Settling in Shinar

After the Flood, Genesis 11 tells, "as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there." The families of Shem, Ham and Japheth came down from the mountains of Ararat to the plain of the Euphrates and the Tigris, still one people with one language. There they learned to make bricks and burn them, and there, a few generations later, they would begin the tower. Tradition reads these verses as the last moment of humanity's unity before Babel; the plain of Shinar is the land of Babylon.