Its character is very simple: to use the words of
Prof. Sayce, "It takes us back to the age when the gods were
believed to dwell in the visible sky, and when man, therefore,
did his best to rear his altars as near them as possible." And
this eminent divine might have added that it takes us back also to
a time when it was thought that Jehovah, in order to see the tower
fully, was obliged to come down from his seat above the firmament.
As to the real reasons for the building of the towers which
formed so striking a feature in Chaldean architecture--any one
of which may easily have given rise to the explanatory myth which
found its way into our sacred books--there seems a substantial
agreement among leading scholars that they were erected primarily
as parts of temples, but largely for the purpose of astronomical
observations, to which the Chaldeans were so devoted, and to
which their country, with its level surface and clear atmosphere,
was so well adapted. As to the real cause of the ruin of such
structures, one of the inscribed cylinders discovered in recent
times, speaking of a tower which most of the archaeologists
identify with the Tower of Babel, reads as follows:
"The building named the Stages of the Seven Spheres, which
was the Tower of Borsippa, had been built by a former king.
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