The Scattering at Babel

Chronicle Entry - Secret Annex

Recorded by Brother Wyn of Caermynach, Anno Domini 922
Event Date: c. 4000 BC according to merchant reckoning
Location: The plain of Shinar, Mesopotamia
Primary Source: Intelligence from Cwmni'r Llwybrau

The Record

The Holy Scripture records in Genesis the eleventh chapter that men gathered on the plain of Shinar and built a tower to reach heaven, and that the Lord confused their tongues so they could not understand one another, and scattered them across the earth. This account is true. The Church teaches that the event represented divine judgment against human pride. This teaching also is true, though the account preserved by the merchants who travel between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic adds details that Scripture does not contain.

The merchants date this event to the fortieth century before Christ. This cannot be reconciled with the chronology the Church derives from Scripture, which places the scattering no earlier than the twenty-third or twenty-second century. The difference spans nearly two thousand years. Last year, the eldest merchant who visits this monastery offered an explanation that I have set down in a separate account. He spoke of time itself turning differently in the ages immediately following Creation, like a potter's wheel that spins rapidly when first kicked and then slows to its working pace. If his explanation holds truth, then both reckonings may be accurate, each measuring different aspects of the same reality. The merchants count the actual rotations of time's wheel. Scripture counts the generations and lives lived, the work accomplished. I am not certain this explanation is correct, but it resolves a difficulty that otherwise remains inexplicable.

What follows comes from knowledge preserved father to son across more than five thousand years by families whose trade requires accurate memory. Whether their account contradicts Scripture or completes it, I cannot say with certainty. I record it because truth sometimes requires two tellings, one preserved in sacred text and one preserved in merchant tradition, and because the differences between them may teach us something about the nature of time itself.

The Seven Towers

The merchants report that the structures built at Shinar numbered seven towers, arranged in a pattern that served no obvious purpose for either defense or habitation. Each tower stood at a specific distance from its neighbors, and each was constructed of fired brick and bronze worked to proportions that suggest careful measurement. The peaks were fitted with great bronze plates that caught the sun and threw light across the valley in ways that witnesses described as almost musical.

The lord whom the Greeks name Zeus taught men how to build them. The merchants record this as documented fact preserved in their tradition. He walked among the peoples of Mesopotamia in those centuries, before Rome existed, before even the first cities of stone rose in Sumer. Men called him by older names then, names that survive in fragmentary form in merchant records but which I will not set down here without better understanding of their meaning. He showed them measurements and angles. He demonstrated how sound could be shaped by stone, how bronze could catch more than sunlight, how the air itself could be made to sing if the structures were properly aligned.

His purpose, as the merchants describe it, was unification through harmony. The Song of the Stars, which flows through creation as water flows through channels, was heard clearly by Zeus in those early ages when the veils between realms were newly established and his understanding of their nature remained incomplete. He believed that if all mortal voices could be made to sing the same note, the Song would become whole again, and creation would be unified under what he understood as proper stewardship. Whether he acted from wisdom or from pride, or from some mixture of both that defies simple categorization, the merchants will not say directly. They report only that he thought himself capable of improving upon the pattern established at creation.

Men built what he taught them to build. The towers rose over seven years of continuous labor. When the final bronze plate was set upon the seventh peak, Zeus himself ascended to strike it with lightning drawn from his own hand. The resonance he expected was perfect unity, all creation singing one pure note that would bind the veils together under his guardianship. The result was catastrophic failure.

The Breaking of the Song

Three separate merchant families, whose ancestors were absent from Shinar yet whose records derive from those who were, described to me what happened when Zeus struck the final tower. I set down their account with the caveat that I cannot vouch for every detail, having neither witnessed the event nor examined physical evidence that would prove the claims beyond doubt.

When Zeus struck the final tower with lightning, the bronze plates caught the fire and amplified it beyond all expectation or intent. The air itself began to vibrate in ways that made the ground shake and the sky shimmer like heated glass. Men fell to their knees, pressing hands over their ears, as the sound grew beyond human capacity to endure. The merchants say it was not painful in the manner that thunder is painful. It was wrong in some fundamental way, as if the bones of the world were grinding against themselves in ways that creation was never meant to accommodate.

The Song did not unify. It fractured instead.

The merchants report that the veil over Olympus, which the Greeks honor, trembled in its foundations. The veil over Cymru, which our people know as Goleudy'r Gân, shuddered as if struck by a mighty wind. Even the northern veil, in lands cold and distant beyond my knowledge, felt the disruption. For a span of time the merchants describe as both very brief and impossibly long, all three veils rang with the same frequency, and that frequency was discord rather than harmony.

Zeus had attempted to force all voices into one key. The Song was never meant to be one key. It was composed to be many keys forming one harmony, each voice distinct yet contributing to a greater whole. When he tried to collapse all difference into uniformity, the Song itself rebelled. Or perhaps God, who composed the Song before time began, rejected the alteration. The distinction between these possibilities matters less than the result, which was catastrophe.

The towers stood for perhaps an hour after the strike, their bronze plates still singing that terrible unified note. Then the bronze began to crack. The stone beneath it split along lines invisible until that moment. The seven towers fell within the span of a single afternoon, collapsing inward upon themselves as if pulled down by hands too great to see. Men scattered from the ruins, and as they scattered they discovered that their tongues no longer formed the same words. What had been one language became many, each group suddenly unable to understand the others without effort and translation.

The Scripture names this divine judgment. The merchants say it was consequence of Zeus's failed attempt to control what he should have served. Both accounts are true. God permits consequences to flow from choices, and consequences can constitute His judgment without requiring His direct intervention in every particular. The towers fell because their design was flawed. The tongues divided because the attempt to force unity had violated the nature of creation itself.

Yet the division of tongues was not the only wound inflicted that day. The merchants report that many who witnessed the shattering were struck silent by terror. Some lost speech entirely. Others could manage only whispers and fragments. The sound of bronze singing that wrong note before it shattered, the sight of towers collapsing, the feeling of creation itself fracturing beneath their feet, robbed voices that the division of languages alone could not have taken. Those who fled westward carried both afflictions: words fractured into unfamiliar patterns and voices stolen by fear.

The Teaching of Tafod Dwybig

It was Arawn, guardian of the western veil, who met the refugees during their westward flight. The merchants record this as his first great act of stewardship among mortal peoples. Where Zeus had tried to force all into one unified tone and achieved only shattering, Arawn taught a single tongue that could hold many speakers within it. The merchants call this language Tafod Dwybig, the Fork Tongue, which the Dragons spoke before men walked the earth.

The teaching took generations, continuing throughout the long trek westward. The first among the refugees to learn was Tafod Ddu, a blacksmith whose hands knew transformation through fire and whose voice had been among those struck silent at Shinar. His recovery of speech became proof that healing was possible, and he helped Arawn teach others during the journey. The language sang in harmonics, much as the volcanic stone in the western lands would later hum when struck. It could carry difference within unity, multiple tones forming one voice, in the manner that creation itself was meant to function before the towers fell.

By the time the refugees reached the Atlantic coasts and the island that would be called Cymru, most had recovered their voices through this teaching. They spoke Tafod Dwybig with the reverence of those who understood what it meant to lose speech and have it restored. This tongue became the foundation of the peoples who would name themselves Cymroth, and from it descended the language I write in this very hour, though five thousand years have changed it beyond what those first speakers would recognize. Yet something of the Dragons' speech remains in Welsh even now, which may explain why our tongue endured when so many others fell to conquest and time.

The Westward Migration

When the towers fell and tongues divided, men feared to remain in lands where the sky itself had been torn and the earth bore scorch marks that would not fade for generations. The air still tasted of bronze and lightning months after the collapse. The ground trembled at irregular intervals, as if creation itself had not yet settled after being so violently disrupted. Those who had witnessed the shattering knew in their bones that the eastern lands were no longer safe, though they could not have explained precisely what they meant by safety or what danger they feared.

They fled westward by the thousands. Some turned north toward colder lands whose names I do not know, while most moved west toward the setting sun and the rumor of gentler shores where the veils might be more stable. They carried what they could, abandoning the rest. Behind them, Zeus remained in the wreckage of his ambition, diminished in understanding though still existing, beginning lessons that would require more than a thousand years to complete.

Among those who fled westward were the ancestors of peoples who would eventually reach the Atlantic coasts and the lands that are now called Cymru. They traveled for generations, learning the Dragon tongue as they walked, until they arrived at virgin hills where stone itself would sing when properly struck. There they would build resonance forts and name themselves Cymroth, the joined ones, bound by both shared ground and shared speech that had healed what terror broke.

The Hidden Implications

I write the following with great hesitation and full knowledge that the Church would name it dangerous speculation. Yet the merchants were insistent on these points, and I believe they touch upon matters that help explain patterns that have persisted for millennia.

Zeus is not myth but guardian, a power that served God's purposes while pursuing his own understanding of how those purposes should be accomplished. In pursuing his own vision too zealously, he nearly tore creation apart. The Greeks worshipped him until Rome made them Christian, and they were entirely within reason to honor him despite his errors. He holds the eastern veil against threats that would devour mortal kingdoms if left unchecked. Yet he learned at Shinar that control differs from stewardship, and that unity imposed by force becomes discord rather than harmony.

This lesson took him centuries to absorb. The merchants hint that his transformation began at Shinar but was not completed until much later, perhaps not until after the resurrection of Christ provided him with a pattern he had not previously understood. Whether this means Zeus himself came to faith in Christ, the merchants will not say directly. They speak only of a conversion that required more than changing one's mind, that required reshaping the entire structure of thought built up over ages, that remains in progress even now.

Though the Church names Arawn demon, he is the guardian of Cymru's veil and serves the same God we serve, though his methods confuse bishops and his nature frightens priests. He does not demand worship. He teaches wisdom when men are ready to learn it. He guided my ancestors westward from the broken towers and taught them to listen for the quiet melody beneath the loud one, to value preservation over domination, to understand that what endures comes through service rather than control.

The Song of the Stars exists as reality, the pattern that flows through creation whether men hear it or otherwise. It contains all paths, all choices, all possibilities woven together in harmonies that transcend human capacity to fully comprehend. Zeus attempted to force it into one path at Shinar. The Song refused, as it must refuse all attempts to constrain it to less than its full complexity. God's will appears thus because it is more ordered than any single mind can grasp, requiring many voices to express its fullness.

Both Zeus and Arawn continue learning. Both will continue learning until the pattern is complete and what the merchants call the Second Dawn rises over a world transformed. I do not know when this will occur. The merchants hint at dates and signs, but I am not certain I understand them correctly, and I am even less certain that their understanding is itself complete. All I know with certainty is that the towers fell six thousand years ago by merchant reckoning, men scattered westward, tongues divided, and the long journey toward wisdom began for guardian and mortal alike.

Final Entry

I showed this account to the eldest of the three merchants when he returned this spring. He read it slowly, his lips forming words that clearly cost him something to see written in my hand. When he finished he set the parchment aside and sat silent for a time before speaking.

"You write well, Brother Wyn. Your Church will kill you for this if they find it."

"I know this," I replied.

"Then why write it?"

"Because truth matters more than safety. Because my ancestors fled those towers and someone should remember why. Because Scripture speaks truly yet requires completion through knowledge carefully preserved even when dangerous."

I paused, then asked what I had wondered since they first told me the story. "Was Zeus wrong to try?"

The merchant smiled, though there was sorrow in it. "Wrong in method, right in desire. He wanted creation unified and whole. So does every guardian who takes his responsibility seriously. So does God Himself. But unity cannot be forced. It must be chosen freely by every voice, or it becomes merely uniformity, which is unity's opposite wearing unity's mask. Zeus learned this truth through catastrophe. Your Scripture records the lesson he learned. We remember how he learned it and at what cost."

He departed at dawn as is his custom, leaving payment and a bronze mirror. This one is smaller than others he has given me, but it catches light in ways that make me think of shattered towers and scattered tongues and men walking westward under stars that sang with more voices than any one listener could possibly hear. I keep it with the other mirrors in my cell. Sometimes when firelight catches its surface, I imagine I hear music in it, though that may be only age and exhaustion playing tricks upon my senses.

More likely it is the memory of what the merchants described: the sound of bronze singing one unified note before it shattered, and the quieter sound that came after, when many voices returned and spoke different words but meant the same thing. We are scattered still. Our tongues remain divided. But the Song plays on, containing all our voices whether unified or diverse, and God who composed it hears every note.