It is at least doubtful whether we ought to allow any weight at all to the additions and embellishments with which later writers, so much wiser than Moses, have overlaid the simplicity of his narrative.
Urukh, whose fame may possibly have reached the Romans, was the great Chaldaean architect.

To him belongs, apparently, the conception of the Babylonian temple, with its rectangular base, carefully placed so as to present its angles to the four cardinal points, its receding stages, its buttresses, its drains, its sloped walls, its external staircases for ascent, and its ornamental shrine crowning the whole.

At any rate, if he was not the first to conceive and erect such structures, he set the example of building them on such a scale and with such solidity as to secure their long continuance, and render them well-nigh imperishable.
There is no appearance in all Chaldaea, so far as it has been explored, of any building which can be even probably assigned to a date anterior to Urukh.

The attempted tower was no doubt earlier; and it may have been a building of the same type, but there is no reason to believe that any remnant, or indeed any trace, of this primitive edifice, has continued to exist to our day.

The structures of the most archaic character throughout Chaldaea are, one and all, the work of King Urukh, who was not content to adorn his metropolitan city only with one of the new edifices, but added a similar ornament to each of the great cities within his empire.
The great builder was followed shortly by the great conqueror.
Kudur-Lagamer, the Elamitic prince, who, more than twenty centuries before our era, having extended his dominion over Babylonia and the adjoining regions, marched an army a distance of 1200 miles from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the Dead Sea, and held Palestine and Syria in subjection for twelve years, thus effecting conquests which were not again made from the same quarter till the time of Nebuchadnezzar, fifteen or sixteen hundred years afterward, has a good claim to be regarded as one of the most remarkable personages in the world's history-being, as he is, the forerunner and proto-type of all those great Oriental conquerors who from time to time have built up vast empires in Asia out of heterogeneous materials, which have in a longer or a shorter space successively crumbled to decay.