Did Samuel Noah Kramer Prove the Ziggurat of Ur was the Tower of Babel?

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I don't think so, but here he is making, not in his own view, but to some, a fairly strong case:

"Before I Die, Please Listen" — Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer Admits the Truth About Sumerians
Secret World Files | 11 Oct. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZZ1P4oOt-k

If Ur and that Ziggurat wasn't the Tower Project, it came close to being a continuation of it. Which I think it was. The phrase "plain of Mesopotamia" is mentioned, and no, it doesn't argue in favour. If Shinar is the land between the two rivers, at Ur, Shinar is in the plain. And you can't exactly find it, you don't have to look for it. It's visible from the last mountain East of Mesopotamia. The Harran plain, by contrast, is a plain that's inside Shinar, transitions into hill country, before reaching rivers East or West. If you looked from Mt. Judi, which is where I think the Ark landed, you might see just hill country and miss the plain. So, the Harran plain is a better fit for "they found a plain in the land of Shinar".

Now, if I said the Ziggurat of Ur was a continuation ... first, phrases like "binding heaven" seem to echo Nimrod's project of preventing another Flood. Second, how much time was there from the failure of the original Babel to the advent of this new, Sumerian one? Let's also take in the Ziggurat of Eridu.

III, Peleg is born, end of Babel

2557 BC

51.766 pmC, dated as 8000 BC

Eridu Z. Level XVIII 5300

2235 BC

68.129 pmC, dated as 5407 BC

2218 BC

Peleg died

2212 BC

69.274 pmC, dated as 5247 BC

Eridu Z. Level I 3200

1841 BC

Abraham died

1838 BC

84.77 pmC, dated as 3204 BC

Ur Z, building begins "2040 BC"

1615 BC

94.87443 pmC, dated 2050 BC*

Ur Z, building ends "2000 BC"

1609 BC

95.41471 pmC, dated 1997 BC**

So, from end of Babel to Eridu level XVIII (lowest), there are c. 339 years. Over the levels of Eridu Z, 380 years. From Eridu level I to beginning of the Ziggurat of Ur, c. 223 years. From failure of Nimrod's Babel to completion of Ur-Nammu's Ziggurat, 948 years.

The Ziggurat of Ur was started and completed during the soujourn of the Israelites in Egypt, unless I'm wrong. The Ziggurat of Eridu starts when Peleg dies and got as far as to when Abraham died.

By contrast, when Peleg was born, Nimrod's Babel was covered in sand, I'd say deliberately. And when St. John wrote the Apocalypse, or maybe the Gospel a bit later, Sumerian and Akkadian ceased to be spoken and written as learned languages.

Samuel Noah Kramer admired Sumerian scribes for manufacturing the collective subjective reality. By "subjective reality" one often, alas, speaks of an individual subjective reality. By "objective reality" even worse, one speaks indistictly of collective subjective or of extra-mental. However, the extra-mental is only made accessible by the subjective, and the subjective is only collective after being individual. By placing the collective over the individual, discoveries about the extra-mental are impeded or severely slowed down.

The ideology which Samuel Noah Kramer discovered was an identity between heaven and earth and social order. It's the same one where Creation results pretty immediately in bakeries, as per the beginning of the Gilgamesh Epic.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
XVIII Lord's Day after Pentecost
12.X.2025

The tables above are (with addition of salient points about ZZ) either quotes or medium values from Newer Tables: Preliminaries · Flood to Joseph in Egypt · Joseph in Egypt to Fall of Troy. The sources of medium values are given in the below footnotes./HGL

* From:

1634 BC

93.251 pmC, dated as 2212 BC

1612 BC

95.145 pmC, dated as 2023 BC

(1634 + 1612 + 1612 + 1612 + 1612 + 1612 + 1612)/7 = 1615.1428571428571429
(93.251 + 95.145 + 95.145 + 95.145 + 95.145 + 95.145 + 95.145)/7 = 94.87443 pmC

5730 * log(0.9487443) / log(0.5) + 1615.1428571428571429 = 2050 BC

** From:

1612 BC

95.145 pmC, dated as 2023 BC

1590 BC

97.033 pmC, dated as 1839 BC

(1612 + 1612 + 1612 + 1612 + 1612 + 1612 + 1590)/7 = 1608.8571428571428571
(95.145 + 95.145 + 95.145 + 95.145 + 95.145 + 95.145 + 97.033)/7 = 95.41471

5730 * log(0.9541471) / log(0.5) + 1608.8571428571428571 = 1996.8720719579191615934