The Sumerians Built a Tower That Reached the Stars — And the Reason It Was Cut Down

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]In the British Museum storage facility, separate from the main galleries and never on public display, there is a clay tablet about the size of a hand. Catalog number BM 24975.

[00:00:15]It is one of nine surviving copies of a Sumerian text called Ener and the Lord of Arata. And this particular copy dates to roughly 1900 BCE.

[00:00:26]The original composition is older, possibly significantly older, and it recounts events the Samrian scribes themselves understood took place in the deep past.

[00:00:38]The text is famous for one specific passage.

[00:00:42]In the middle of an otherwise straightforward narrative about a trade dispute between two cities, the scribe inserts a description of a previous time before the dispute when the whole universe spoke to Enlil in one tongue.

[00:00:56]The passage describes how this universal language was changed. The God ans place strife in the mouth of humanity and the single tongue became many.

[00:01:07]Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel narrative was written between 1,00 and500 years after the Samrian text. The Genesis story is a derivative. The original is on the tablet in the British Museum basement.

[00:01:21]What the standard scholarly interpretation does not address is what came immediately before the confusion of tongues in the Sumerian original.

[00:01:32]The Genesis version says that humans began building a tower and that the tower was the cause of the divine intervention. The Samrian text agrees on the cause and effect. But the Samrian text describes the tower more specifically. It says the people of the world had built a structure that was approaching the place of the gods and that this structure was made of burnt brick and bitammen raised in stages with a path of the highest level on which the stars could be touched. Then the gods cut it down. If you are following these artifacts and records and the patterns the textbook version of history does not address, hit subscribe.

[00:02:13]We post a new investigation every week.

[00:02:15]Now, let me show you what that tower actually was.

[00:02:19]The structure described on BM24975 is in its physical specifications a ziggurat.

[00:02:26]The construction method fired brick and bamin raised in stages with a stepped ascent matches the method used for every major ziggurat in southern Mesopotamia from the late 4th millennium B.CE onward.

[00:02:40]The Samrians built dozens of them. The largest and best preserved is the great ziggurat of constructed under king Namu beginning around 2,100 B.CEE and completed by his son Shogi. The base is approximately 64 m long by 46 m wide.

[00:03:00]The original height before later collapse and erosion has been variously reconstructed at between 21 and 30 m above the surrounding plane. That is not a tower that reached the stars in any literal sense. But the Sumerian conception of the stars was different from ours. To a Bronze Age Mesopotamian, the firmament was a fixed dome at a finite climbable distance overhead.

[00:03:24]The stars were light set into that dome.

[00:03:27]A structure that ascended high enough above the aluvial plane to alter your perspective on the night sky. High enough that you could observe from above the haze of the river valley. high enough that the horizon dropped was in the Sumerian framework a structure that approached the stars and the ziggurats were demonstrably used for exactly this purpose.

[00:03:51]The Sumerianss and their Babylonian successors maintained the most sophisticated naked eye astronomical observation program in the ancient world. The records they produced, the Mul Ain, the Venus tablet of Amisaduca, the planetary observation diaries, are the earliest systematic astronomy in human history. These observations had to be made from somewhere.

[00:04:16]The standard scholarly position is that the upper platforms of the ziggurats were where they were made. This is what makes the description on BM 2 4975 unusual. The text does not describe the tower as a temple. It does not describe it as the dwelling of a god. It describes it as a structure for touching the stars.

[00:04:37]The Samrian verb l carries the specific meaning of physical contact. The text describes this action not as a routine religious activity but as the reason the gods intervened. There is a separate Samrian text called the lament for Ur which describes the destruction of the city of Ur and its great ziggurat by Elomite forces around 2004 BCE.

[00:05:02]Multiple copies survive. The lament describes the destruction in graphic specific detail. The breaking of the gates, the death of the citizens, the burning of the temples.

[00:05:14]But the lament also describes something that the standard interpretation has never adequately explained. The text says that the upper levels of the ziggurat were not just damaged, they were deliberately broken down. The verb ghoul means demolish or unmake and it is used in the lament with the specific phrasing that the upper platform was cut from the body of the temple. The choice of words is ghoul and it implies active unmaking rather than accidental collapse. The destruction of Ur is real.

[00:05:47]Elomite and Amorite forces overran the city. The third dynasty of Ur, which had been the dominant power in southern Mesopotamia for over a century collapsed. The standard narrative of conquest does not explain why an invading army would specifically dismantle the upper observational platform of the central ziggurat while leaving much of the lower structure intact. Lutters do not work that way.

[00:06:12]Conquerors do not work that way. They take what is portable and burn what is flammable. The Elomite occupation of Ur did both. But the upper platform was not burned. It was unmade, taken apart brick by brick in a way that suggested deliberate purpose rather than ordinary military destruction. When Robert Coldy's German expedition excavated the Babylonian ziggurat, the structure most commonly identified with the Genesis Tower of Babel between 1899 and 1917. His team noted the same pattern at a different site. Itani had been damaged in antiquity, then rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar II, then partially dismantled again. The dismantling, according to ancient sources, was carried out by Alexander the Great, who reportedly intended to rebuild the structure, but died before the work could be completed. Alexander's intent, as recorded by Strabo and Aryan, is usually framed as a gesture of respect.

[00:07:11]He wanted to restore the great structure of the Babylonian past. Cold Dewi's excavation found something the literary sources do not mention. The dismantling had stopped very precisely at the level of the upper observational platform. The lower stages had been left intact. Two ziggurats, two dismantlings, both stopping at the same architectural feature.

[00:07:34]There is a broader pattern that becomes uncomfortable once you look for it.

[00:07:38]Stepped parameal structures appear in the archaeological record across cultures that had no documented contact with one another.

[00:07:45]Examples include the Mesopotamian ziggurats, the Egyptian step pyramids, the Mesoamerican pyramids of the Maya and Aztec, the Chimera Prasats, and the Nubian pyramids. The lower stages of these structures have generally survived. The upper stages have with remarkable consistency not the conventional explanation is that the upper levels were lighter, more exposed and more vulnerable to weathering, looting and reuse for building materials.

[00:08:16]This is true, but the pattern is striking enough that several archaeologists have noted it across cultures.

[00:08:23]The Egyptian pyramid texts contain references to the Benben, the topmost capstone being removed in some cases by deliberate action rather than decay. The Maya Takal record the breaking of upper temple platforms during specific reigns in language that frames the breaking as ritual rather than military.

[00:08:42]The cross-cultural pattern does not on its own prove anything.

[00:08:47]Tall structures lose their tops more often than they lose their bottoms. But the textual evidence, Sumerian, Egyptian, Maya, describes the loss of the upper levels in language that suggests intent rather than entropy. And the texts span enough cultures and enough centuries to be difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

[00:09:10]This is where the suppression beat enters the story because there is one Cole Dewi's full field notes from the Temani excavation are held at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. They were partially published in his 1913 book Das Vida Babylon. The portions concerning the upper structure of the ziggurat were not published in full. A subsequent inventory of the Coldaway papers conducted in 1962 identified a section of approximately 40 pages of field notes specifically describing the foundation of the upper platform, the alignment of certain stones, and what the original notes describe as anomalous orientations not consistent with cardinal direction.

[00:09:57]These pages were marked as restricted access and the basis for the restriction was given as pending re-evaluation by the Iraq Antiquities Department. The pending re-evaluation has not occurred in the 63 years since. There is a parallel pattern at Orer Leonard Woolly's expedition which excavated the Great Ziggurat between 1922 and 1934 produced detailed survey drawings of the structures surviving levels. Woolly's published account focuses on the lower stages.

[00:10:27]His unpublished field notes held at the British Museum and the Pen Museum and partially digitized in the early 2000s contain measurements and observations relating to the upper platform fragments that were recovered from the rubble.

[00:10:41]These observations have not been incorporated into any subsequent reconstruction of the ziggurat. The standard published reconstructions show the upper levels as schematic and hypothetical drawn from Samrian iconography rather than from physical evidence. The physical evidence, the rubble fragments themselves and Woolly's notes on them sits in archive. Now, the modern stakes hook.

[00:11:04]The Samrian text on BM24975 does not just describe the cutting down of a single tower. It describes the cutting down as a recurring intervention.

[00:11:17]The text says, "The gods have done this before and will do it again when humanity once more builds structures that approach the place of the gods."

[00:11:26]The phrase used is ena, an idiom that translates roughly as every cycle. The Samrian scribe was not describing a one-time mythological event. He was describing a pattern. What the pattern means depends entirely on how you read the underlying text. The conservative reading is theological, the Samrian conception of divine punishment for human ambition, structurally similar to the Greek Prometheus narrative or the tower of Babel itself. The deeper reading is that something specific kept happening to civilizations that built tall observational structures in southern Mesopotamia and that the scribes recorded the pattern because they had observed it across multiple generations. If you accept the deeper reading, the question becomes what was actually happening. The conventional explanation involves military conquest, climatic disruption, or simple structural failure of mud brick construction in a wet climate.

[00:12:25]None of these explanations fully accounts for the specific pattern Cold and Woolly documented. Upper platforms were dismantled while lower structures were preserved in a sequence that recurs across separate cities and separate centuries.

[00:12:40]The genres required concession.

[00:12:43]The Samrian text on BM 24,975 is most plausibly read as theological literature and the babble of tongues passage is best understood as religious tradition rather than historical repage.

[00:12:58]The dismantling of the upper platforms at Ur and Edeni has multiple plausible non-msterious explanations.

[00:13:06]Mudbrick upper structures are inherently more vulnerable than stonecord lower stages.

[00:13:12]Conquerors had specific reasons to target the high platforms. They were the locations of treasure caches, religious icons, and the symbolic seats of the deities of the conquered city. Cole Dewee's field notes are restricted for ordinary administrative reasons.

[00:13:28]Woolly's unpublished material has not been incorporated into reconstructions because it is fragmentaryary, not because it is being suppressed.

[00:13:38]This is the responsible position. It is probably correct.

[00:13:42]What is harder to dismiss is the specificity of the Sumerian text.

[00:13:46]Approaching the place of the gods is not how the Mesopotamians describe temple tops in religious contexts. They describe temple tops as the seat of the gods, the place where the gods rested.

[00:13:58]The verb on BM 24,975 l to touch is not used elsewhere in Samaran temple literature. It is a verb of human action, of human contact with something that is not normally accessible. The scribe was not describing a religious offering. He was describing an act that the gods were specifically said to have responded to by removing the means. The means were towers high enough to observe what could not be observed from the ground. The Samrians built them. The towers were cut down at the upper level. The scribes recorded the pattern. And the pattern in the text's own framing is one that repeats whenever the towers are rebuilt to that height. The tablet sits in storage. Coldy's notes sit in the Berlin archive. Woolly's notes sit in the British Museum. The great ziggurat of Ur has been partially restored, but the upper platform remains a reconstruction rather than a recovery. The Etmani Foundation in Babylon was partially documented during the Iraq war years and then closed to further investigation when the security situation deteriorated.

[00:15:08]It has not been reopened to systematic study. The Samrian scribe ended the relevant passage on BM 24,975 with a phrase that has been translated three different ways. The most cautious rendering is and the upper bricks were taken away. The more aggressive rendering is and the highest place was made hidden.

[00:15:32]The third rendering proposed by an independent Italian researcher in 2011 and largely ignored is and the way to the stars was closed.

[00:15:43]If you want more of these, the artifacts, the field notes, the structures whose upper levels nobody is allowed to reconstruct, subscribe. Next week, we open Coldiz's restricted Babylon material and look at the 40 pages of field notes that have not been published in over a hundred years. The video on screen breaks down a related case from the same period. Click it.