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My question is about the length of the cubit in Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon" story.

The ancient cubit was, give or take, 20 inches. In his "Tower of Babylon," Ted Chiang describes the tower's platform as 200 cubits on a side, and the tower itself as 60 cubits on a side. This works out to a tower that is 100 feet on a side.

Considering that the widest side of the Empire State Building is 420 feet, that doesn't sound like a particularly massive tower. (The tower was incredibly tall, yes, but it's base was very small.)

Am I missing something? Is there some other definition in play? A number of commentaries seem to assume that it was a giant tower at the base, but the book's definitions don't suggest that...

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There's no good indication from the text that the tower is especially wide or that a cubit in Chiang's world is any different from a cubit in ours. The tower itself is described as being a straight up-and-down tower that deviates less than a finger-width from the base to the top.

The tower's base resembled the first two platforms of an ordinary ziggurat. There stood a giant square platform some two hundred cubits on a side and forty cubits high, with a triple staircase against its south face. Stacked upon that first platform was another level, a smaller platform reached only by the central stair.

It was atop the second platform that the tower itself began. It was sixty cubits on a side and rose like a square pillar that bore the weight of heaven. Around it wound a gently inclined ramp, cut into the side, that banded the tower like the leather strip wrapped around the handle of a whip. No; upon looking again, Hillalum saw that there were two ramps, and they were intertwined. The outer edge of each ramp was studded with pillars, not thick but broad, to provide some shade behind them. In running his gaze up the tower, he saw alternating bands-ramp, brick, ramp, brick-until they could no longer be distinguished. And still the tower rose up and up, farther than the eye could see; Hillalum blinked, and squinted, and grew dizzy. He stumbled backward a couple steps and turned away with a shudder.

To put the shape into perspective, it looks like this

enter image description here

But stretching around 270 miles straight up

enter image description here

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  • Thanks. I thought that perhaps I was missing something. The cover art from his 1991 publication suggests a Gormenghast-like size. That makes more sense to me, but, alas....
    – Bob Carnage
    Commented Oct 25, 2018 at 21:41
  • It looks a bit tapering on the cover art; images.gr-assets.com/books/1459000288l/23637380.jpg - Chalk that down to artistic differences.
    – Valorum
    Commented Oct 25, 2018 at 21:55
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    It's not so much that the cover art tapers as it is a building that is clearly much larger than 100 feet across. Of course, in our world, a tower 270 miles high couldn't be that thin... but it's also clearly not our world.
    – Bob Carnage
    Commented Oct 26, 2018 at 21:12

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