“Mama Anya, can you tell us about the tower again?”

The little family had just finished dinner. As was their custom, the children had run to their great-grandmother’s tent. Little Sumer leaned forward, resting his chin on his hands. Beside him, little Inanna, with wide, impatient eyes, bounced on the worn rug. “Please, Mama Anya? Tell us the one about when the words broke?”

Anya chuckled, a warm, resonant sound like dry leaves rustling in the autumn wind. Her eyes, though clouded by age, still held a spark of the wonder and terror she remembered. She settled deeper onto her rug, pulling the knitted shawl tighter around her shoulders.

Outside their tent, the night air was growing cool, but inside, the fire cast a cozy, flickering warmth.

“Ah, the Tower,” she began, her voice a comforting rasp. “You never tire of that one, do you? Come close, my little ones, and I’ll tell you a story about a time when the whole world spoke one tongue, and then, in a single day, it didn’t.”

As a little girl, Anya remembered the Tower as the beating heart of their world. It was a magnificent, unfinished giant, stretching its brick fingers towards the heavens. She’d spend hours in its colossal shadow, sometimes making mud bricks that felt important in her small hands, mimicking the synchronized grunts and chants of the workers who swarmed its colossal base.

It was a place of endless fascination. Though not a source of joy back then, she remembered listening to the elders tell stories in their shared, clear tongue, a language as universal as the sky above. There was talk about the relentless ambition of the taskmaster in chief, a hunter king. He had commissioned the tower to rival with the gods. The gods had flooded the world before. But if they built to live above the mountains, the gods would now be powerless against them.

Yet Anya’s greatest joy was that she had friends from every family cluster, from the sun-baked plains to the rocky foothills. Their laughter, their arguments, their whispered secrets, all flowed in perfect understanding. This was simply how things were.

But as the tower grew, reaching higher and higher, a subtle shift began. The constant hum of work grew more frantic, and more and more people fell under the demands of the construction. The overseers’ shouts grew sharper, less human. Anya would overhear her parents, their faces etched with a new kind of weariness, whispering about the relentless pace, about the increasingly proud and demanding figures who led the project.

Then came the day the world broke. Anya remembered it vividly. She was playing a game of ‘Sky-Touch’ with her cousin, Elam, near the tower’s base. They were laughing, their words tumbling out effortlessly. “I can jump higher than you!” she’d shrieked. But this time, when Elam replied, his mouth moved, his eyes were wide, but the sounds that came out were gibberish. A string of jumbled syllables.

“Elam?” she’d ask, amusement in her voice. He looked back, confusion clouding his face, and repeated the foreign sounds. Once. Twice… Then a third time. She realised Elam was not joking.

Fear, cold and sharp, pierced through her childish wonder. She ran, stumbling, to her mother, who was packing clay. “Mama! Elam’s words are broken!”

Her mother, wide-eyed, embraced her tightly. “My child, my child, what are you saying?” But then, her mother’s own voice, usually so clear, seemed different, a strange new inflexion having crept into her words.

A moment later, her father arrived, in shock. He spoke, and while his words were largely understandable to Anya and her mother, a subtle, jarring difference had entered his speech, a hard edge that hadn’t been there before. He struggled to understand his own sister, Anya’s aunt, who rushed over, her face tear-streaked, speaking a dialect that was now distinctly different, almost alien, to them.

The great-grandmother paused, a faraway look in her eyes. “It was like a great, invisible hand had reached down and twisted the threads of our tongues. Not haphazardly, mind you. It was… organised chaos. Your closest kin, your mother, your father, your siblings – their words still largely aligned. You could still understand the people in your immediate dwelling, your little family unit. But step outside that circle, even to your cousins, to your aunts and uncles who lived just a stone’s throw away, their words were like the babbling of a strange river. You could guess the gist, perhaps, but the deep understanding – it was gone.”

Instead of the usual unified chant, the tower was now filled with cries of frustration and shouting matches because no one could properly convey their meaning. Builders who had worked side-by-side for years now stared at each other in bewildered anger, unable to follow instructions, unable to relay crucial commands. Tools lay abandoned.

“The tower,” Anya continued, her voice growing softer, “it stood there, mighty and silent, accusing us. We were being punished. But we didn’t know why.”

“My family, my immediate kin, we found others who spoke our new, shared tongue,” she explained. “We looked at each other, scared, but also with a new kind of determination. We had to leave this cursed place.”

All the groups began to drift away according to their newly-formed tongues. To the east, to the west, seeking new lands where they could build together again, where their words wouldn’t be met with blank stares.

Great-Grandma Anya sighed, a long, weary breath. “The scattering was a sorrowful time, my dears. The loss of family ties and friendships that simply evaporated because words failed. But in that great confusion, there was also a strange, beautiful gift.

With many conversations and much time for reflection, we understood that we should respect the gods and stay in our place.

The tower we had been building angered the gods.

So we stopped building to compete with the gods. Instead, we built to honour them.

When the arrogance of man makes him believe he is a god, the gods themselves put him back in his place. The gods’ anger is painful. But honouring the gods brings blessings.”

Anya paused, her gaze distant, then returned to the children, her voice softer now, tinged with a quiet melancholy.

“And yet, my dears, it seems that lesson is one we struggle to hold onto. Again and again, throughout the story of our world, man has forgotten his place, reaching for the heavens, playing god himself. And again and again, the world breaks, sometimes in a deluge, sometimes a roar of confusion, sometimes a quiet fracturing of trust. We build our towers regardless, with no real thought to consequences.”

Inanna, her head now nestled against Anya’s lap, let out a soft, sleepy sigh. Sumer, who had been listening with quiet intensity, now leaned against his great-grandmother’s arm, his eyes heavy-lidded.

Anya smiled, her gaze tender. The story was done. She gently stroked Inanna’s hair, then Sumer’s, watching as the rhythm of their breathing deepened, pulling them down into the quiet embrace of sleep.