Etemenanki

32.5364°N, 44.4208°E.

Etemenanki — the House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth — the great ziggurat at Babylon dedicated to Marduk, in modern Babil Governorate, Iraq. The original construction date is undetermined but the structure was already old by the early second millennium BCE; it was rebuilt by Hammurabi (~1770 BCE), destroyed by the Assyrians under Sennacherib in 689 BCE, and rebuilt at its largest scale by Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II between 626 and 562 BCE. Original base 91 metres per side; original height approximately 91 metres on seven terraces — a perfect cube of mudbrick faced in fired brick set in bitumen. Alexander the Great ordered it dismantled in 331 BCE in preparation for a complete rebuilding that his death in 323 BCE prevented; the materials were carried away by the local population over the following centuries. Almost nothing now survives above ground.

The probable original of the Tower of Babel narrative, the largest ziggurat ever built, in a city whose name has meant excess and confusion for two thousand five hundred years.