The Tower of Babel tells the tale of people working to create something that rivals the might of god, before being cut down for their hubris and ending up more divided than ever, no longer being able to even communicate.
I believe that the story of the Tower of Babel is a mythic retelling of the fall of an ancient middle-eastern empire. Probably the Babylonian, Akkadian, Sumerian or Mesopotamian Empire. The Empire is, to an ancient tribe, clan or city-state, an impossibly powerful force. The Babylonian empire in particular rose from near nothing to a power dominating most of the Fertile Crescent under the rule of Hammurabi, and then fell under a series of weak rulers. This “Empire of Babel” would rise and fall in similar fashion, or possible fall due to a natural disaster, a so called act of god. After falling the empire is split into several different groups based of language, ethnicity and so on, along with parts being conquered by neighboring empires.
Is this hypothetically possible or am I just drawing false parallels?
The short answer is: no. It’s not.
Explanation: the ante-deluvian myths are more concerned with aetiology—the origins of things—than reporting (even symbolically) actual events in history. What we’re dealing with here is myth. It’s a mythological explanation for why humans don’t all speak the same, mutually intelligible language. Now, it is certainly possible that the tower imagined in Genesis was modeled off of a ziggurat. However, it’s impossible to say definitively.
The problem with trying to map the text to the fall of a Mesopotamian empire is also one of chronology. Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hittite (etc.) kingdoms rose and fell all the time. This kind of event wasn’t really “uncommon.” You then have to square this with potential chronological horizons for when the Hebrew text was composed.
It’s important to remember too that the name Babel (= bāb ‘ēl = “Gate of god”) may be functioning as a pun on what unknown foreign languages sound like to a listener.
Remember, most of Genesis is not trying to report actual history as we think of it.
A couple of resources:
Klaus Westermann, Genesis 1–36 Richard Elliot Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed