The 'Tower of Babel' Tablet

Nineteenth-century scholars read this broken tablet as a Babylonian tower-of-Babel story: a king builds a great tower, the gods are angered, they 'make strange his speech' and scatter the builders, and a storm destroys the work. The footnote to line I.8 points out that its verb for 'mingled / confounded' is the same root as Hebrew balal in Genesis 11:7.

Caution: most Assyriologists now doubt the identification — the tablet is too fragmentary to be sure what it describes, and the currently-favoured Mesopotamian parallel to Genesis 11 is the Sumerian poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which recalls a time when all people 'spoke to Enlil in one tongue'. It is kept here as a historical curiosity of biblical archaeology.