The Hanging Gardens of Babylon may never have existed, or may have been somewhere else.
They were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: terraced gardens rising like a green mountain. Yet no Babylonian text mentions them and archaeologists have found no trace. One Oxford scholar argues the real wonder stood in a different city altogether: the Assyrian capital of Nineveh.
Greek and Roman writers described an astonishing sight: tiers of trees, shrubs and vines on raised terraces of brick, with soil deep enough for the largest trees and water lifted from the Euphrates. The word translated 'hanging' actually meant something closer to overhanging, describing plants on a raised structure. The best-known story, from a Babylonian priest called Berossus writing around 290 BC, says Nebuchadnezzar II built them for his wife Amytis, who missed the green hills of her homeland.
The problem is the evidence. The Hanging Gardens are the only one of the Seven Wonders whose location has never been established. Nebuchadnezzar left many long inscriptions about his building works; none mentions a garden, or indeed Amytis. The Greek historian Herodotus described Babylon without mentioning them. Excavations at Babylon have found nothing definitive, though part of the ancient city lies under the shifting Euphrates and cannot safely be dug.
Three explanations are offered. Perhaps the gardens were a romantic invention, the classical writers' ideal of an Eastern paradise. Perhaps they existed and were destroyed around the first century AD. Or, as Stephanie Dalley of Oxford proposes, the legend describes the well-documented gardens that the Assyrian king Sennacherib built at his palace in Nineveh, near modern Mosul, around a century earlier. She notes that 'Babylon' was a name used for several cities, that two classical sources credit a 'Syrian' king, and that Sennacherib himself called his palace and garden 'a wonder for all peoples'.
Sennacherib's engineering was real. Inscriptions describe water-raising screws, and remains survive of canals running over 50 kilometres into the mountains and a vast aqueduct at Jerwan built from more than two million dressed stones. A carved panel from his grandson's palace shows a mature terraced garden. Whether that proves Dalley right is still debated, but it suggests that the world's most famous garden may have been a triumph of water engineering above all.
Source: Wikipedia — Hanging Gardens of Babylon · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
