by Richard Farr
The most magnificent version of the ziggurat at Babylon—the one that best fits Daniel’s description—was finished around 600 BCE by King Nebuchadrezzar II. Just two centuries later, only a ruin remained. Alexander the Great pulled that down, planned to rebuild yet again, then got distracted by a sudden itch to invade India. He did get back to Babylon—but only for long enough to be poisoned by one of his own generals. The “Tower of Babel” never rose again.
The origin of the book of Genesis
Daniel gives just the one-sentence version of a complicated and controversial history. But most scholars seem to think that most of Genesis, including the Babel story, was written around 550 BCE, during the Babylonian Exile.
Noah, Utnapishtim, and all the others
The Nineveh tablets are from about 1200 BCE. The “Noah Version” of the story was first written down in roughly 600 BCE, or possibly as early as 800 BCE. So Utnapishtim precedes Noah by at least as much as Shakespeare precedes us. The oldest Sumerian flood narrative, featuring Ziusudra, goes back at least another five hundred years before that.
Akkad and Akkadian cuneiform
Cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) writing was developed by the Sumerians well before 3000 BCE, and was later adapted for many other languages, including Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Elamite, and Old Persian.
Why God destroyed the Tower
People often think the Babel story is all about the height of the Tower: God has a migraine because he thinks we are threatening to climb up, like Jack on his beanstalk, and invade heaven itself. This idea is in some versions of the story—but all we get from Genesis 11:6 is this: “And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” In modern English: They’ve understood how powerful their unity makes them, and now they’ll stop at nothing. It’s not clear from this exactly what the divine worry about Babel really is. You might ask, What’s so bad about being united and building cities? But the Bible does not answer that question.
Obscenity and broadcasting
For an amusing account of our irrational attitudes to obscenity, especially as they relate to free speech, I recommend chapter 7 of Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”
“The same idea comes up all over the world in different forms”
In the case of language origin myths, at least, there are many, many examples with remarkable similarities.
In The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond describes a myth from New Guinea involving a murderer who escapes into a tree with his relatives. When the relatives of his victim haul down the treetop using vines, the vines snap, and everyone in the tree is flung far and wide. When they land, they set up separate communities that have mutually unintelligible languages.
According to Andrew Dickinson White’s A History of the Warfare Between Science and Theology, there’s a Hindu story that neatly combines Babel and Eden. A tree grows too close to heaven, and the creator-god Brahma punishes it by turning it into many little trees; they are not big enough to shade all the people, who therefore divide into separate groups and come to have different languages.
The rediscovery of Troy
The Iliad, Homer’s ancient epic about the siege of Troy, was widely believed to be a true story, well into the Middle Ages. It was only later that people started to get more “realistic” and dismiss it all as mythical. It took the archaeologists Charles Maclaren and Heinrich Schliemann, among others, to get us back to the more improbable, more romantic truth.
Noah’s flood and the Black Sea theory
Geologists are pretty clear that a catastrophic flood, around 7,500– 6,500 BCE, greatly increased the Black Sea’s size: the Mediterranean broke through a narrow gap, spilling hundreds of cubic miles of seawater into what had been a lake. This may well have something to do with some flood mythology. But geologists disagree about whether this event happened suddenly or not, and anyway it’s a poor source for Noah’s story. Most of the flooding happened in the north, near Odessa in modern Ukraine. Mount Ararat is two hundred miles southeast of the Black Sea, in an area that didn’t flood at all.
The perhaps-not-mythical unicorn
In the interview, Morag is interrupted just as she’s about to discuss the theory that the myth of the unicorn comes from actual human contact with Elasmotherium, a one-horned rhino that went extinct perhaps fifteen thousand years ago. It appears to be depicted in cave paintings, for instance at Rouffignac in France. Elasmotherium doesn’t look a whole lot like a modern “unicorn,” but stories do get garbled over fifteen thousand years.
Plato, mathematics, and the soul
Plato was impressed by the spooky power of mathematics, and his big philosophical idea is essentially the one that Iona, like most mathematicians, finds attractive. Maybe the world we experience through our senses isn’t the real world at all, but rather a kind of illusion, or at best a mere shadow cast by the real real world—a realm hidden behind or beneath or beyond our experience that we can approach only through pure reason.
PART II: THE AKKADIAN VERSION
“A stuffed giraffe called Lamarck”
Joke. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) was responsible for the pre-Darwinian idea that animals evolve by inheriting “acquired characteristics”; thus, giraffes stretch their necks to get food, and giraffes with long necks give birth to offspring with long necks. This isn’t true, but it isn’t stupid either, and in fact Darwin himself didn’t wholly reject Lamarck’s theory. He just thought it was less important than the mechanism he proposed: natural selection.
Cicero at Rhodes
Cicero became one of the most influential writers and statesmen of all time, but he was only twenty-six in 80 BCE, and just starting out as a lawyer. When an enemy of the dictator Sulla was dragged into court and framed for the death of his own father, Cicero successfully defended him. Sulla’s anger made Cicero fear for his own safety, and he went into a two-year self-imposed exile, visiting Athens, Asia Minor (Turkey), and then Rhodes. The connection I make later between his shopping habits, his return home, and an ancient shipwreck seems intriguingly plausible given the dates and the geography, but there’s no other evidence for it.
The “guy named Posidonius,” with whom Cicero met and studied at Rhodes, was in fact one of the most celebrated geniuses of the entire ancient world, spoken of in the same breath as Aristotle. He wrote voluminously on almost every subject and also traveled widely—so the project of collecting diskoi from all over the known world, which I ascribe to him here, is not so implausible. Alas, nearly all his writings are lost, so most people have never heard of him.
William Henry Seward
Seward was Lincoln’s close friend and secretary of state, and in his own right a brave and persistent opponent of slavery. He also negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia. The statue in Seattle’s Volunteer Park, which I walk past nearly every day, shows Seward with the 1867 Alaska treaty under his arm. The Wikipedia article on Seward originally claimed, plausibly, that the statue faces Alaska. My greatest contribution to human knowledge so far has been to correct this; in fact he faces south, with Alaska somewhere over his right shoulder.
Rijndael encryption
Pronounced RIN-doll, and also called AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), this is a widely used symmetric key algorithm for high-level encryption. But I only pretend to understand it, so please look it up and try for yourself.
Star Trek and plastic foreheads
Before you join in the scoffing—which I’ve been doing for years—check out Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris’s book Life’s Solution, in which he argues (contra Stephen Jay Gould and most biologists) that if complex life evolved independently on other planets, it would probably look a lot like us. Maybe the Trekkie scenario is right after all. Live long and get this superglue off my fingers.
Sherlock Holmes and the impos
sible
The famous line is, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (From The Sign of Four, 1890.) Like many things Holmes says, this seems to impress a lot of people—but then a lot of people don’t stop to think.
For Holmes to “eliminate the impossible” is for him to judge that some explanations on his list cannot be true. But how can he know this, when his own knowledge is finite, and therefore the process by which he comes to such judgments must itself be fallible?
Here’s an infamous example of the problem. In 1835, the French philosopher Auguste Comte announced with great confidence that “we shall never be able by any means to study the chemical composition of stars.” (Savor that: never by any means.) Must have sounded like a safe bet, at the time, but German optical theorist Joseph Fraunhofer was already working on the process—stellar spectroscopy—that within a generation would allow us to do just that.
As this suggests, the “Comte problem” is really two separate problems for Sherlock. He’s wrong to think he can ever be confident that an option on his list is impossible. But he’s also wrong to think that what remains, after discounting the “impossible,” is a complete list: what about all the options that his lack of knowledge (or imagination) has caused him to exclude from the list in the first place?
Watson may seem stupid compared to Sherlock, but he’s mainly just weak-kneed. He should have fought back a bit harder against literature’s most successful intellectual bully.
Archimedes, “naked and roaring”
There’s no evidence for the famous story about him leaping out of the bath, but it’s irresistible in any of its several forms. According to the Roman writer Vitruvius, the king asked Archimedes to determine whether the new royal crown had been adulterated with silver, or was pure gold. Archimedes puzzled for a long time over how to do this, and the “eureka moment” was realizing that because a crown of pure gold is denser, it will displace less water than an alloy crown of identical weight. Verdict: probably fiction. Galileo himself heard the story and dismissed it on the grounds that the difference in volume would have been too small for Archimedes to measure. Others think Archimedes was merely noticing that any submerged object displaces a volume of liquid equal to its own volume. A third idea, which gets my vote, is that the “eureka moment” was really Archimedes discovering his great principle of buoyancy: not just that an object displaces its own volume, but that it is buoyed upward by a force equal to the weight of the liquid it displaces.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter which version is true: any way you look at it, Archimedes was so far ahead of everyone else that he was probably from another planet.
“Lowered down to us from heaven”
That kingship—and the whole notion of submitting to the authority of a ruler—was a “gift” from the gods, is an idea from a real source: the Sumerian King List, a document that survives in various forms and fragments, notably on the cuneiform Weld-Blundell Prism in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.
The date of Atlantis
According to the version in Plato’s Critias, it all happened nine thousand years before Solon—but it has been suggested that Solon got his Egyptian wrong, and the priest really said “nine hundred.” It needs to be nine hundred to a thousand, roughly, for my purposes—but that’s fine, since these dates all have pretty much the flavor of “like, dude, a really long time ago.”
PART III: HOME OF THE GODS
Casaubon, “a character in a novel”
Middlemarch, by George Eliot. “MDCCCLXXI” is 1871—the year Eliot began to publish the book in a serial version.
Krakatoa, “a zit compared to Thera”
The destruction of Krakatoa in 1883 unleashed two or three cubic miles of rock and ash, triggered tsunamis that killed thirty-six thousand people, made a noise that was heard as far away as Australia and the island of Réunion, and produced a shock wave that traveled seven times around the world. Thera’s eruption was thought to have been “only” three or four times that big, until a study in 2006 raised the estimated size of the ejection to around fourteen cubic miles. If that’s right, Thera was the third-largest explosion in recorded history, beaten only by Tambora, Indonesia (1815) and Changbaishan, China (ca. 1000).
The Antikythera wreck(s)
While I was planning, researching, and writing this book, several coincidences occurred that you probably won’t believe. The most amazing to me was this: in the summer of 2012, I decided for fictional purposes that there would turn out to be two ships (skaphe) at the Antikythera site; three or four months later, a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution led a new dive investigation at the site which found evidence suggesting exactly that. For photos of the 2012 dive, use the search phrase “Return to Antikythera” and look for the photo archive of The Guardian.
Eratosthenes and the size of the Earth
Eratosthenes’s calculation was based on reports that there was a deep well at the town of Syene (modern Aswan), in the bottom of which you could see the sun’s reflection at noon on the solstice. (In other words, the sun was directly overhead.) He also knew that the sun was about seven degrees off vertical at that same time where he lived, in Alexandria. After estimating the distance from Aswan to Alexandria, he concluded that the earth must be about twenty-five thousand miles in circumference. This staggeringly good estimate was partly due to accurate measurement, and partly due to luck: some of the errors in his data cancel each other out.
The Antikythera Mechanism
Professional archaeologists brought many treasures from the Antikythera wreck to the surface, including a blue glass bowl that somehow, miraculously, spent almost two thousand years underwater without sustaining more than a few scratches. But the “mangled chunk of metal” was so mangled that for a long time after the salvage operation it sat in a warehouse without anyone noticing that it might be unusual or interesting.
When they did notice, it appeared, absurdly, to be a mechanical clock, like something that belonged on the mantelpiece in a Victorian living room. It had wheels, hands, levers, dials, and more than thirty interconnecting gears. After the archaeologists had finished with the X-rays and reconstructions, it turned out to be the world’s first—or first-known—analog computer.
EPILOGUE
Seeing in the Dark
It seemed appropriate to steal the title of this section from Timothy Ferris’s excellent book on the culture of amateur astronomy. Informative, lyrically beautiful science writing—read him.
SOME DATES
Most of these are accurate, at least approximately. A few are mere conjecture. One or two are unmitigated fiction.
7000–6000 BCE: A new civilization emerges in the eastern Mediterranean, at the island known as Strongyle. Strict social hierarchies emerge for the first time, along with city-building, written language, and the first organized religion. For at least a thousand years, the civilization develops in isolation; then a powerful priestly caste begins exporting its language, and its revolutionary new religious and cultural ideas, across the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.
5000 BCE (not, as previously believed, 1600 BCE): Approximate date that the so-called Phaistos Disks were made, according to William Calder’s measurements.
5000–4000 BCE: First wave of city-building, combined with massive population increases, across the ancient world.
4000–3200 BCE: True writing emerges in Sumer, the Indus Valley, early Minoan Crete, and Egypt.
3000–1200 BCE: Minoan culture flourishes on Crete.
2800–2500 BCE: City of Akkad founded in Mesopotamia; Akkadian (the parent language of both Assyrian and Babylonian) emerges as a distinct language; explosive growth in the number of languages in the region, including Assyrian, Babylonian, Minoan, Proto-Elamite, and possibly many others that are now lost.
2700 BCE: Gilgamesh is king of Uruk, in Mesopotamia; the Elamite civilization and language emerge on the northeast c
oast of the Persian Gulf.
2560 BCE: Great Pyramid of Khufu built at Giza in Egypt.
2300 BCE: Akkadian Empire under Sargon the Great controls most of central Mesopotamia.
1770 BCE: Babylon is at the height of its power under Hammurabi; a massive influx of people to Strongyle begins, from Greece, Crete, North Africa, and as far away as Mesopotamia.
1628 BCE: Destruction of Strongyle.
1327 BCE: Death of Tutankhamun; approximate date of the original ziggurat at Babylon.
1250–1150 BCE: The Bronze Age Collapse, which includes the destruction of Troy and about fifty other cities, causes a massive drop in population throughout the eastern Mediterranean; the Nineveh “Deluge Tablets” from the Epic of Gilgamesh are dated from this time; the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley also suffers massive population loss at this time, and then collapses.
600 BCE: The great ziggurat at Babylon is rebuilt for the last time.
560–550 BCE: Authorship of the book of Genesis by Jewish scholars during their exile in Babylon; the Roman statesman Solon visits Egypt and hears the story of Atlantis.
399 BCE: The Athenian soldier, historian, and philosopher Xenophon takes part in the epic retreat from Mesopotamia of the Army of the Ten Thousand and describes his experiences in the original Anabasis; back in Athens, the philosopher Socrates, a relentless critic of Athenian society, is executed for “corrupting the youth” and “teaching false gods.”
360 BCE: Socrates’s student, Plato, mentions Solon’s story about Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias; meanwhile he is developing his massively influential idea that the “real” world is in fact an illusion, or at best a mere shadow of something else.