Where is shinar

Their problem is that onsite evidence gleaned from excavation to support the identification of Nagar with Tell Brak is very limited. This would suggest that if Brak is indeed Akkad, Nagar must be another mound in the area. Vaux , p.

We cannot overemphasize what an important location Tell Brak occupied in ancient times, situated as it was in north Mesopotamia in the Khabur 12 river triangle as the Upper Khabur area in Syria is commonly called , in the center of the main east—west route from the Mediterranean to Assyria Semple ; Wright et al.

This is a subject that arises with respect to historical mentions of the wharf of Akkad, at which boats from faraway places docked with goods Stieglitz , p. There is one other note on Akkad, with respect to its location. The rather sudden collapse of the Akkadian Empire occurred in the secular history timeline around BC. A prolonged widespread drought that lasted for about years is known to have started rather suddenly at this time, and is believed to be a reason why this mighty empire disappeared so suddenly Kerr ; Ristvet and Weiss Since the northern Mesopotamian area was considered to have been very hard hit by the drought, evidenced by the population there largely leaving and heading south in droves, placing Akkad in the north would better explain its collapse at the time of the drought 13 Weiss et al.

For a translation of the old Babylonian version of the curse, see The Cursing of Agade Although Akkad had been very powerful in its day, it is not mentioned in the biblical prophecies of the first millennium BC; this is because long before this time Akkad had lost its importance, and was little more than a cult center by then Kuhrt , p.

What excavators are finding at Tell Brak and elsewhere in this part of Syria, northern Iraq, and southeastern Turkey, is causing them to reconsider what most scholars have historically believed, which is that cities and civilization first developed in the south of Mesopotamia and then spread from there to the north see, for instance, Huot ; Sanders ; Van de Mieroop , pp. The advanced state of civilization indicated at Brak means that these long-held beliefs may have to be overturned, and historians may have to rewrite history to show that cities first developed in this northern area Crawford , pp.

In view of the geology of South Mesopotamia, where the land was very low in elevation and the alluvium newly formed after the Ice Age, we would expect that the territory there would not have been ready for habitation as soon as in the north. Earlier development of civilization in the north would therefore seem to make sense.

However, this will not be an easy change of thinking for scholars to make, because the idea that civilization started in the south is well entrenched. We will conclude here that the first city of the Babel kingdom trio, Akkad, is most likely Tell Brak in north Syria.

Erech is mentioned only once in the Bible, in Genesis This was at the time of the building of the temple in Jerusalem; a large number of people from different parts of the Babylonian empire had been transplanted earlier from their native areas to Samaria by Asnappar Ezra The Archevites of Ezra could have been from either place; at the time of the writing of the book of Ezra, no clarification was apparently needed.

There are historical indications of a city in the Khabur triangle area in the north of Syria that could have been the biblical Erech. Urakka is shown on the online map of the Assyrian Empire Parpola , near the modern city of Amuda in Syria, almost on the Turkish border see fig.

There is an ancient mound 6 km 3 miles south of Amuda, called Tell Aqab, that could possibly be this Urakka; excavations carried out on Aqab show it to have roots in great antiquity Davidson and Watkins This would point to the same location near Amuda for both Urakka and Urakdi, and there would be reason to believe that Tell Aqab is the location of Erech of the Bible, again allowing for the many spelling variants of these names.

The famous Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian work of literature originally believed to be largely mythical, contains information that is now considered to be possibly historical Epic of Gilgamesh Calneh is mentioned twice in the KJV Bible, in Genesis and Amos ; in addition, it would appear that Calno of Isaiah is the same city as Calneh of the other two verses. These slightly differing spellings could well be Semitic language variations coming into play, as discussed earlier.

This city in the Genesis triad has had to struggle for recognition of its very existence. Other scholars have refuted the Albright view on various linguistic grounds Westermann , p. And have I not taken Arabia, 17 and Damascus, and Samaria? The identifying clause about the tower was probably inserted to distinguish which city was meant, as there were possibly other cities at that time with similar names, as we shall see. Is not Hamath as Arpad?

Is not Samaria as Damascus? This puts Calneh in the position of being the first in line of these six cities that the Assyrians had attacked and destroyed, giving us a clue as to its location. What we know about this Calneh is that it must have been an important city some time before the time of the prophets Isaiah and Amos, because it is mentioned by them at the same time as other important cities—and both prophets mention Calneh first.

A reading of the context of both passages, in Amos 6 and Isaiah 10, shows that what the prophets are alluding to is the destruction of all these cities, that had already taken place, and is using them as a warning that the king of Assyria would come and do the same to Israel. At the time of these two prophets, the destruction of these named cities would have been well known.

If Calneh was so important, we can reasonably expect that it should appear in ancient history somewhere. Not surprisingly, various biblical writers have been more than willing to supply some ideas on this.

It is claimed that a fairly unimportant city with a name similar to Calneh is located near Aleppo in northwest Syria, south of ancient Carchemish. Another Calneh is reported by travelers of the nineteenth century, this one located near the junction of the Khabur and Euphrates rivers Chesney , p. Toffteen , p. Mitanni controlled a large area of north Syria and Assyria at its peak Oppenheim , pp. The city of Washshukanni is generally believed to be somewhere in the Khabur triangle area, but most sources claim that this city has never been found.

Moore , pp. A city named Sikan i is believed to be Tell Fakhariya because of a statue with a bilingual inscription that was found there Greenfield and Shaffer , p. Astour , p. We note also that Sikani is placed in this location at the headwaters of the Khabur river on the Assyrian Empire map Parpola Washshukanni was finally destroyed by the Assyrians around BC in the standard timeline McIntosh , p.

The matter of determining an accurate timeline now becomes especially pressing. A study of ancient Middle East history shows that, over a couple of thousand years, cities rose and fell constantly, and a city that was very powerful at one time was in total ruins at another.

If we are looking for a city that had been powerful, but then was completely destroyed before the era of the prophets, we need to be sure that we have the chronology right. One of the recurring timeline themes is that the accepted secular history of the ancient Middle East has to be reduced by at least years; this is an idea that was first put forth by the much-maligned Velikovsky , and has been a matter of discussion by various authors since for example, Courville ; Henry Tell el Fakhariya, situated near the headwaters of the Khabur River close to the Turkish border, is considered by this author to be the likely location of Calneh.

Scholars believe that this Tell could be Wassukanni, capital of the ancient kingdom of Mitanni; and also the later Assyrian city, Sikani. Photo: Sebastian Hageneuer Tell el Fakhariya We will therefore conclude that Tell Fakhariya is the most likely location of Calneh, the third of the Babel trio of cities.

Interestingly, some of the Jews who were taken into captivity may have been settled very close to Calneh, as Tell Fakhariya is only 2 km 1 mile east of Tell Halaf; 19 indeed, the captives may have been as little as 50 km 31 miles from the site of Babel itself see fig. This now gives us three cities that occupy three points of a triangle in the area known as the Upper Khabur valley see fig.

We might reasonably expect that the Babel Tower and City were somewhere inside this triangle, perhaps equally distant from Erech, Akkad, and Calneh.

It is widely believed that the Tower of Babel was a ziggurat, also called a stepped pyramid; a quick search on the internet will bring up any number of sites that state this for example, Livingstone There is good reason to believe this, because the many ziggurats that are known around the world 20 clearly point back to a time when there was an original ziggurat, the knowledge of which traveled with people as they spread out to populate the earth. For creationists, who believe the Bible story in Genesis 11 literally, this original ziggurat has to be the Tower of Babel.

The question is what this original ziggurat looked like. The ancient ziggurats in South Mesopotamia that we know today, widely touted as being most likely what the Tower of Babel looked like and even that one of them was the actual Tower of Babel, as we have seen earlier , actually date a lot later than Babel. The base of the Tower was most likely square, as were all the other, receding levels. A plain reading of Scripture would lead to the conclusion that the tower was to be very high; this would mean that the base would have been quite large to sustain its height.

There might have been a temple or shrine on top, since many ziggurats do have this, such as the ziggurat at Ur Oates , pp. We also do not know how many able-bodied men were available to do the building work; estimates of the total population at the time of the dispersion have varied greatly, from under a thousand Morris to 65, Tower of Babel , to name two.

Whatever the number was, this author takes the view that the long-lived people at Babel were Neanderthals, and thus known to be physically very strong Cuozzo ; Habermehl ; Trinkaus ; they would have been able to do much harder physical work than humans today.

Drawing by Holger Behr Chichen Itza The builders at Babel were working on a city as well as a tower, as we see in Genesis 4, 5 and 8 note that the city was mentioned first in this phrase, all three times. If we study the ziggurats everywhere in the world today, we see that they are almost never solitary structures. They are usually accompanied by a large number of temples, shrines, altars, palaces and other associated buildings, both religious and administrative, with the entire area enclosed by a wall.

These geographically widespread pyramid complexes tell us that the custom of building this kind of religious and administrative center must be patterned after the original model at Babel. We would therefore look for remnants of a large number of structures that the people were building alongside the Tower itself at the Babel site.

The Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, Mexico, is shown above with some of the structures that accompany it. Photo by Ineuw Pyramid of the Moon This is a very durable material, and because of this, remnants of the Tower may well have survived the ages. Mud bricks were used in Israel for other construction, as for instance, in the tells of Dan, Hazor, Megiddo and others Schaffer There is one other thing that we need to look for, and that is ruins that are the oldest on earth we assume here that all pre-Flood constructions were totally destroyed in the worldwide Flood.

The subject of dating the Babel site can get quite confused if other means of dating are used, rather than the statements in the Genesis record. For instance, scholars generally believe that going back to BC using the traditional secular time scale , only unbaked bricks were used for architecture, along with gypsum or mud as mortar; and that it was only later, about to BC, that baked brick and bitumen which were expensive came into use for luxurious buildings such as palaces, temples, and ziggurats.

On this basis, the Tower of Babel would be dated by them to the period of the well-known ziggurats of southern Mesopotamia, thus posing another set of chronological problems to be solved imaginatively such as explaining how there were many peoples living in various places, speaking different languages, at the same time that the Tower of Babel was being built see Seely ; Singer , pp.

Obviously, according to Genesis, the Tower of Babel had to have predated all other ziggurats; indeed, the Babel city and tower would date the same as the original cities of Erech, Akkad, and Calneh, with all of them being the earliest cities on earth.

The showy gopuram towers of south India, that act as gateways to their Hindu temple complexes, display a recognizable ziggurat architectural style embellished by ornate Indian sculpture. The tower shown above belongs to the Srivilliputhur Andal temple complex in the town of Srivilliputhur, 74 km 46 miles from Madurai, India; it is the one that is shown on the government seal of Tamil Nadu Srivilliputhur Divya Desam In ancient times there was more rain there than now, and the rivers of this area would also have been watered from the northern Turkish mountains and the springs in their foothills, even as they are now Wright et al.

Bitumen would have been readily available to the Babel builders. According to Moorey , pp. There were oak trees in this region in ancient times Deckers and Riehl ; these would have served for building material, as well as fuel to bake brick and process the bitumen. An alternative fuel could have been the bitumen itself; this is noted by Moorey , pp. The center of this triangle of cities is roughly km 99 miles west and somewhat south of Mt.

Cudi, the mountain considered by this author to be the most likely one where the Ark landed Habermehl This would have been a reasonable distance for the people to have travelled to the spot where they decided to settle. However, if the ocean shoreline at the time was further south at the escarpment between Hit and Samarra, as discussed earlier, we see that the people did not choose to live near the seashore, as mankind has done in the many years since.

Indeed, there are no other currently known ziggurats near the Khabur triangle area at all; the nearest known ziggurat is the one at Tell al Rimah Karana , about km 80 miles to the east Dalley , p. Those who might consider it likely that a land with many ziggurats such as South Mesopotamia would be a more probable location for the Tower of Babel perhaps because the Babel tower would have inspired the later ones should remember that the people were dispersed before the one tower that they were building was finished.

It is therefore equally likely that the Tower would be found in a place where there are no other ziggurats located nearby. The memory of that original tower would have gone out from Babel with its builders in all directions, however, and we see this in the many ziggurats that were built later on all over the world. New ideas do not gain ready acceptance, and it can be expected that this one will be no exception.

Because thousands of years have gone by since the Tower of Babel was built, 25 we could expect that the remains would be in ruins today.

The Bible does not say how much of the Tower had been built when God stopped its building, but clearly it and its city were not finished. In addition, there are extra-biblical stories that tell how God destroyed the Tower by wind, for example, The Book of Jubilees , and the Greek Sibyl as quoted by Josephus a Antiquities 1. Although information from these sources does not carry the authority of Scripture, it does, however, leave open the possibility God destroyed a good part of the Tower.

Assuming that the Tower was a ziggurat with a square base, we would look for a large square area of ruins with remnants of the city complex nearby. But would any of it be visible above ground? This is where the geology of this part of the world needs to be considered. Study and testing have shown that there has been flooding of the Upper Khabur plain over the years, from the end of the Ice Age up to now, and thick deposits of these flood sediments have built up Deckers and Riehl ; Oguchi, Hori, and Oguchi In any case, because of the sedimentation buildup, plus not knowing how high the ruins are, it is difficult to say whether or not there would be any visible mound today at the location of the Tower of Babel.

The assumption is made that people did not ever return to Babel to live; at least, the Bible gives no indication of this. Therefore it is unlikely that a mound would have formed in the traditional manner from successive levels of habitation.

According to the biblical account, we would look for ruins that contain baked brick held together by bitumen. Genesis does not say whether these materials were used only for the outer walls, or whether they were used for the entire tower through and through; ziggurats of later times usually used the more expensive baked bricks only for the exterior, and then filled the interior with cheaper material such as mud brick Saggs , p.

However, from the wording of the Genesis account, the people planned to stay in Shinar and not scatter; this would imply that they wanted the tower to be a long-lasting structure. For this, they would need the baked brick to be used throughout, as it is well known that the mudbrick-filled ziggurats did not last and had to be repeatedly rebuilt Saggs , p. If in later times the populace of the area looted the Babel site of bricks to use for their own buildings, there could be little of the Tower and City left, the taking of bricks from a deserted site for use elsewhere being a time-honored tradition in the Middle East.

In Babylon, for instance, the fine baked facing bricks of the ziggurat Etemenanki of Nebuchadnezzar found their way into many peasant dwellings of the area Leick , p. However, if Babel was considered a taboo site and not to be touched lest the gods got angry, or alternatively was entirely hidden by layers of silt, this looting of its bricks may not have happened. The earliest post-Flood people most likely possessed superior technology with respect to construction; this knowledge could well have come through the Flood from antediluvian times Chittick , passim.

Thus, the Tower would have been built with the advanced building skills that those earliest people had. Their evolutionary worldview demands that the earliest structures be the most primitive and in any case they do not believe that the Babel story is more than a myth inspired by later ziggurats. The spade of the archaeologist will be crucial in helping us find out more information about the area where Babel and the three cities of our triangle lie.

One archaeological effect of the Gulf war and the continuing political unrest in Iraq, where traditionally a great deal of excavation had been carried out, has been to favor increased excavation in places like North Syria, because of the dangers of working in Iraq. Previous to that war, relatively little excavation had been done in the Khabur triangle area compared to the very large number of mounds waiting for excavation with a few exceptions such as Tell Brak Akkermans and Schwartz , p. However, other obstacles may lie in wait for those wishing to get a permit to excavate at a new site.

These may include a Syrian shortage of available government staff for placing the required permanent representative at every dig; and also the belief on the part of some that no new digs should be allowed unless the site is threatened Matthews As outlined in this paper, we have a fair idea where we should look for Babel.

But it will still take a search mission to actually find it. Other methods actually peer into the ground without digging it up, making great amounts of information available to archaeologists quickly and inexpensively, compared to the relatively slow and limited process of standard archaeological dig methods.

There are a number of different kinds of these remote sensing tools, and they are sometimes used in combination to find a given site. According to Kvamme , pp. For an excellent history and overview of the subject of satellite remote sensing, and discussion of at least a dozen different satellite image types, see Parcak Menze, Muhl and Sherratt discuss the detection of North Mesopotamian tell sites as low as 6 m 19 ft high by satellite remote sensing.

A recent technology using satellite QuickBird imagery has been useful in locating underground archaeological remains Masini and Lasaponara Of special interest is that Masini and Lasaponara have analyzed QuickBird data to produce a detailed visualization of a large buried pyramid near the Cahuachi archaeological site in Peru Lorenzi High-resolution Google Earth satellite imagery has become a useful and inexpensive tool for archaeologists; it is being used at Tell Brak, for example Jarus We could expect from the above discussion that the area where the Tower and City remnants lie might be visible by satellite photography because baked brick is quite different in consistency and composition from soil, and is easier to see than mudbrick structures, which do not differentiate from the surrounding soil as easily.

It will be easier to spot the Tower site if the Tower foundation is not very far below the surface, or if there are some ruins above ground.

With these modern remote sensing tools at hand, we can say that the chances of locating the actual Babel site are higher than they might have been in the past. It has been shown in this paper that, based on biblical, historical, geological, and geographical evidences, the Tower of Babel was most likely built in the Khabur River triangle of North Syria, somewhere inside a triangle marked at its points by Tell Brak, Tell Aqab near Amuda and Tell Fakhariyah; and could not have been located anywhere in southern Mesopotamia, as has been traditionally believed.

There is a possibility that we may yet find the actual site of the Tower of Babel, but this will require further research as well as onsite archaeological excavation. Ainsworth, W.

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Uruk b. Early period. A Sumer. In all lists it is the tenth who survives the Flood and all display a longevity which, in the Babylonian accounts with ages of more than 20, years each, make the life-span of Methuselah years; Gen look insignificant.

That they were historic personages cannot be doubted since epigraphic and architectural remains attesting their presence are associated with them. The Classical period b. The Sumer. There is evidence for a primitive form of democracy which soon clashed with the growing power of the priests and temple, but eventually outclassed the latter through the control of military forces.

The larger cities, Ur, Lagash, Kish, and Umma were continual rivals for overall power. The royal graves found at Ur belong to this dynasty and bear witness to the wealth of this time. After a dispute with Umma had been settled by the intervention of Mesilim of Kish, Lagash became the dominant center.

Eannatum was followed by Urukagina who by social reforms and legislation sought to curb the growing bureauracy which bore hardly on the poor, the widows and the fatherless. Despite his efforts to restore the rights of the individual, his people failed to withstand the pressures of Lugalzaggesi of Umma who took over the city and was himself soon thereafter conquered by the powerful Semite, Sargon of Agade who thus brought Sumer.

The Sumerian renaissance. A period of splendor under the Sem. This was marked by order in Sumer. His achitectural activities extended beyond Ur, which he virtually rebuilt, to Uruk, Eridu, and Nippur. In each place he built a ziggurat and rebuilt fallen temples.

Meanwhile a contemporary, Gudea of Lagash, marched to Syria and Anatolia and brought back building materials to embellish his own city.

When Ur-Nammu died in battle his son Shulgi succeeded to the throne. He continued the political and administrative reforms begun by his father and for forty-seven years fought the hill tribes to the N. This does not seem to have affected the Mesopotamian belief and practice, whereby the king always thought of himself as the vice-regent and servant of the chief god of his city to whom he was ever responsible for truth and justice.

Although the courses have changed dramatically since ancient times we know the area was nearly - miles long and nearly miles across. The rivers were so large that the land was considered an "island" that was between them.

But the heart of ancient Mesopotamia was in the northwest where the Euphrates made a huge bend at the northern portion of the Tigris as shown in the map above. The Tower of Babel.

The Bible records in Genesis 11 that all mankind came to the Land of Shinar and make a name for themselves under the leadership of Nimrod, so they built a tower at Babel, a tower that would reach to heaven.