Where was the Tower of Babel?

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Genesis places the tower in the land of Shinar, that is Babylonia, and names the city Babel, which is the Hebrew name of Babylon; the map point stands at Babylon on the Euphrates, south of Baghdad in Iraq and about 870 km from Jerusalem in a straight line. The story says that the builders, “as they journeyed from the east”, “found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there”, and that they used baked brick and bitumen, the materials of Mesopotamian building: “let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” Genesis 10 names Babel first among the cities of Nimrod in Shinar. Babylon's great temple-tower, the ziggurat Etemenanki, “house of the foundation of heaven and earth”, stood beside the temple of Marduk; Herodotus describes it as a tower of eight stages, and Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt it in the sixth century BC. Most scholars think the story has this ziggurat, or an earlier one on the same site, in view. Only the outline of the foundations of Etemenanki survives, a square of about 90 m a side, because Alexander the Great had the ruined stages cleared for a rebuilding that never came. Since the Middle Ages travellers have also been shown the ziggurat of Borsippa, Birs Nimrud, south-west of Babylon, whose vitrified summit looks like a tower struck by fire; in the twelfth century Benjamin of Tudela described a Tower of Babel near Hillah split by fire from heaven, most likely this one. Genesis gives no date, and the map does not fix one.