The Pyramids of Giza.
The Pharos of Alexandria.
The Colossus of Rhodes.
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
The Statue of Zeus at Olympia.
The Mausoleum at Halicanarnassus.
These are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, celebrated for millennia as the greatest
architectural achievements of antiquity.
Sadly, today only one of the original wonders - the Pyramids of Giza - are still standing,
the rest having long ago crumbled to ruins.
But while one can still visit many of these ruins and ponder their former magnificence,
one ancient wonder remains frustratingly elusive: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Despite more than a century of searching, no trace of this enigmatic structure has ever
been found.
So what were the Hanging Gardens?
What made them so special?
Did they actually exist - and, if so, what happened to them?
Let’s find out as we delve into the history and mystery of the missing Seventh Wonder.
The classic legend of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon tells that they were constructed
by King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 603-562 B.C.E.
(And for those of you who paid attention in Sunday school, yes: this is the same Nebuchadnezzar
who sacked Jerusalem and forced the Israelites into bondage).
As the story goes, Nebuchadnezzar’s wife, princess Amytis of the ancient Persian kingdom
of Media, found the sun-baked landscape of Mesopotamia depressing and longed for the
lush forest and mountains of her homeland.
So, in order to cheer her up, her husband constructed an oasis in the middle of the
desert - an artificial mountain of brick and stone covered in hundreds of trees and other
plants.
But while this is the most common account, a rival story attributes the construction
of the gardens to Queen Semiramis, a semi-mythical figure who supposedly ruled the Assyrian Empire
during the late 9th Century B.C.E.
Thus, several sources instead refer to the structure as the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis.
Whatever the case, the only evidence of the Gardens’ existence comes from the writings
of seven ancient historians - all of whom wrote their accounts centuries after the Gardens
were supposedly built.
The oldest and most credible of these is Berossus of Kos, a priest of the Babylonian god Marduk
who in 280 B.C.E.
composed a guide to Mesopotamia and its culture titled Babyloniaca.
Unfortunately, the original text has been lost, though it was extensively quoted by
later writers like 1st Century C.E.
Roman-Jewish historian Josephus:
“At his palace he had knolls made of stone which he shaped like mountains and planted
with all kinds of trees.
Furthermore, he had a so-called pensile paradise planted because his wife, who came from Media,
longed for such, which was the custom in her homeland…within his palace he erected lofty
stone terraces, in which he closely reproduced mountain scenery, completing the resemblance
by planting them with all manner of tress and constructing the so-called Hanging Garden.”
It is interesting to note here that the modern term “paradise” is thought to derive from
the walled gardens constructed in the region - specifically the old Persian pairi-daeza,
meaning “to build a walled enclosure.”
Furthermore, the term “pensile” in Josephus’s account is derived from the ancient Greek
word kremastos.
This was originally translated as “hanging”, implying that the garden beds were suspended
- for example, by a system of ropes.
Today, however, scholars typically interpret the word’s meaning as closer to overhanging,
evoking a more practical structure of stepped, overhanging terraces.
Indeed, the next commonly cited account of the Gardens, by 1st Century Greek historian
Diodorus Siculus, describes their construction as follows:
“The park extended four plethra on each side, and since the approach to the garden
sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from another tier on
tier, the appearance of the whole resembled that of a theatre.
When the ascending terraces had been built, there had been constructed beneath them galleries
which carried the entire weight of the planted garden and rose lists by lists one above the
other along the approach; and the uppermost gallery, which was fifty cubits high, bore
the highest surface of the park, which was made level with the circuit wall of the battlements
of the city.
Furthermore, the walls, which had been constructed at great expense, were twenty-two feet thick,
while the passageway between the two walls was ten feet wide.
The roofs of the galleries were covered over with beams of stone between sixteen foot long,
inclusive of the overlap, and four feet wide.”
For the curious, a plethron - plural plethra - was an ancient Greek unit of measurement
composed of 100 podes or Greek Feet - themselves equivalent to between 296 and 324 millimetres.
600 podes made up one stadium - plural stadia - while 5000 podes made up one milion or Greek
Mile.
The cubit, meanwhile, was an ancient unit of measurement equivalent to the distance
between one’s elbow and the tip of one’s fingers.
Standard cubits were typically based on the measurements of a particular king, and thus
varied by region and time period.
At the time of the Gardens’ supposed construction, the Mesopotamian Cubit measured around 533
millimetres.
Thus, according to Diodorus’s account, the Gardens measured 120 metres to a side - an
area of around 1/10 of a square kilometre or 3.5 acres.
In addition to the Gardens’ general construction, Diodorus also describes how the terraces were
waterproofed and irrigated:
“The roof above these beams had first a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of
bitumen, over this two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and as a third later a covering
of lead, to the end that the moisture of the soil might not penetrate beneath.
On all this again the earth had been piled to a depth sufficient for the roots of the
largest trees; and the ground, when levelled off, was thickly planted with trees of every
kind that, by their great size or any other charm, could give pleasure to the beholder.
And since the galleries, each projecting beyond another, all received the light, they contained
many royal lodges of every description; and there was one gallery which contained openings
leading from the topmost surface and machines for supplying the gardens with water, the
machines raising the water in great abundance from the river although no one outside could
see it being done.”
Such waterproofing would have been essential to the Gardens’ operation, since stone as
a building material was difficult to come by in Mesopotamia.
Therefore, most structures were made out of sun-baked mud bricks.
These were resilient enough to withstand the region’s infrequent rains, but under the
vast flow of water needed to keep such a giant horticultural construction irrigated would
have quickly dissolved away.
Therefore, the Hanging Gardens were likely to have been one of the few structures in
Babylon to make use of large stone slabs - a vital clue for archaeologists searching for
their remains today.
As for the irrigation “machines” described by Diodorus, these are but one of the enduring
mysteries surrounding the Hanging Gardens.
Based on the accounts of Diodorus and others, archaeologists have long suspected that these
machines were a form of Archimedean screw, a spiral ramp mounted inside a tube which,
when rotated, can efficiently scoop up and raise water over large distances.
While such screws were traditionally thought to have been invented around the 3rd Century
B.C.E, a cuneiform tablet dating from the reign of Assyrian king Sennacherib, who ruled
from 704-681 B.C.E, appears to describe the casting of Archimedean screws in bronze - pushing
back the origins of these devices by 500 years.
Another possibility is that the machines were a form of noria, a bucket-covered wheel driven
by oxen or donkeys used throughout the middle east to raise water into irrigation canals.
However, the earliest recorded use of noria dates from the 1st Century B.C.E, suggesting
once again that these devices may be far older than originally thought.
The next two commonly cited accounts of the Hanging Gardens come from Roman historians
Quintus Curtius Rufus and Strabo, the latter of whom confirms the dimensions and irrigation
methods described by Diodorus:
“Babylon, too, lies in a plain; and the circuit of its wall is 385 stadia.
The thickness of its wall is 32 feet; the height thereof between the towers if fifty
cubits; that of the towers is sixty cubits; and the passage on top of the wall is such
that four-horse chariots can easily pass one another; and it is on this account that this
and the hanging garden are called one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
The garden is quadrangular in shape, and each side is four plethora in length.
It consists of arched vaults, which are situated, one after another, on checkered, cube-like
foundations.
The checkered foundations, which are hollowed out, are covered so deep with earth that they
admit of the largest of trees, and have been constructed of baked brick and asphalt - the
foundations themselves and the vaults and the arches.
The agent to the uppermost terrace-roofs is made by a stairway; and alongside these stairs
there were screws, through which the water was continually conducted up into the garden
from the Euphrates by those appointed for this purpose, for the river, a stadium in
width, flows through the middle of the city; and the garden is on the bank of the river.”
And finally, we come to the writings of Greek scientist Philo of Byzantium, who in 250 B.C.E.
further elaborated on the sophisticated structural and hydraulic engineering of the Gardens:
“The whole mass is supported on stone columns, so that the entire underlying space is occupied
by carved column bases.
The columns carry beams set at very narrow intervals.
The beams are palm trunks, for this type of wood - unlike all others - does not rot and,
when it is damp and subjected to heavy pressure, it curves upwards.
Moreover it does itself give nourishment to the root branches and fibres, since it admits
extraneous matter into its folds and crevices.
This structure supports an extensive and deep mass of earth, in which are planted broad-leaved
trees of the sort that are commonly found in gardens, a wide variety of flowers of all
species and, in brief, everything that is most agreeable to the eye and conducive to
the enjoyment of pleasure….Streams of water emerging from elevated sources flow partly
in a straight line down sloping channels, and are early forced upwards through bends
and spirals to gush out higher up, being impelled though the twists of these devices by mechanical
forces….This is a work of art of royal luxury, and its most striking feature is that the
labour of cultivation is suspended above the heads of the spectators.”
Yet despite these lavish descriptions by Greek and Roman writers, contemporary Babylonian
records do not mention the Hanging Gardens at all.
This is especially strange given that Mesopotamian rulers were obsessed with recording lists
of their achievements.
Indeed, one set of cuneiform clay tablets called the Topography of Babylon describes
the features of Nebuchadnezzar’s capital city in exhaustive detail, from giant constructions
like walls, gates, and temples to the names of individual streets.
Yet nowhere in this list does anything resembling a massive walled garden appear.
Even stranger is the fact that such gardens were common throughout Mesopotamian history,
with well-documented examples being constructed by rulers such as Tiglath Pileser at Nineveh
in the 12th Century B.C.E, Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud in the 9th, and Martuk-Aplaiddina
at Babylon in the 8th.
Nonetheless, the sheer volume of later descriptions makes it impossible to dismiss the existence
of the Gardens outright, forcing historians to look for other, more tangible evidence.
But while Babylon was one of the largest and most famous cities in the ancient world, its
ruins remained buried and unexplored until 1899, when German archaeologist Robert Koldewey
began his excavations of the site - located some 80 kilometres south of modern Baghdad.
Over the course of 14 years, Koldewey uncovered many of the city’s major architectural features,
including its outer walls, the lavishly decorated Ishtar Gate, and the remains of the Ziggurat
of Martuk - the temple which some have speculated inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of
Babel.
While excavating the city’s southern citadel, Koldewey discovered a large basement containing
14 rooms with stone arches and strange holes in the floor.
As the Hanging Gardens were one of the few sites in Babylon known to use stone in its
construction, Koldewey concluded that he had at last discovered the location, and that
the holes were for chain pumps that raised water from the basement to the roof.
However, later archaeologists disputed Koldewey’s conclusions arguing that the site was located
too far away from the Euphrates river to be practically irrigated.
Furthermore, clay tablets discovered in the ruins suggest that the building was actually
used as an administrative centre and storehouse.
And despite more than a century of excavation, no other structure matching the descriptions
of Josephus, Diodorus, Strabo and others has been discovered on the Babylon site.
So what, then, happened to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?
Sadly, the simplest explanation is that they never existed at all, and were simply invented
by Greek and Roman writers as a romantic ideal of a Middle Eastern pleasure garden.
Alternatively, some scholars suggest that the Gardens did exist but were destroyed by
an earthquake in the Second Century B.C.E.
Stripped of the protection of their elaborate stone and asphalt waterproofing, the largely
mud-brick ruins then slowly eroded into oblivion.
Or it may be that the ruins simply haven’t been found yet.
After all, the Babylon site is enormous - covering 8.5 square kilometres - but only a small proportion
of it has been thoroughly excavated.
Furthermore, the River Euphrates has shifted significantly westward since the time of Nebuchadnezzar
II, raising the possibility that the ruins of the Gardens may lay beneath its waters.
Another, more disturbing possibility is that the ruins were bulldozed in 1987 along with
large swaths of ancient Babylon when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein attempted to build
a theme-park reconstruction of the ancient city on the site - and this is why we can’t
have nice things…
All that said, some scholars now believe that the Hanging Gardens did indeed exist, just
not in Babylon.
While reexamining ancient Babylonian texts in 2013, Oxford University scholar Stephanie
Dalley discovered that they had been mistranslated.
Based on her own translations, Dalley began to suspect that the accounts of Josephus,
Strabo and others actually refer to earlier gardens located in the city of Nineveh, 480
kilometres from Babylon.
These gardens, built by Assyrian king Sennacherib between 704 and 681 B.C.E, are well-documented,
being depicted in several carvings on the walls of the royal palace.
Furthermore, the ruins of the Jerwan aqueduct, which carried water 50 kilometres from the
mountains to Nineveh, bear the following inscription:
“Sennacherib king of the world . .. Over a great distance I had a watercourse directed
to the environs of Nineveh, joining together the waters . . . Over steep-sided valleys
I spanned an aqueduct of white limestone blocks.
I made those waters flow over it . . .”
Carved depictions of these Gardens also adorn the walls of the palace, while extensive remains
of irrigation equipment - including the 50-kilometre-long Jerwan aqueduct - have been uncovered around
the Nineveh site.
This theory helps explain many of the inconsistencies in traditional accounts of the Gardens.
For example, of the six main accounts we have covered, only those of Josephus - and by extension
Berossus - definitively name Nebuchadnezzar II as the Gardens’ builder; all subsequent
writers simply refer to an unnamed “Syrian King”.
Thus it is possible that the achievements of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar simply became
conflated over time.
This is supported by the fact that many of the classic accounts of the Hanging Gardens
are ultimately derived from observations made during the Persian campaign of Alexander the
Great.
Prior to their victory over the Achaemenid Empire of King Darius III at the Battle of
Gaugamela in 331 B.C.E, Alexander and his army camped for four days near the aqueduct
of Jerwan outside Nineveh.
This would have given the historians and other scholars travelling with the army a chance
to examine the ruins and write up detailed descriptions, which were later copied and
misattributed to Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar.
Interestingly, this mix-up may have been due to a simple misunderstanding of the Akkadian
language.
The word Babylon translates to “Gate of the Gods,” and was applied to a number of
ancient Mesopotamian cities.
Thus, while Nineveh might have been a Babylon, it was not the Babylon familiar to the Greeks
and Romans, resulting in a misunderstanding that has persisted for millennia.
The Nineveh theory also helps to explain a glaring inconsistency in the writings of Herodotus,
the famous Greek historian from the 5th Century B.C.E.
Despite being the only Greek chronicler believed to have actually visited Babylon, nowhere
in his accounts does Herodotus mention anything resembling the Hanging Gardens - further suggesting
that they were actually located elsewhere.
Then again, Herodotus may not have actually visited Babylon - and even if he did, many
of his accounts of other historic sites are strangely incomplete.
For example, his detailed descriptions of the Pyramids of Giza do not once mention the
Great Sphinx.
Yet despite this compelling evidence, the Nineveh theory remains only one of many possible
explanations for the fate of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
The whole truth cannot be known without either consulting Doctor Emmit Brown or with more
concrete archaeological evidence - evidence that has become increasingly difficult to
obtain due to the turbulent political situation in Iraq.
In addition to Saddam Hussein’s 1987 vandalism of Babylon, in 2016 the great Maskhi Gate
of Nineveh, along with hundreds of artefacts in the nearby Mosul Museum, were destroyed
by the fundamentalist group ISIL as blasphemous idols.
Such destructive acts, and the fact that so grand a structure as the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon could have disappeared entirely, serve as sobering reminders of the fragility of
the ancient past, how much human history may have been lost forever, and how much nothing
any of us do matters because we’ll all be forgotten in due time, likely without even
a single reference to use ever existing, if you think about it, putting our lives below
the likes of some random garden that someone made at some point…
Speaking of things made to last much longer than you or even any record of you, Ancient
Roman concrete!
But just how did the Ancient Romans make their concrete so much better than modern concrete?
Well check out our video here to find out.
It’s incredibly fascinating.