Anne Habermehl, B.Sc.
25 Madison St
Cortland, NY 13045 USA
The many known ziggurats (stepped pyramids) around the world greatly resemble each other, even though the peoples that built them were from widely different cultures. This would appear to indicate a common origin for their design. The obvious conclusion is that all these ziggurats are patterned after the Tower of Babel that was built in Shinar soon after the worldwide Flood.
After the Babel dispersion, men built ziggurats wherever they settled, smaller ones at first, and then larger ones as their population and resources increased (we know this from excavations). Throughout the millennia, there has been some evolution of the ziggurat design and concept, but it is surprising how recognizable its basic elements have remained into fairly recent times.
The driving force behind the building of the original Babel tower was rebellion against God, along with commitment to worshiping Satan. There must have been a pagan religion practiced by the early people who built the Tower of Babel, because around the world we find ample historical evidence of the pagan religions of the builders of the ziggurats. Indeed, neither the original Babel tower nor the ziggurats that it spawned were solitary constructions. There was always a religious complex attached, an area of temples and altars and other associated structures (in Genesis 11 we note that they were building both a tower and a “city”). The nature of the Babel pagan religion can be deduced from an examination of the similar pagan forms of worship that accompanied the worldwide ziggurats: snake worship, sun and moon worship, obscene fertility rites, worship of multiple gods and goddesses, human sacrifice and more.
The relatively short time that it took the post-Flood people to rebel, to design and build the tower complex, and to fall into the various forms of pagan worship would seem to indicate that this rebellion was a return of the pre-Flood wickedness that had caused God to destroy the world by flood. We can wonder whether similar ziggurat complexes and the same type of pagan worship had existed before the Flood. Certainly, the worldwide worship of snakes would seem to indicate a link between Babel and the serpent of the Garden of Eden.
Judging by the enormous amount of labor required to build these structures, we see how important the ziggurats and temple complexes were to the rebellious peoples who built them. This greatly puzzles secular historians and archaeologists, who recognize that these structures are not temples or tombs, but cannot work out what their true purpose was. Indeed, the very existence of the ziggurats presents a problem to these scholars, whose worldview does not allow for early “primitive” man to have been capable of such feats of engineering. They also cannot explain how all these worldwide ziggurats happen to resemble each other so much.
Previously unknown ziggurats are coming to light constantly, and we can expect that there are many other as-yet-undiscovered ziggurats around the world, including those that are in ruins or buried under later religious structures.
The worldwide ziggurats, along with their temple complexes and accompanying pagan religions, constitute proof that the biblical story of the Babel dispersion actually happened, literally, as the Bible tells it.