While playing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones earlier today, I realized that the Tower of Babel is in the background in one of the levels. This is an image of the tower in-game. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is another game which has a level named "The Tower of Babel", and it looks like this. I then did a search on the Tower and there are several different paintings of it, such as this or this
If the Tower is a myth, what was the inspiration for the Tower that led the artists to paint such different renditions of the same structure?
EDIT: my question is along the lines of whether we know about a 'real' tower of Babel, and whether there is/was there a real life building that the myth is based on.
The reason you see a similar artistic depiction of the Tower of Babel is because they all attempt to imitate the ziggurat style building of "towers" in Mesopotamia where some people theorise the Tower of Babel myth came from. Ziggurats are essentially buildings with stories where each story has a reduced area in comparison to the story below to provide the structure stability. This is the same principle as a pyramid, but with one major difference: A ziggurat is a temple, or at least an accessible structure, while most (Egyptian) pyramids are more tombs. This is why Mesopotamian ziggurats are more akin to Mesoamerican pyramids than egyptian pyramids, they are meant to be accessed.
There are multiple lines of evidence that point towards a Mesopotamian source of the story:
Use of brick instead of stone. Mesopotamian ziggurats, as were many things made by civilizations of that time in that place (unfortunately), were mostly made of clay, as opposed to Egyptian pyramids, which used limestone.
Mythological: There are multiple mythological parallels connecting the attempt "to reach heaven" with many specific ziggurats (Etemenanki,Ur). The most convincing parallel is with the Sumerian legend Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which actually includes the main aspect of language confusion.
