[ealgeone]

Except those accounts are also from people removed from the sea.

Genesis and the Tower of Babel also explain why we see ziggurats or pyramid structures around the world.

[Rockingham]

Most scholars see the Old Testament as incorporating stories that the Israelites acquired from dominant and much larger foreign cultures and from the Israelites experiences during their Babylonian and Egyptian captivity. The Old Testament is thus more derivative than formative of other cultural accounts. My guess is that the story of the Tower of Babel was developed by the Israelites to explain a failed construction they saw in Babylon.