For all the means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange we’ve estab­lished between the cul­tures of the world, no mat­ter how dis­tant they may be from one anoth­er, we still have no tru­ly uni­ver­sal sin­gle human lan­guage. The rea­son could date back to antiq­ui­ty, when we first attempt­ed a grand col­lec­tive project: that of build­ing a tow­er that would reach the heav­ens. Deter­mined to pun­ish our effron­tery, God not only destroyed the work in progress, but ren­dered our lan­guages mutu­al­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble in order to hin­der any fur­ther attempts to do it again. Or at least that’s how one sto­ry goes.

You may not sub­scribe to a lit­er­al read­ing of the account of the Tow­er of Babel as it appears in the Bible’s Book of Gen­e­sis, but accord­ing to the Hochela­ga video above, the struc­ture does have a fair­ly plau­si­ble basis in his­to­ry.

It could be a leg­endary ver­sion of Ete­me­nan­ki, a Mesopotami­an zig­gu­rat built to hon­or the god Mar­duk at such a scale that it inspired tall tales, as it were, spread far and wide in the ancient world, such as the rumor that its con­struc­tion required mobi­liz­ing the man­pow­er of all human­i­ty. But it real­ly did exist, as evi­denced by its ruins dis­cov­ered at the site of the ancient city of Baby­lon — which, in Hebrew, was called Babel.

A cuneiform-cov­ered tablet con­ve­nient­ly found at the same loca­tion describes a con­struc­tion project of Ete­me­nanki’s size as using mate­ri­als like bitu­men and baked brick, which aligns with bib­li­cal details of the Tow­er of Babel, as do the Greek his­to­ri­an Herodotus’s ref­er­ences to its lay­out and struc­ture. Also rel­e­vant is the Baby­lo­ni­ans’ 587 BC inva­sion of Jerusalem, which brought cap­tives to the cap­i­tal. It’s hard­ly impos­si­ble that some of those dis­placed Jews would have the loom­ing Ete­me­nan­ki in mind when they went on to write the his­to­ries that would ulti­mate­ly find their way into the Hebrew Bible. They may have had no hope of return­ing to their home­land, but they must, at least, have felt rea­son­ably cer­tain that Mar­duk’s days were num­bered.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Map of All the Coun­tries Men­tioned in the Bible: What The Coun­tries Were Called Then, and Now

Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Northrop Frye Teach­es “The Bible and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture”: All 25 Lec­tures Free Online

A Sur­vival Guide to the Bib­li­cal Apoc­a­lypse

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Wit­ty, Eru­dite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Did Psy­che­del­ic Mush­rooms Appear in Medieval Chris­t­ian Art?: A Video Essay

Vis­it the Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Cur­rent­ly, the tallest build­ings in New York City are One World Trade Cen­ter, Cen­tral Park Tow­er, and 111 West 57th Street. All of them were com­plet­ed in the twen­ty-twen­ties, and all of them have attract­ed com­ment, some­times admir­ing, some­times bewil­dered. But none of them, fair to say, yet exude the romance of the Wool­worth Build­ing, the Chrysler Build­ing, and the Empire State Build­ing, all of which opened before World War II, and each of which once had its day as the tallest build­ing in the world. Here to explain these endur­ing “big stars of the New York City sky­line” is archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Tony Robins, who in the half-hour video above tells the sto­ry of all their impor­tant details, inside and out.

In fact, this video comes as the pilot episode of “Obses­sion to Detail,” a new series from Dai­ly Mail Busi­ness YouTube chan­nel. The Mail may not come right to mind as a source of archi­tec­tur­al com­men­tary, but in this case, they’ve found the right man for the job.

He knows that the Wool­worth Build­ing’s lob­by con­tains gar­goyle-like car­i­ca­tures of its archi­tect and client; that the Chrysler Build­ing once had a pri­vate club on its 66th, 67th, and 68th floors whose bar had both a paint­ing of the New York sky­line and a view of the real thing; that the 86-sto­ry Empire State Build­ing is pro­mot­ed as hav­ing 102 sto­ries only by includ­ing its unused diri­gi­ble moor­ing mast and sub-base­ments; and that what we now call Art Deco was, in its day, referred to as “the ver­ti­cal style,” in ref­er­ence to the pro­por­tions its build­ings were rapid­ly gain­ing.

An expe­ri­enced New York tour guide, Robins would be remiss if he did­n’t tell you all these facts and many more besides. It’s pre­sum­ably also part of his job to frame the process­es that gave rise (or indeed, high rise) to these sky­scrap­ers as in keep­ing with the cease­less one-upman­ship and self-pro­mo­tion that is the spir­it of his city. A par­tic­u­lar­ly illus­tra­tive episode occurred when Minoru Yamasak­i’s orig­i­nal World Trade Cen­ter went up in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, which pro­voked a response from the Empire State Build­ing in the form of a rec­tan­gu­lar addi­tion on top that would pre­serve its sta­tus as the world’s tallest build­ing. Robins has been in the game long enough to have had the chance to ask the archi­tect who designed that pro­pos­al if he was seri­ous. “Of course not,” came the reply. “This was all for pub­lic rela­tions. This is New York. This is who we are. This is what we do.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Archi­tect Demys­ti­fies the Art Deco Design of the Icon­ic Chrysler Build­ing (1930)

The Sto­ry of the Flat­iron Build­ing, “New York’s Strangest Tow­er”

An Immer­sive, Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of New York City’s Icon­ic Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal

Watch the Build­ing of the Empire State Build­ing in Col­or: The Cre­ation of the Icon­ic 1930s Sky­scraper From Start to Fin­ish

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

How the World Trade Cen­ter Was Rebuilt: A Visu­al Explo­ration of a 20-Year Project

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.