Just how many spoken languages have existed in the world and where did
all of this language diversity come from? Almost every ancient culture has had some
kind of myth attempting to explain the origin of languages. Because it’s such a
universal question, it’s such a universal story – with many variations, of course.
In one Aztec tradition, mute children are each given a unique language by a magical dove.
A Salishan myth tells how an entire village is split over an argument about
duck noises – leading to an unfortunate rift in the entire community. And here you thought YouTube
drama was bad! Over time, they drifted further apart and began speaking different languages.
Other myths blame the confusion of languages on cannibalism, trickster gods, a madness-inducing
famine, and in one tradition, it’s because some jerk ate a couple of hummingbird eggs.
There are as many myths as there are human cultures,
but by far the most famous language origin myth is the Biblical story of the tower of Babel.
According to the Biblical book of Genesis,
a worldwide flood has just wiped out all but 8 people. Noah, his wife, his three sons,
and their wives. God tells them to be fruitful and fill the earth, which they start to do
before humanity clusters in one city and begins building a giant tower to reach to the heavens.
That ticks god off, so he confuses their languages. No longer able to communicate,
they disperse throughout the world.
Now that’s just a brief summary, and there are plenty of comically absurd aspects to that story,
which I’m not going to cover in this video because I already did in my reboot
of Animated Bible Myths – I’ll put a link to that video below in case you missed it.
What I do want to look at in this video is the historicity of this story
and whether there’s any evidence indicating that it actually happened, or if it goes against all of
the archeological findings and scientific data. Immediately after the flood, the Bible’s author
lays out an 11 generation family tree of Noah’s descendants and says how long each of them lived,
so while the author is anonymous, it’s pretty clear this is not a first hand witness to any
of this but they’re writing this down way after the fact. How much later?
Well, we don’t know, but bear in mind that the earliest written fragments of scripture we have
are from almost 2,000 years later. Once they’ve given the who’s who of
Noah’s family tree, the very first story after the flood is the Tower of Babel - which it says
was built in the plane of Shinar. Shinar is mentioned 8 other times throughout the Bible
and we know exactly where it is. It’s right here in Babylonia - specifically this little region
between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It doesn’t technically say who built it,
but it’s widely believed to have been a guy named Nimrod. Because, according to the Bible,
Babel was built shortly after the flood before everyone started to spread out and populate the
earth; and the Bible says that Nimrod built the city of Babylon (where the tower was),
and that he later went on to build several other cities in Shinar, before dispersing to Assyria and
building four more cities there. And this is where the Bible runs into major insurmountable problems.
First off, Nimrod is Noah’s great grandson.
There have only been three generations since the flood wiped out all but 8 people.
Who exactly is he building these cities with? See we know that generation 1 consisted of just
3 couples (Noah’s sons and their wives). Combined, they have 16 boys, and since human biology
dictates that the average natural sex ratio for humans is .95 girls for every boy (and we’ll
be generous and round up), then that gives us a total of 32 people or 16 couples by generation 2.
From here, the Bible only follows three of these people’s lineages. But even if we assumed that
each of these 16 couples had 14 kids – which is over twice the country with the highest total
fertility rate on earth. That gets us only 224 babies for generation 3. And that’s assuming an
infant mortality rate of 0, that no one died in childbirth, and no one died of disease or
starvation scrounging for food after the flood – and remember, this is before modern medicine,
and this entire generation would be severely inbred. It also assumes that everyone had kids,
and that there were no violent deaths. Which is absurd, because based on a wealth of
anthropological data, we know that hunter gatherer societies have traditionally been significantly
more violent than urban societies are today and they had much shorter life expectancies.
So by the time Nimrod arrives on the scene, if we really really fudge the numbers in the
Bible’s favor, then we can grant them up to 264 people on the entire planet
(a more realistic number would be about a third of that – or about 88 people). And yet,
the Bible has Nimrod founding two great kingdoms with 4 sprawling cities each?
We haven’t even looked at the archeological evidence yet, and the Bible’s already debunked
itself. But I’m not done. See, the cities that Nimrod allegedly founded were Babylon, Uruk,
and Nineveh all of which are very well known cities in Mesopotamia. And five other cities
which are listed which historians still aren’t certain as to where exactly they’re located.
Now, here’s the crazy thing. The first three cities. We know A LOT about. And they
weren’t all founded by the same person. In fact, they weren’t even all founded by the same
culture or at the same time period. Uruk is so old, that there are multiple
cities built on top of each other dating back to 5000 BCE.
Nineveh, shows signs of occupation as early as a thousand years earlier in 6000 BCE.
And both of these cities would thrive for
thousands of years before Babylon was built in 2300 BCE.
In fact, 800 years before the founding of Babylon, Uruk was an absolute powerhouse – a
sprawling city so big that archeologists estimated its population at 40,000 residents.
So unless this Nimrod dude lived for 3000 years, then this is a big fat swing and a miss. As
for the tower, sure, some of these cities built stepped towers called ziggurats. And
these may have been the inspiration for the Biblical story written a millennium
and a half later by Jews living in Babylonian captivity. But unlike the Biblical narrative,
these towers weren’t abandoned. They were completed and had temples at the top of them
that were fully operational. There is an unfinished ziggurat at the city of Eridu,
but it was built over the remains of multiple temples since Eridu was NOT a new city when
this ziggurat’s construction began, and it also wasn’t the first ziggurat ever built.
And by the time the ziggurats at Babylon and Eridu were constructed, the ancient Egyptians
had already completed the massive stepped pyramid of Djoser, they had a very distinct language,
and were beginning to record written records in hieroglyphics. Not only that, but archeologists
have found jewelry, precious metals and lapis lazuli as early as 3300 BCE in Naqada, Egypt.
Egypt doesn’t have lapis lazuli mines. There was only one source of this blue rock in the
ancient world – it was mined and traded from the Kokcha river valley in Northeastern Afghanistan.
That means that there were trade routes all the way from Afghanistan to southern Egypt long before
the first ziggurat was ever constructed, and a thousand years before Babylon was even a city.
Now you may be wondering how archeologists are able to tell how old something is and whether or
not these dating methods are actually reliable. So I’ll be covering that in an upcoming video.
But first, I’m not quite done with the Tower of Babel. Since there are so many different ways
to disprove this story, I’m going to have to do a part 2 on it. If you’d like to see either of
those videos, make sure that you’re subscribed to my channel and hit the notification bell so
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