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Tower of Babel from BL YT 28, f. 51
Summary
Detail of a miniature of the building of the Tower of Babel, from Pseudo-Aristotle's Secreta secretorum. Image taken from f. 51 of Secreta secretorum (ff. 1-43); Il Tesoro (translation of Li Livres dou Tresor) (ff. 43v-130); miscellaneous texts (ff. 130v-143v). Written in Italian.
Henry Yates Thompson (1838-1928) was a British collector and philanthropist who assembled this remarkable collection over his lifetime. The collection is now housed at the British Library in London.
Henry Yates Thompson was born into a wealthy family in 1838. Thompson began collecting manuscripts and other items in the 1870s. His collection quickly gained recognition for its exceptional quality and breadth. He had a keen eye for illuminated manuscripts, which are manuscripts decorated with intricate illustrations and calligraphy. The collection has a particular emphasis on medieval manuscripts.
The Tower of Babel is a Near Eastern myth that is recorded in the Jewish Tanakh's first book (Genesis); it is meant to explain the origin of different languages. According to the story, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating eastward, came to the land of Shinar (Hebrew: שנער). There they agreed to build a city and a tower "tall enough to reach heaven"; seeing this, God, viewing such behavior as rude and disrespectful, confounded their speech so that they could no longer understand each other and scattered them around the world. The Tower of Babel has been associated with known structures according to some modern scholars, notably the Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk by Nabopolassar, king of Babylonia (c. 610 BCE). The Great Ziggurat of Babylon was 91 metres (300 ft) in height. Alexander the Great ordered it demolished circa 331 BCE in preparation for a reconstruction that his death forestalled.
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