its way upward, cheaper grazing
Speaker 1: in the distance. Uh. In fact, they're grazing in areas
Speaker 1: previously devoted in the former painting to utility buildings. So
Speaker 1: arguably what we see here is a utopian vision of
Speaker 1: what is possible for humanity when it is free from tyranny. Again,
Speaker 1: the king has gone. There's no king in this painting.
Speaker 1: Oh man, that that would mean the Tower of Babel
Speaker 1: would be a very odd selection of story to predict
Speaker 1: a genuine utopian vision. Well, but if you're a humanist, uh,
Speaker 1: I mean not so like reappropriating the story exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there is a hopefulness to this painting, the works
Speaker 1: of humanity in a state of grace, about to transcend
Speaker 1: the limits of of not only what we've accomplished before,
Speaker 1: but the limits of the frame, the limits of the
Speaker 1: the actual canvas that or the you know, or the
Speaker 1: wood that he's working on here um the limits of
Speaker 1: the artist's vision, even like this is a tower of
Speaker 1: babble that may be completed. I you know, kings and
Speaker 1: bureaucracy and all the than the negative aspects of the world.
Speaker 1: To stay out of the affair Men's box, says this quote.
Speaker 1: In some the Flemish painter has produced in this panel
Speaker 1: a suggestive image of an ideal state, a symbolic communal
Speaker 1: hive rising heavenward from a bucolic real landscape and bustling port.
Speaker 1: And he has shown us the greatness and power of
Speaker 1: human productivity made possible in the absence of a tyrant's
Speaker 1: hebristic will. The artist has given his contemporaries and us
Speaker 1: a glimpse of the humanists ideal city, a terrestrial utopia.
Speaker 1: In a word, Brugle has provided a visual metaphor of
Speaker 1: mankind in a state of grace. Babble has been remedied. Woa,
Speaker 1: So there you go. Uh again, that's just some added
Speaker 1: layers of interest to just to phenomenal paintings. So I
Speaker 1: want to look at one more great work of art
Speaker 1: to pick ing the Tower of Babel, and that is
Speaker 1: an engraving by Gustav Dora known as the Confusion of Tongues,
Speaker 1: and this was made in eighteen sixty five. I think,
Speaker 1: uh it was. I've seen it described as a woodcut
Speaker 1: or an engraving. Now, this is the the image that
Speaker 1: I think was referenced in the childhood illustration that I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier that I grew up with, in that this
Speaker 1: looks very much like just a spiral road up into
Speaker 1: the heavens um And interestingly enough, Dora apparently based his
Speaker 1: design on the minaret of the great Mosque It's Samara.
Speaker 1: This is a ninth century mosque located in Samara, Iraq,
Speaker 1: and it's still there to this day. Only the outer
Speaker 1: wall and the minaret remain as the as the mosque
Speaker 1: itself was destroyed in twelve seventy eight. Now I really
Speaker 1: love this. I love Doris a virgin. Dora always sort
Speaker 1: of does it for me. He's got these great illustrations
Speaker 1: of the divine comedy that are just burned. I want
Speaker 1: to talk about one of those in a second. But
Speaker 1: the man the tower here I said earlier, I think
Speaker 1: that none of the traditional artistic representations match what I
Speaker 1: had in my mind as a kid, meaning a tower
Speaker 1: that literally goes up to where you can't see it anymore,
Speaker 1: so straight into space. Yeah, that's where this one really Uh.
Speaker 1: Is different from the Brugle images because the Brugle towers
Speaker 1: are incomplete to see where they break off and their
Speaker 1: sky above them. This thing just vanishes into the heavens. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: here you can see the tower has it's further along.
Speaker 1: But this is the moment of confusion. It's not like
Speaker 1: the king lording over the construction saying, look, what good
Speaker 1: work we're doing here. It's surrounded by people who appear
Speaker 1: to be in anguish, and you can guess that they're
Speaker 1: in anguish because they've had their languages confused and they
Speaker 1: can't understand one another anymore. There's a man in the
Speaker 1: foreground reaching up to the heavens with like a plaintive
Speaker 1: kind of posture, like why would you do this to me? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of going stout there, what's happening? Uh? And
Speaker 1: and of course it has that great black and white
Speaker 1: pathos that you see in Doria's work. Um. One of
Speaker 1: my favorite illustrations of his is from his illustration of
Speaker 1: the Divine Comedy and the scene in Kanto seven, when
Speaker 1: Dante and Virgil are passing by the demon Plutus, who's
Speaker 1: also the you know, Greco Roman god of wealth. Uh,
Speaker 1: but he's uttering the string of nonsense words. Plutus is saying,
Speaker 1: Pope Satan, Pope Satan Aleppe, which is, at least in
Speaker 1: the medieval Italian of the story, it's nonsense. The Dante's
Speaker 1: Pilgrim doesn't understand what he's saying, but Virgil apparently does
Speaker 1: understand what Plutus is saying and interprets his words as
Speaker 1: a threat. And so it makes me recall this idea
Speaker 1: of the confused tongues maybe uh even confused tongues in
Speaker 1: the heavenly realms, Like would they speak a different language
Speaker 1: in hell than they would in heaven or on earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're get We're getting. We're almost getting into speaking in
Speaker 1: tongues territory here we have to, But we have to
Speaker 1: save at rabbit hole for another day. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to add one interesting modern interpretation that I came across
Speaker 1: on the Internet the other day, and it's by artist
Speaker 1: and animator Katsuhiro Otomo and collage artist Kosuke Kawamura. And
Speaker 1: this is a version of Broygel's interpretation of the tower.
Speaker 1: But it's got to cut away, so it's like those
Speaker 1: old books, you know, the picture books where they have
Speaker 1: a cross section of the Hanna War and they've got
Speaker 1: to cut away of the tower where you can see
Speaker 1: the inside. And I think it's great, this is worth
Speaker 1: looking up. Nice he's a sort of extrapolating on the
Speaker 1: design that Rugle's gone with with for the exterior, and yes,
Speaker 1: trying to imagine what it would look like inside. Yeah. Nice.
Speaker 1: And apparently one of these artists that I just mentioned
Speaker 1: had something to do with the Kira so nice. Alright, Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take another break, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at some I guess you could say
Speaker 1: thought experiments on the dimensions of the tower if it,
Speaker 1: if it were to exist. Yes, and then also at
Speaker 1: the confusion of language. All right, we're back. So, as
Speaker 1: we've discussed, the biblical account itself is vague, so you
Speaker 1: have to go to these other accounts, such as the
Speaker 1: Jubilee for even a starting point if you're gonna try
Speaker 1: and put numbers behind what the Tower of Babble consists off,
Speaker 1: and the Book of Jubilees does put numbers on it,
Speaker 1: and I wonder if it's the only one. Other accounts
Speaker 1: may put numbers on it as well, but I believe
Speaker 1: it's the prime one. Certainly. If if you're gonna go
Speaker 1: for an ancient text that has numbers, that's where you go.
Speaker 1: And then you start busting out down those cubits and
Speaker 1: making them into meters or feet, you know. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you want to mentions, crack open your jubilees. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing that the ways we mentioned that the biblical
Speaker 1: account does say that they're reaching unto heaven, and that's
Speaker 1: the thing that defies measurement, unless heaven is orbital access
Speaker 1: to angelic space aliens, in which case we're talking a
Speaker 1: space elevator, and we'd uh, we needed to reach a
Speaker 1: g stationary orbit of thirty five thousand, eight hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: or twenty two thousand, two hundred forty five miles. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's a big tower. That's a big tower. And even
Speaker 1: today we're waiting on carbon nano technology to catch up
Speaker 1: with the dream man. I've heard some criticisms of even
Speaker 1: that speculation. It's like even carbon carbon nanotubes are not
Speaker 1: going to save us. Some people think that building a
Speaker 1: space elevator is really just impossible from a material's perspective.
Speaker 1: So we we're still trying to figure out how to
Speaker 1: you know, violate the pieces of the earth, how how
Speaker 1: how much we can bake that stone to make it
Speaker 1: serve our purposes here maybe if it's well baked enough.
Speaker 1: So your earlier, earlier attempts to guess the tower's height
Speaker 1: are based in you know, older and Western view of history,
Speaker 1: one in which such wonders of the Bible were a
Speaker 1: matter of actual history and could conceivably be uncovered and found,
Speaker 1: and later attempts were more in the spirit of a
Speaker 1: thought experiment. So I'm not gonna go through all of them.
Speaker 1: But if you crush the cubits, depending on you know,
Speaker 1: where you're getting your figures from, your tower height figures
Speaker 1: might hit any of the following sixt that doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like it reaches the heavens. Well, it's still big, still big,
Speaker 1: one point three miles high, one point six, three point six,
Speaker 1: four point six, and then eight miles So at this
Speaker 1: point you're in territory with the birds. Yeah, but but
Speaker 1: you're uh, and the thing is that eight miles high,
Speaker 1: of course, you're still far short of that that space
Speaker 1: elevator that I mentioned earlier, and again the Burj Khalifa
Speaker 1: is uh two thousand, seven hundred and seventeen feet tall
Speaker 1: and that's roughly half a mile. So, as I said,
Speaker 1: all of this is just a matter of trying to
Speaker 1: translate old systems of measurement into new. However, here's another approach,
Speaker 1: and this this came to us by late material scientist
Speaker 1: and author J. E. Gordon. He wrote a book back
Speaker 1: in the day titled Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down? Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's it's a wonderful book. You can I was
Speaker 1: looking through it on on Google Books. It's out there
Speaker 1: in various formats. You can pick up a used coffee
Speaker 1: really easily. Uh. And he's he's cited in a Uh.
Speaker 1: He's often cited for his comments on the tower. His
Speaker 1: book is not primarily about the tower, but he touches
Speaker 1: on it a couple of times. Uh. He doesn't go
Speaker 1: all in, but he does share the basic idea. Quote. Now,
Speaker 1: brick and stone weigh about one and twenty pounds per
Speaker 1: cubic foot or two thousand uh kilograms per meter, and
Speaker 1: the crushing strength of these materials is generally rather better
Speaker 1: than six thousand pounds for square inch. Elementary arithmetic shows
Speaker 1: us that a tower with parallel walls could have been
Speaker 1: built to a height of seven thousand feet that's two
Speaker 1: kilometers one point three miles before the bricks at the
Speaker 1: bottom would be crushed. So that's higher than I would
Speaker 1: have expected. Yeah, but he also points out that, yeah,
Speaker 1: with a broad enough base, you could have built as
Speaker 1: high as Mount Everest. I mean, if you again, this
Speaker 1: is thought experiment, land, if you're just saying sky's a limit.
Speaker 1: I got this enormous plane, and somehow I can get
Speaker 1: the materials there. Sure you could build at least as
Speaker 1: high as Mount Everest at twenty nine thousand eight ft
Speaker 1: or five point four miles eight kilometers. So the pyramid approach, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just if you have enough space and enough slave labor
Speaker 1: to do it, he says. Quote. Thus, a simple tower,
Speaker 1: preferably with a broad base and tapered toward the top,
Speaker 1: could well have been built to such a height that
Speaker 1: the men of Shannar would have run short of oxygen
Speaker 1: and had difficulty in breathing before the brick walls were
Speaker 1: crushed beneath their own dead weight. So there you go,
Speaker 1: a little physics breakdown on the Tower of Battle and
Speaker 1: what would what was conceivably or even inconceivably possible. So Robert,
Speaker 1: you're telling me they really did build a tower to them? Uh,
Speaker 1: just just it's just an eye of what's possible, you
Speaker 1: know at that point, if you're gonna go ahead and
Speaker 1: build on those things. When I just impoured a mountain,
Speaker 1: you can just cut off a mountain at the base
Speaker 1: and drag it over to where you need it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you're not really it's not really flipping off God properly, right,
Speaker 1: because the whole thing is this is a mountain you built.
Speaker 1: So you're going with the angry Nimrod interpretation here where
Speaker 1: he's got spite because of the flood. I do like it.
Speaker 1: I kind of want this to be an Aeronowski film,
Speaker 1: you know, the angry Russell Crow Nimrod who's on a
Speaker 1: mission of vengeance against God at the top of the tower.
Speaker 1: Are you not threatened? Al Right? Well, at this point
Speaker 1: we should we should get into the language. Okay, so
Speaker 1: this is gonna be the last thing we discussed here today.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the the idea of the confusion of tongues
Speaker 1: is clearly central to the Babel myth, Right, it's that
Speaker 1: it's this ideological purpose. Like, like we discussed, it's an
Speaker 1: obvious fact of nature that people speak different languages in
Speaker 1: different places. Why is that? Why doesn't everybody speak the
Speaker 1: same language? It would be so much easier if everybody
Speaker 1: spoke the same language. So how come that in the case? Indeed,
Speaker 1: that's the basic question, like what why do we have
Speaker 1: all these languages? To begin with? Uh, let's let's try
Speaker 1: and sort of answer that question, the same question that's
Speaker 1: being asked and answered and then answered by the myth
Speaker 1: but with their modern understanding. So, according to the Linguistic
Speaker 1: Society of America, humans currently have roughly six thousand, nine
Speaker 1: hundred and nine distinct languages. Each of these falls into
Speaker 1: one of two hundred and fifty language families. For instance,
Speaker 1: the Indo European language group includes some two hundred languages,
Speaker 1: and they're not evenly spread out either. Europe has two
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty while Asia has two thousand, one hundred
Speaker 1: ninety seven. Papua New Guinea alone has eight hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty two. Yeah, and I know what you you might
Speaker 1: be thinking, I said, all right, so they're similar, die, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they sure they have just just eight hundred thirty two
Speaker 1: shades of the same color. But no, these are in
Speaker 1: thirty to forty distinct language groups. So it just goes
Speaker 1: to show it's not it's not just based on how
Speaker 1: far people are spread, their number of other factors. Now,
Speaker 1: it's obvious to some extent that languages change over time,
Speaker 1: and you can probably guess that new languages are produced generally,
Speaker 1: not by people planning out a language, sitting down and
Speaker 1: doing the esperanto kind of thing, cleon or what have you. Right,
Speaker 1: though created languages do exist, they're not generally spoken as
Speaker 1: people's native native tongue languages evolve, right, yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 1: that in the roots of realizing this go back to
Speaker 1: the rough observations of earlier man. So you take Greek
Speaker 1: and Latin, for instance, they show similarities and this led
Speaker 1: them any to assume that Latin came from Greek, but
Speaker 1: it didn't both emerge from from older Indo European tongues,
Speaker 1: perhaps according to to some theorist Indo Hittite. Now, other
Speaker 1: similar languages were often dismissed as the same tongue. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, the Romans often considered just all bar barbarians
Speaker 1: spoke Barbarian, when, of course you had various groups and
Speaker 1: various languages in play. And by the Middle Ages there
Speaker 1: was an increased Western interest in the language, but this
Speaker 1: often entailed such a doomed ventures as the attempt to
Speaker 1: root all European tongues in Hebrew, and Hebrews not directly
Speaker 1: related to any of them, because it's a Semitic language. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I imagine that was a religiously motivated quest exactly,
Speaker 1: kind of like taking your myth on a stick and
Speaker 1: you know, running around through history. So language changes over time,
Speaker 1: sometimes fairly rapidly and in many ways. Just consider how
Speaker 1: different English is today compared to a few centuries ago
Speaker 1: with the Canterbury Tales. You know, you have to have
Speaker 1: a translation of it really to read it, or or
Speaker 1: a proper understanding of this older version of English. And
Speaker 1: yet on the other hand, US languages like Japanese, which
Speaker 1: has apparently changed very little in a thousand years now,
Speaker 1: isn't that an interesting problem? Why do some languages change
Speaker 1: faster than others? Yeah? And indeed, and then you have
Speaker 1: to realize, well, there there's not just one change. There
Speaker 1: all these different changes. So there's lexical change phonetic and
Speaker 1: phonological change, spelling changes, semantic changes, uh, syntactic changes. And
Speaker 1: on top of this, there's this concept of linguistic drift,
Speaker 1: both short term uneddirectional drift and long term cyclic drift.
Speaker 1: So we might have to have Christian jump in on
Speaker 1: a future episode because I know he's very interested in
Speaker 1: linguistic studies. Uh. But suffice to say that large scale
Speaker 1: linguistic shifts often occur in response to social, economic, and
Speaker 1: political pressures. So invasion, displacement, colonization, um, you know, enslavement.
Speaker 1: The history books are full of examples. Uh. New technologies
Speaker 1: also require new words and new ways of talking to
Speaker 1: each other. But the breakup of language is more complicated
Speaker 1: than you might think. So you might think that if
Speaker 1: speaker of language A and speaker of language BE can
Speaker 1: understand each other, then they speak the same tongue. But
Speaker 1: this isn't always the case, and in some cases speaker
Speaker 1: BE can understand speaker A, but not the other way around.
Speaker 1: So to come back to the Tower of Babble and
Speaker 1: the confusion of tongues here, UH is an instantaneous splintering
Speaker 1: of language possible and not really not the outside of
Speaker 1: some sort of magic or perhaps crazy ancient alien technology
Speaker 1: scheme right where they're like zapping language centers of the brain.
Speaker 1: But certainly, if you don't interpret the Tower of Babble
Speaker 1: story to literally, you could say that God just simply
Speaker 1: did something else to displace people and cease the building
Speaker 1: of the tower with cataclysms, war, et cetera, and that
Speaker 1: these traumas and displacements are what splintered language in a
Speaker 1: way that matches up with our understanding. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: this will go along with something I want to get
Speaker 1: into in just a minute. When I look at at
Speaker 1: an interesting article about this that I came across, it
Speaker 1: makes it an interesting bit of sense, doesn't it when
Speaker 1: you when you think of the towers a means of
Speaker 1: reaching God or technological greatness. The displacement and spread of
Speaker 1: human civilization leads to the birth of numerous languages. Culture
Speaker 1: is in modes of thinking. They make such a unity,
Speaker 1: such vision that kind of humanist dream of of ruggle
Speaker 1: the elder. It makes it just incredibly difficult to accomplish now,
Speaker 1: as we see in every corner of our world today.
Speaker 1: Right now. First, I want to look at this article
Speaker 1: that I found that I thought was interesting about the
Speaker 1: idea of the evolution of language and how that happens.
Speaker 1: Um and also comparisons between the way languages evolved in
Speaker 1: the way organisms evolved. But also we should keep in
Speaker 1: mind to come back to the idea that what if
Speaker 1: the confusion of tongues has benefits as well. Now, first
Speaker 1: I just wanted to look at this interesting article from
Speaker 1: Plos Biology in two thousand and eight by John Whitfield
Speaker 1: that was called across the Curious Parallel of Language and
Speaker 1: species evolution. Now this this wasn't a study, This was
Speaker 1: like a feature article that was talking about some ongoing
Speaker 1: research at the time. I thought that was pretty cool.
Speaker 1: So the author, John Whitfield, has um It starts off
Speaker 1: by talking about how in eighty seven Charles Darwin wrote
Speaker 1: a letter to his sister where he talked about the
Speaker 1: ideas of this linguist named Sir John Herschel. Now Herschel
Speaker 1: wasn't just a linguist. He was a polymath. He did
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff. But Herschel had a thesis about language,
Speaker 1: and the thesis was languages, the languages that exist today
Speaker 1: were descended from a common ancestor. Now, the idea of
Speaker 1: a common descent of languages. I think it seems fairly
Speaker 1: intuitive to us now, but it encountered problems in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, and one of which was uh that the
Speaker 1: evolution of Earth's diverse languages, as different as they were,
Speaker 1: would make the Earth much older than people generally believed
Speaker 1: it to be at the time for religious reasons such
Speaker 1: as Bishop Usher's Biblical chronology, which you know, made the
Speaker 1: Earth about six to ten thousand years old. Right. So
Speaker 1: by Darwin's time, linguists already had some success tracing the
Speaker 1: genealogies of languages, so it was clear, for example, that
Speaker 1: many of the languages of Western Europe, such as French, Spanish,
Speaker 1: and Italian, had origins ancient Latin. That's not even that
Speaker 1: hard to observe, right You might imagine just sort of
Speaker 1: figuring this out by looking at the languages themselves, but
Speaker 1: one could also see the interbreeding of languages with with
Speaker 1: different ancestors. For example, you've got modern English. This has
Speaker 1: a strong base in Germanic languages, but you also can
Speaker 1: see that it clearly has input from Romance languages like
Speaker 1: French and Latin and Spanish as well. It's also fairly
Speaker 1: clear how this usually happened since we had textual records
Speaker 1: reflecting changes in language use over time. So the basic
Speaker 1: principle was discent with modification. People pass on their languages
Speaker 1: to the next generation. But with each generation, small changes
Speaker 1: creep in. New words appear, old words foality use, or
Speaker 1: become pronounced differently. New grammar rules start to come into use,
Speaker 1: and eventually enough of these changes accumulate that it would
Speaker 1: be difficult for a person speaking the ancient parent language
Speaker 1: to understand a person speaking the modern descendent language. That
Speaker 1: they would talk to each other and they wouldn't get it.
Speaker 1: And so Darwin started to wonder, I wonder if new
Speaker 1: species could evolve by descent with modification the same way
Speaker 1: languages do. And now modern linguists have quantitative analytical tools
Speaker 1: that can help them understand how languages change over time,
Speaker 1: and you can use very similar tools to investigate changes
Speaker 1: in genomes over time. So a lot of this article
Speaker 1: then ends up comparing genetic change or genomic change to
Speaker 1: language change. What are what are the points of similarity
Speaker 1: and what are the points of difference? Um and so
Speaker 1: Whitfield quotes an evolutionary biologists named Mark Pagel of the
Speaker 1: University of Reading, who says languages are extraordinarily like genomes.
Speaker 1: We think that they could be very that there could
Speaker 1: be very general laws of lexical evolution to rival those
Speaker 1: of genetic evolution. So there are ways in which language
Speaker 1: evolution and genomic evolution are similar. They're gonna be other
Speaker 1: ways that they're different, and we should acknowledge that in
Speaker 1: a minute. But one way is that the most basic
Speaker 1: or most important components change the slowest. So in biology,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be genes that are used constantly by
Speaker 1: nearly all organisms. One example would be genes involved in
Speaker 1: protein synthesis. You've got to do this all the time,
Speaker 1: so they just change very slowly, and for this reason
Speaker 1: they can be used to trace genomic relationships way deep
Speaker 1: into history. And in linguistic this would be the words
Speaker 1: you use all the time, like pronouns and numbers. If
Speaker 1: you think about the way language is change, if the
Speaker 1: language is going to be changing over time, what are
Speaker 1: the things that are most likely to have discontinuity from
Speaker 1: the way your parents spoke. It's gonna be like less
Speaker 1: common sayings or new expressions or something like that. Another
Speaker 1: parallel he talks about is that the varying rates of
Speaker 1: evolution in both languages in genomes that they can alter
Speaker 1: over time. So uh. In biology, it looks like that
Speaker 1: there is generally a slow and steady rate of change
Speaker 1: in a line of descent that is then suddenly punctuated
Speaker 1: by occasionally brief periods of more rapid change. This might happen,
Speaker 1: for example, when you get various populations of the same
Speaker 1: species that are suddenly cut off from one another and
Speaker 1: unable to inter breed and forced into different living conditions.
Speaker 1: So you might think about our episode on the London
Speaker 1: Underground mosquito. You've got the surface Coulex pipiens mosquito, and
Speaker 1: part of that population appears to break off into a
Speaker 1: subgroup that gets trapped into the London underground, which selects
Speaker 1: for different traits. You've got to like the dark, You've
Speaker 1: got to really have a taste for rat and human
Speaker 1: blood instead of bird blood. Uh. And eventually, the version
Speaker 1: of Coulex pipiens that's that's accumulating these different adaptations is
Speaker 1: a different species within a surprisingly short amount of time,
Speaker 1: and they can no longer successfully breed and produce fertile
Speaker 1: offspring with one another. With the surface population, it looks
Speaker 1: like a similar kind of thing happens with languages. Populations
Speaker 1: that speak them accumul late small changes over long periods
Speaker 1: of time, but there may be more rapid speciation events
Speaker 1: eventually after a population splits off. So if you take
Speaker 1: a large group of English speakers and you split them
Speaker 1: up into smaller groups, and you put them on different islands,
Speaker 1: so they never talk to each other, you can expect
Speaker 1: their rate of differentiation and how their language has change
Speaker 1: is going to accelerate. Now this isn't exactly a dissenting opinion,
Speaker 1: but I want to throw this bit in from the
Speaker 1: Linguistic Society of America on the diversity of language compared
Speaker 1: to biological diversity. So the languages of the world seem
Speaker 1: amazingly diverse, but when you compare them to communication systems
Speaker 1: in general, they're all remarkably similar to one another. Quote.
Speaker 1: Human language differs from the communicative behavior of every other
Speaker 1: known organism in a number of fundamental ways, all shared
Speaker 1: across languages, they say. Quote, human language is so different
Speaker 1: from any other known system in the natural world that
Speaker 1: the narrowly constrained ways in which one grammar can differ
Speaker 1: from another fade into insignificance. For a native of Milan,
Speaker 1: the differences between the speech of that city and that
Speaker 1: of Turin may loom large, but for a visitor from
Speaker 1: Kula Lumpur, both are simply Italian. Similarly, the differences we
Speaker 1: find across the world in Grammars seem very important. But
Speaker 1: for an outside observer, say a biologist studying communication among
Speaker 1: living beings in general, or this is me, but dare say,
Speaker 1: you know, an angelic destroyer sent down or a Babylonian
Speaker 1: god quote, all our relatively minor variations on the single
Speaker 1: theme of human language. That's interesting. Yeah, stuff that may
Speaker 1: appear very diverse to us because we are so highly
Speaker 1: attuned to the differences between it, just from an outside
Speaker 1: encoding perspective is not all that different. Yeah. They're all
Speaker 1: speaking Earth anyway, they're all speaking human. Yeah, so what
Speaker 1: drives language change? Like? Well, again we've touched on on
Speaker 1: on some of the reasons. But but what what you're
Speaker 1: you're taking your research show? Well, obviously this is not
Speaker 1: at a settled issue. I mean, there are all kinds
Speaker 1: of things that drive changes in language. Um, some appear
Speaker 1: to be these fairly random kind of influences and changes
Speaker 1: in pronunciation and stuff like that. Sociolinguists and this is
Speaker 1: this is a point that um Whitfield makes in his article.
Speaker 1: Sociolinguists would point out that sort of random artifacts of
Speaker 1: culture can influence language trends, and so they might give
Speaker 1: the example of the idiosyncratic speech patterns of a very
Speaker 1: high status person or social group get copied a lot,
Speaker 1: and that can become the sort of driving factor in
Speaker 1: the way languages change over time. Imagine if Marlon Brando's
Speaker 1: the coolest guy in America and suddenly all all the
Speaker 1: men in America start mumbling their words like him. Or
Speaker 1: if you're if you're living in England and it's recently
Speaker 1: been conquered by French aristocrats, suddenly you might you might
Speaker 1: want to start incorporating more Francophonic features into your speech,
Speaker 1: so you talk more like the new bosses and the
Speaker 1: new rich people. Your company is purchased by a different
Speaker 1: company and they have different bits of business jargon, and
Speaker 1: suddenly you're speaking like that at home. That forbid, that
Speaker 1: would be that would be grounds for the confusion of
Speaker 1: tongue in business. Uh. There are even ideas that genetics
Speaker 1: could influence language change. Not I think it's not strongly.
Speaker 1: It's not believed that this is strongly determinative by everybody
Speaker 1: that I know of who said, like, you know that
Speaker 1: you have genes for speaking Chinese or something. But in
Speaker 1: a more subtle way, it appears that there could be
Speaker 1: certain types of genes that favor the development of certain
Speaker 1: types of languages. So, for example, it appears there could
Speaker 1: be the certain ancestral genes that correlate with the development
Speaker 1: of what's known as tonal languages versus non tonal languages.
Speaker 1: And a tonal language is one in which saying basically
Speaker 1: the same word, the same sequence of phonemes with a
Speaker 1: different pitch or tone has a different meaning. Chinese is
Speaker 1: a good example of this. Yeah, Like they're multiple ways
Speaker 1: to say ma. We say my in our tongue and
Speaker 1: it means one thing, but it can mean you you
Speaker 1: say it wrong. You might think you're saying a mother
Speaker 1: in Chinese, but you're actually saying horse or himp. Is
Speaker 1: that a direct horse or himp? Well that's that's that's
Speaker 1: just three of them, mother, horse, and himp, But then
Speaker 1: their additionals as well. So can you do the different pronunciations?
Speaker 1: How what does it sound like? Well, you have there's
Speaker 1: like rising around it. So there's like and there's there's
Speaker 1: like ma ma ma ma u. Those are just a few,
Speaker 1: but just just an idea of just some of the tones.
Speaker 1: And that's why a language like Mandarin Chinese is it
Speaker 1: can be so difficult for uh, for say, an English
Speaker 1: speaker to pick up on. I mean, that sounds amazingly
Speaker 1: difficult to learn if you don't come from a language
Speaker 1: that has tonal qualities to it. Yeah, we well, you know,
Speaker 1: the thing is, we don't, and we do. I thought
Speaker 1: about this a lot because certainly your tone in saying
Speaker 1: certain words in English can can have a very important
Speaker 1: effect act on what you're saying. Uh, not so much
Speaker 1: changing the definition of a word, but changing the connotations.
Speaker 1: So so it's not yet it's not a direct comparison,
Speaker 1: but it's it's kind of like the the the the
Speaker 1: importance of tone in English taken to a different level altogether. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is interesting. But anyway, so the idea here is that, um,
Speaker 1: not so much that you would have a gene that
Speaker 1: tells you to speak a certain to speak a language
Speaker 1: like that, but that there are certain genes that appear
Speaker 1: to be geographically correlated with areas where people had developed
Speaker 1: languages with tonal features, so that could play a role.
Speaker 1: But another interesting feature is the fact that if languages
Speaker 1: evolved like organisms, if this is, if this analogy is
Speaker 1: correct at all, they're more like the evolution of bacteria
Speaker 1: than the evolution of say, complex mammals, because languages can
Speaker 1: trade horizontally, right, The transmission of language is is not
Speaker 1: just vertical across generations. You don't just directly inherent your
Speaker 1: language from your parents. You largely do, but it's also horizontal.
Speaker 1: You get new words, new speaking patterns, new grammatical rules
Speaker 1: from the people around you, and you can trade them off.
Speaker 1: So it is more like the horizontal gene transfer you'd
Speaker 1: see in microbial life. That's true, that's a good point.
Speaker 1: And then, of course I think it's not just the
Speaker 1: people around you. It's the TV programs around you as well.
Speaker 1: Uh and and and another extent, the books you read.
Speaker 1: You have all these these influences that are are taking
Speaker 1: what you were essentially given by those who reared you.
Speaker 1: And uh, and you're you're recreating it every day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So in the creation of new languages, I think the
Speaker 1: the analogy of evolution by natural selection or maybe not
Speaker 1: natural selection, evolution by some kind of selection. Evolution by
Speaker 1: vague selection is somewhat a good analogy in other ways
Speaker 1: it's not a perfect analogy. But I also have a
Speaker 1: question for any linguists out there listening. So we've talked
Speaker 1: about the difficulties of identifying, you know, or the idea
Speaker 1: of a species in biology before. In biology, the species
Speaker 1: distinction is usually taken to mean that two different species
Speaker 1: are animals or organisms that cannot breed and produce fertile offspring.
Speaker 1: So if we follow the analogy between genomics and linguistics,
Speaker 1: what is the equivalent distinction between different species of language?
Speaker 1: I mean, you might be tempted to say, well, it's
Speaker 1: when you can't understand one another, But there are varying
Speaker 1: degrees of understanding, right, you might sort of understand somebody.
Speaker 1: So anyway, if you have a good answer for that,
Speaker 1: you might want to email us it blow the mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com to let us know.
Speaker 1: All right, as we begin to close out here, and
Speaker 1: I want to talk very briefly about a book and
Speaker 1: an idea that I imagine a number of you out
Speaker 1: there have been thinking about the whole time. And that's
Speaker 1: Neil Stevenson's Cyberpunk Classics No Crash. I've never read this,
Speaker 1: but I've always meant to. Oh yeah, this is the one,
Speaker 1: of course, It's it's a wild book. It's you've got
Speaker 1: so many fun elements going on in a hero protagonist
Speaker 1: with samurai sword. But the part that's stuck with me
Speaker 1: the most, and the part that that that that jives
Speaker 1: with today's episode is this important plot point about about
Speaker 1: this uh, this this this thing that's referred to as
Speaker 1: the nam Shub of Inky who mentioned earlier this is
Speaker 1: the Sumerian god. So the idea here and this is
Speaker 1: like the this is the version of it that that
Speaker 1: Stevenson plays within the book. Is he of this ancient
Speaker 1: Sumerian or language and it allowed brain function to be
Speaker 1: programmed using audio stimuli in conjunction with a d N
Speaker 1: a altering virus. So Sumerian culture in this scenario UH
Speaker 1: is organized around these programs known as ME, which were
Speaker 1: administered by priests. Oh yeah, the ME. So there in
Speaker 1: one of the things I mentioned earlier, the the Golden
Speaker 1: Age passage in the Sumerian epic. There, I think there
Speaker 1: is a recital of m A. That's that's it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's what he's playing off of in this So
Speaker 1: Inky this uh this this important figure this uh this
Speaker 1: God develops a counter virus known as the nam shub
Speaker 1: and then he delivers uh this to stop the Sumerian
Speaker 1: language from being processed by the brain, and this leads
Speaker 1: to the development of other less literal languages, giving birth
Speaker 1: to the babble myth. So this would be a case
Speaker 1: where the confusion of languages as described by Inky confusing
Speaker 1: the tongues in this epic is actually a benevolent thing.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the idea that Stevenson is rolling out here
Speaker 1: is that if you have a mono linguistic culture, it's
Speaker 1: like having like a massive farm that's only one crop
Speaker 1: because you're susceptible to a single virus or pathogen or
Speaker 1: parasite is wiping it out. They specifically mentioned say, you know,
Speaker 1: uh Nazism coming in, and if if it resonates with
Speaker 1: a few people, if everyone has the same language and
Speaker 1: essentially the same culture, then that that that harmful idea,
Speaker 1: that that that linguistic meme can just run rampant and
Speaker 1: eat everyone up. But if you have these it's like
Speaker 1: having a forest fire breakout in a global forest with
Speaker 1: you know, without any streams or planes to break it up,
Speaker 1: everything's going to burn. I love this idea, and I
Speaker 1: think this is fascinating. I think it is a great
Speaker 1: case for preserving the diversity of human language and culture.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think sometimes it is tempting. I think,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be great if the whole world had one
Speaker 1: language in one culture. It would be so easy for
Speaker 1: us all to get along. We could do trade would
Speaker 1: be so much easier, we could just really you know,
Speaker 1: like it seems utopian when you think about it, but
Speaker 1: I absolutely see some merit in the idea that that
Speaker 1: would make us much more uniquely vulnerable to a particularly
Speaker 1: bad linguistic or cultural program that gets instituted that catches
Speaker 1: on easily. I mean, it's easy to think about memes
Speaker 1: like Nazism or like a really awful interpretation of a
Speaker 1: religion or something like that, And there are ideas that
Speaker 1: can be captivating to people that they feel very entranced
Speaker 1: by and beholden to um, but they're utterly destructive. And
Speaker 1: if you have these divisions of culture and divisions of
Speaker 1: language where you can't play exactly the same linguistic meme
Speaker 1: on somebody else's brain. It's a it's a little bit
Speaker 1: of an immunity barrier, or what if the what if
Speaker 1: the pathogen here is a is an intense desire to
Speaker 1: build a giant tower into the sky, and maybe ultimately
Speaker 1: the god or gods in the scenario saying well, look
Speaker 1: at these people, they're totally wasting their time building this
Speaker 1: tower to nowhere. We better break that up before they
Speaker 1: hurt themselves. The only humane thing to do is to
Speaker 1: knock it down, and thereafter called the land Overthrow. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: there you have it, everybody. The Tower of Babel, artistic interpretations,
Speaker 1: mathematical interpretations, linguistic interpretations, and hey, there is a lot
Speaker 1: of awesome other Tower of Babel literature and legend out
Speaker 1: there that we didn't even have time to get into today.
Speaker 1: So if you want to write us about your favorite
Speaker 1: Tower of Babel stories from or or equivalent legends from
Speaker 1: other other types of literature mythological history, let us know
Speaker 1: about that. That's right in the meantime, Heading over to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that's what we
Speaker 1: will find all the podcast episodes, including the Great Flood
Speaker 1: episode that we mentioned earlier and London Underground Mosquito, London,
Speaker 1: ut Aground Mosquito as well. You'll find those episodes and
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, along with blog post, videos,
Speaker 1: and links out to our various social media accounts such
Speaker 1: as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, all of those things, and
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with us, as always,
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Well more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot Com,
Speaker 1: a lot of little they starts start sport