Athanasius Kircher and the Turris Babel
In 1679, a Jesuit scholar in Rome published a large illustrated book to answer a question that seemed simple: could the Tower of Babel really have reached the heavens? Athanasius Kircher, then seventy-seven years old, did not answer with a sermon.
He answered with arithmetic. The book, called Turris Babel, calculated the size of such a tower, the number of bricks needed and the weight it would have to bear. His conclusion was that the work could never have been completed, and that the earth itself would have been thrown off balance by the load. It is a strange and fascinating example of a mind that tried to measure a myth.
The Story in Genesis
The tale occupies only nine verses in the Book of Genesis (11:1-9). The whole earth had one language and one speech. The people migrated to a plain in the land of Shinar and said: "Let us build a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves."
God came down to see the city and the tower, and he confused their language so that they could no longer understand one another. They scattered across the earth. The name Babel, the text says, was given because the Lord "confounded" speech there. In Hebrew, the word for "confound" sounds much like the word Babel.
For many centuries, readers took this as an explanation for the world's many languages. It is also a story about pride, and about what happens when people try to reach too far.
The Real Tower
Historians believe that a real building lies behind the tale. In Babylon stood a vast stepped temple tower, a ziggurat, called Etemenanki, which means "the house of the foundation of heaven and earth." It was dedicated to the god Marduk, and it was rebuilt several times, the last under King Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BCE.
The Greek historian Herodotus saw or heard of it and described it as a stack of eight towers. The Israelites, deported to Babylon, would have seen it. It is not hard to imagine how the sight of this colossal structure gave rise to the story.
Archaeologists have found the foundations of Etemenanki. The tower itself is gone, and scholars still debate its exact height and form.
Kircher's Tower
Kircher lived in an age that wanted to test the Bible by reason, and he approached Babel as an engineering problem. He figured out how much material would be needed to build a tower to the Moon, and he showed, by the physics of his day, that its weight would shift the earth's center of gravity.
He thus argued that the builders cannot have meant to climb all the way to heaven, or if they did, they were doomed to fail without any divine help. The book includes a series of engravings that show his imagined tower, rising in a great spiral, and maps of the lands where the nations spread afterward.
The numbers are not sound by modern standards, and the argument rests on assumptions about the shape of the universe that we no longer hold. Yet the attempt is remarkable. It shows a scholar who wished his faith and his reason to agree.
Searching for the First Language
Kircher was also interested in the languages that arose after Babel. He wrote about the spread of the peoples from the plain of Shinar and tried to trace how their tongues were related. Like many scholars of his time, he assumed that there had once been a single language, spoken by Adam and by the builders.
Some thought it was Hebrew. Kircher, who admired Egypt, was drawn to the idea that the oldest writing was a picture-writing like the hieroglyphs. He also believed that Chinese characters were descended from Egyptian signs, an idea that is not supported by evidence.
His reconstruction of the early history of language was therefore mostly wrong. Yet he put on the table a question that would eventually be answered by science: how are the world's languages related, and where did they come from?
What Linguists Say Today
The answer came in the late eighteenth century. In 1786, the British judge Sir William Jones, who had studied Sanskrit in India, noted that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had a stronger resemblance than chance could explain, and that they probably came from a common source.
This insight led to the discovery of the Indo-European family, which includes most of the languages of Europe and much of Asia. Scholars have reconstructed parts of its ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, spoken perhaps six thousand years ago.
Whether all human languages go back to one original is an open question. Most linguists think that the methods of comparison cannot reach back more than several thousand years, and the signs of a single mother tongue, if it existed, have been lost. The picture is of many families, with branches and mixtures, and not of one great break at a tower.
Closing
The Babel story survives because it explains something we feel: that people who speak differently can fail to understand each other, and that our grandest plans can collapse into confusion. Kircher read it as a puzzle for mathematics. We might read it as a parable about humility.
Either way, the little tale in Genesis has done what few ancient stories can do. It has made each new age ask again how we came to speak as we do.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Mirror
- Athanasius Kircher and the Oedipus Aegyptiacus
- Athanasius Kircher and the Oedipus Aegyptiacus: The Universal Synthesis of Egyptian Wisdom
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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