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Tower of Babel from BL Royal 17 E II, f. 8

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Tower of Babel from BL Royal 17 E II, f. 8

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Summary

Detail of a miniature of the building of the Tower of Babel, at the beginning of Book 1. Image taken from f. 8 of Le recoeil des histoires de Troyes (Le livre nomme Hercules). Written in French.

The BL Royal Manuscript Collection, also known as the Royal Collection, consists of over 2,000 manuscripts that were once owned by the British monarchs, including English and later British kings and queens from the late 12th to the 19th centuries. These manuscripts are notable for their historical and artistic value.

The collection was initially stored in various royal libraries and palaces, such as the Tower of London and Westminster Palace. During the English Civil War in the 17th century and the subsequent Interregnum, many royal treasures, including manuscripts, were dispersed and sold. Some manuscripts were lost, destroyed, or ended up in private hands.

In 1757, King George II donated the Old Royal Library to the British Museum (which later became the British Library), where the manuscripts were integrated into the museum's collections. This marked the formal establishment of the Royal Manuscript Collection within the British Museum.

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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Date

1200 - 1500
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Source

British Library
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Public Domain

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raoul lefèvre
raoul lefèvre