The flat southern-Mesopotamian plain (Sumer/Babylonia) — no stone, hence brick and bitumen (11:3); home of Babel, Erech (Uruk), and Accad (Akkad). The name resurfaces, deliberately archaic, when Nebuchadnezzar carries the temple vessels 'to the land of Shinar' (Daniel 1:2): the narrator filing the new empire under the tower's old country.