After the Flood, we are told in Genesis that men journeyed from the east until they came to the plain of Shinar, where they built the tower of Babel, in the vain hope of ascending into heaven. God, however, confounded their language and scattered them over the face of the earth. The references in this narrative to Shinar and Babel, or Babylon, indicate that here again we may expect to find a Babylonian account of the Confusion of Tongues, just as we have found a Babylonian account of the Deluge. As we have seen, the Accadians regarded themselves as having come from the “mountain of the east” where the ark had rested, while Shinar is the Hebrew form of the native name Sumir—or Sungir, as it was pronounced in the allied dialect of Accad—the southern half of pre-Semitic Babylonia. Now Mr. George Smith discovered some broken fragments of a cuneiform text which evidently related to the building of the Tower of Babel. It tells us how certain men had “turned against the father of all the gods,” and how the thoughts of their leader’s heart “were evil.” At Babylon they essayed to build “a mound” or hill-like tower, but the winds blew down their work, and Anu “confounded great and small on the mound,” as well as their “speech,” and “made strange their counsel.” The very word that is used in the sense of “confounding” in the narrative of Genesis is used also in the Assyrian text. The Biblical writer, by a play upon words, not uncommon in the Old Testament, compares it with the name of Babel, though etymologically the latter word has nothing to do with it. Babel is the Assyrian Babili, “Gate of God,” and is merely a Semitic translation of the old Accadian (or rather Sumirian) name of the town, Ca-dimíra, where Ca is “gate” and dimíra “God.” Chaldean tradition assigned the construction of the tower and the consequent confusion of languages to the time of the autumnal equinox; and it is possible that the hero-king Etanna (Titan in Greek writers), who is stated to have built a city in defiance of the will of heaven, was the wicked chief under whom the tower was raised.