The Tower of Babel built in the second millennium BC
in the ancient city of Babylon in Iraq
depicted by artists through the ages
and a powerful symbol of both myth and reality
When people think of the Tower of Babel
they often think of this painting which is here behind me
blown up much larger than life-size
and it's how the Dutch painter Bruegel in the sixteenth century
brought to life this amazing edifice which has towered over the world
since genesis was first put to paper
This really is a painting one has to look at very carefully
It's full of extraordinary things not least the fact
that part of the tower seems to be completely finished
and part of it still in a rudimentary state
and you might imagine that it would all be rudimentary
and then all finished at once
but if you've ever worked on a big building project
you'll know that isn't the case
What people don't often know however
is that the Tower of Babel itself as imagined here
was once a real building called the Ziggurat
in the centre of the capital Babylon
ruled over by Nebuchadnezzar II
And parallel to this historical account
the Old Testament tells us that the tower
built so that its top may reach onto heaven
became a symbol of human ambition
when the whole world had just one language
Nothing remains on the ground of Nebuchadnezzar's
huge edifice the Ziggurrat
nothing remains at all, all the bricks have vanished
But when the surveyors investigated they established
that the ground plan was about 91 meters squared
so it was a huge building and when
all the evidence is put together it's been concluded
that the building itself must have been about 17 meters tall
And on this model there are human beings put in to scale
just to give it an idea exactly how huge it was
and how this building in its hay day towered over people's lives
just like the Tower of Babel does when you read the Bible
The Bible tells us that man was to be punished
for building his tower to the heavens
and that punishment was to be the creation
of different languages so that
humans would be divided and unable to understand each other
My fascination with the Tower of Babel began from about 1990 onward
looking at for example Bruegel's famous painting
Anne Desmet is one of the contemporary artists in the exhibition
who has an enduring fascination with this image
The Tower of Babel story is significant in that
I find it as a symbol of human aspiration and folly
that combination of the ambition of
human ideals and human dreams
and then perhaps overreaching themselves sometimes
but there's still something wonderful in that ambition
and I think there's something in our own generation
when there are moments of apocalypse
9/11 was another one obviously an obvious one
but it seems to make you think back
to that historical tradition of the Tower of Babel
it seems still a very relevant image for today