The Great War and the Fall of the Ancient Kingdom

Lore & Background

Before the Zahard Empire, there existed a civilization known as the Ancient Kingdom—though whether it was a single, unified kingdom that ruled the entire Tower is unknown, as the pre-Zahard era is largely a mystery. This kingdom was a place of immense power and knowledge, but its rulers remain unnamed and their nature speculative; no canon confirms a single 'King and Queen' ruling all. Their civilization is said to have been a golden age of arcane mastery, but its exact structure is lost. This golden age was shattered by the arrival of Zahard and his companions, the Ten Great Family Heads, who had climbed the Tower from the outside. The reasons for the war are complex, involving the nature of power, the control of the Tower's floors, and a fundamental disagreement over the future of the Tower's inhabitants—whether they should remain as they were or be reshaped into a new order. Notably, the Administrators are native to the Tower and predate any human kingdom; they were never part of the Ancient Kingdom's ruling class.

In Their Own Story

The air on the 134th Floor was not air, but a silent, shimmering pressure that weighed on the soul. The Ancient King stood before his palace, a structure of black stone and frozen light, its spires twisted like the fingers of a dying god. Across a chasm of raw space, a young man with golden eyes and a crown of thorns watched him, his silhouette cutting against the void. 'You would break the world for your ambition?' the King's voice echoed without sound, each word a tremor in the fabric of the floor. Zahard, the man who would be king, simply smiled—a cold, knowing grin that promised annihilation. 'No,' he replied, his voice a whisper that tore at the fabric of reality, peeling the light from the air. 'I will break you, and build a better one from the pieces.' The first blow was not a weapon, but a command. The King commanded the floor to swallow his enemy whole, to turn the space beneath him into a maw of nothingness. Zahard commanded it to stop. The floor screamed—a sound like shattering glass and dying thunder—and the Great War began.

Reader's Guide

The conflict is not shown directly in the story, but its legacy is everywhere. The war was a total struggle for control of the Tower, with the Ancient Kingdom's forces fighting against Zahard, the Ten Great Family Heads, and their newly formed empire. The war resulted in the complete destruction of the Ancient Kingdom, with its capital and most of its people erased from history. The aftermath saw the rise of the Zahard Empire, the sealing of the 135th Floor, and the establishment of the Ranker system. The war's most direct impact is the creation of the 'Floor of Death', a floor rendered uninhabitable by the conflict's final battle. The ancient weapons and powers used in the war, like the 'Thorn' and the '13 Month Series', are now central to the current story. The grudges of the war's survivors, such as the 'Administrators' and the 'Guardians', continue to influence the Tower's politics and the fate of irregulars like Bam.

Did You Know?

• The name of the Ancient Kingdom is never explicitly stated in the series, adding to its mythic, lost status.
• The 135th Floor is sealed not because of the war, but because Zahard stopped climbing and ordered it sealed.
• Some theorize the 'Administrators' themselves were once part of the Ancient Kingdom's ruling class, but this is an invention with no basis in canon—Administrators predate all human kingdoms.
• The '13 Month Series' weapons were created by the Workshop for Zahard's princesses, not forged from the remnants of the Ancient Kingdom's warriors.

The Narrative and Its Explanatory Purpose

The account in Genesis 11 operates as an etiology, a myth crafted to answer the question of why humanity speaks so many different languages. A single, linguistically unified people migrates to the region of Shinar in Lower Mesopotamia and collectively resolves to build a great city crowned by a tower whose summit would reach the heavens. Yahweh, observing their coordinated labor, remarks on how formidable humanity becomes when united in purpose and speech. In response, God confounds their shared language, rendering mutual comprehension impossible, and scatters the population across the globe. The city is left unfinished. This narrative thus serves as the biblical origin story for linguistic diversity, and the resulting confusion of tongues, known in Latin as confusio linguarum, becomes the foundational event explaining the fragmentation of human speech into countless separate languages.

Historical Echoes and the Name Babel

Modern scholars frequently trace the Babel narrative to real structures and texts from ancient Mesopotamia. The most commonly cited inspiration is Etemenanki, the great ziggurat dedicated to the god Marduk in Babylon, whose Hebrew rendering became the word Babel. A parallel account surfaces in the Sumerian legend of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which likewise situates its events in southern Mesopotamia. The name itself carries layered etymologies: the native Akkadian Bāb-ilim translates as gate of God, though scholars now regard this as a folk etymology grafted onto an older, non-Semitic form, Babilla, whose original meaning remains unknown. Within the Genesis narrative, the city is said to receive the name Babel from the Hebrew verb bālal, meaning to jumble or confuse, a wordplay that Encyclopædia Britannica attributes to the near-identical pronunciation of the Hebrew terms for Babylon and to confuse. Notably, the exact phrase Tower of Babel never appears anywhere in the biblical text itself.

Competing Interpretations of Divine Motive

The story has generated centuries of debate over why Yahweh intervened. The classical reading, articulated by the first-century Jewish writer Flavius Josephus, frames the tower as a hubristic act of defiance orchestrated by the arrogant tyrant Nimrod, making God's response a punishment for human pride. This theme of divine-human competition echoes the earlier Eden narrative. However, contemporary scholars have challenged this interpretation. Ellen van Wolde argues the builders' ambitions were never directed against Yahweh. Arie van der Kooij contends the text is neither about sin nor punishment but rather parallels Mesopotamian etiological literature, addressing the present circumstances of its original authors. Another modern reading emphasizes the narrative's explicit mention of linguistic and cultural homogeneity, interpreting God's act not as retribution but as the origin story for cultural diversity, presenting Babel as the cradle of civilization. Phillip Sherman has also noted the curious implication that Yahweh must be physically present to learn of human activity, suggesting a deity who feels threatened by collective human potential.

The Tower's Imagined Dimensions Across the Ages

Genesis itself offers no precise measurement, using only the idiom of a top in the sky to convey impressive rather than literally impossible height. Later traditions filled in the gaps with striking specificity.