Etemenanki, the Tower of Babel belongs to the years before the Common Era — dated here to c. 610 BCE at Babylon. The date is a scholarly centre of gravity, not a foundation-stone timestamp.
Etemenanki — “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth” — was Marduk’s seven-stage ziggurat, the historical core of the Babel story.
How it was made
Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt it in baked brick and bitumen. Herodotus’s height claims are inflated; the base was still a city-block of clay.
Why it still counts as a wonder
It never needed a Greek list to be a wonder: the labour, the alignment, or the survival is enough.
Alexander ordered repairs, then died. Brick-robbing and the shifting river unmade it. The wonder is the name that outlived the stairs.
On dating
BCE in this series means years before the traditional birth of Christ, counted backward. A monument listed as c. 610 BCE may have been founded earlier, rebuilt later, or famous only in one phase. Where ancient writers disagree — as they do for Babylon’s gardens — we say so.
This is story 25 of 100 in The Trend Ledger’s illustrated desk on world wonders raised before the Common Era.