Do We Have Artifacts from the Tower of Babel?
by Lita Sanders on Aug 18, 2025
We love hearing from you and answering your questions!
One reader, Ashley, recently asked,
“Are there any artifacts that are from the tower of Babel that we still have today?”
Good question!
First, we don’t really know where the tower of Babel was. A lot of people think it was around Babylon, but just because Babel and Babylon sound similar doesn’t mean they’re the same. If it were Babylon, we would have a lot of ancient artifacts, but none that go back quite that far. Notably, there was a tower in ancient Babylon that was destroyed and rebuilt several times—one of the people who rebuilt that tower was Nebuchadnezzar. There’s a stele of the tower of Babel he had carved to commemorate it. Alexander the Great razed the tower to the ground and meant to rebuild it bigger and better, but he died before he got the chance.
The stele of the tower of Babel
Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London. Photo Tom Jensen 2025. Open Access.
What we have are archaeological finds that take us back to the time of the first generations after the dispersal. Gobekli Tepe is one such place—people carved T-shaped limestone pillars, some of them with pictures on them, and intentionally buried them. We don't know why they did this because they didn’t leave behind a written record, but it shows that the people after Babel cared about symbolic art because the structures don’t appear to serve any practical purpose.
The Gobekli Tepe archaeological site
Photo by Zehra Rekibe Başol on Pexels
Another very ancient archaeological site in modern-day Turkey is Chatalhoyuk (cha-tal-HOO-yuhk). This city is made up of mud-brick houses that were clustered together and accessed from holes in the roof.
Archeological site in Chatalhoyuk
Omar hoftun, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3
Just like Noah’s ark, it shouldn’t surprise us that we don’t have artifacts from the tower of Babel. Thousands of years have passed, and if the ruins of the tower were in Babylon, the site was continuously inhabited for a long time, meaning that anything from the tower of Babel could have been dismantled and used for something else. There are lots of artifacts we wish we had access to that have simply been lost to time or are waiting to be dug up in an archaeological dig. But we can trust that God’s Word gives us the true history of these events.
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