If they existed, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon would be the
second oldest of the ancient wonders. Built in the 6th century, the gardens are
long gone. Some scholars argue that the reason there's no record of them is
precisely because they were gardens -- plants and flowers are living things
that eventually die. Even if the structure on which the gardens were affixed
remains, it could very well be in unrecognizable ruins.
We'll start with the most popular theories about the
gardens. They were likely located by the Euphrates River in what is now
modern-day Iraq. The gardens didn't actually hang: They draped over the sides
of terraces on a brick structure. Some accounts of the gardens claim that they
grew as high as 75 feet (22.86 meters) in the air and that people could walk
beneath them. Accounts from the classical writer Diodorus Siculus describe that
the brick walls were 22 feet (6.7 meters) thick and 400 feet (121 meters) wide.
And Philo wrote that there were several strata of flora and many levels of
irrigation.
The biggest wonder about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? They weren’t in Babylon
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, weren’t
in Babylon at all – but were instead located 300 miles to the north in
Babylon’s greatest rival Nineveh, according to a leading Oxford-based
historian.
After more than 20 years of research, Dr. Stephanie Dalley,
of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute, has finally pieced together enough
evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the famed gardens were built in
Nineveh by the great Assyrian ruler Sennacherib
- and not, as historians have
always thought, by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
Dr. Dalley first publicly proposed her idea that Nineveh,
not Babylon, was the site of the gardens back in 1992, when her claim was
reported in The Independent – but it’s taken a further two decades to find
enough evidence to prove it.
Detective work by Dr.
Dalley – due to be published as a book by Oxford University Press later
this month – has yielded four key pieces of evidence.
First, after studying later historical descriptions of the
Hanging Gardens, she realized that a bas-relief from Sennacherib’s palace in
Nineveh actually portrayed trees growing on a roofed colonnade exactly as
described in classical accounts of the gardens.
That crucial original bas-relief appears to have been lost
in the mid 19 century. When it was
discovered by the British archaeologist, Austin Henry Layard, in the 1840s, it
seems to have already been in such poor condition that its surface was, in all
probability, rapidly crumbling away. Alternatively, it may have been amongst a
group of Layard’s UK- bound Nineveh carvings which were lost when the boat
carrying them sank in the River Tigris. Luckily, however, an artist employed by
Layard had already drawn the bass-relief – and that drawing, recently
recognised by Dr. Dalley as portraying the garden, had been reproduced in Layard’s
book about Nineveh published in London in 1853.
Further research by Dr. Dalley then suggested that, after
Assyria had sacked and conquered Babylon in 689 BC, the Assyrian capital
Nineveh may well have been regarded as the ‘New Babylon’ – thus creating the
later belief that the Hanging Gardens were in fact in Babylon itself. Her research revealed that
at least one other town in
Mesopotamia - a city called
Borsippa – was being described as
“another Babylon” as early as the
13 century BC, thus implying that in antiquity the name could be used to
describe places other than the real Babylon.
A breakthrough occurred when she noticed
from earlier research that after
Sennacherib had sacked and
conquered Babylon, he had actually
renamed all the gates of Nineveh after the
names traditionally used for Babylon’s city gates. Babylon had always
named its gates after its gods. After the Assyrians sacked Babylon, the
Assyrian monarch simply renamed Nineveh’s city gates after those same gods. In
terms of nomenclature, it was clear that Nineveh was in effect becoming a ‘New
Babylon’.
Dr. Dalley then looked at the comparative topography of Babylon and Nineveh and
realized that the totally flat countryside around the real Babylon would have
made it impossible to deliver sufficient water to maintain the sort of raised
gardens described in the classical
sources. As her research proceeded it therefore became quite clear that the
‘Hanging Gardens’ as described could not have been built in Babylon.
Finally her research began to suggest that the original
classical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens had been written by historians
who had actually visited the Nineveh area.
Researching the post-Assyrian history of Nineveh, she
realized that Alexander the Great had actually camped near the city in 331BC –
just before he defeated the Persians at the famous battle of Gaugamela. It’s
known that Alexander’s army actually camped by the side of one of the great
aqueducts that carried water to what Dr. Dalley now believes was the site of
the Hanging Gardens.
Alexander had on his staff several Greek historians
including Callisthenes, Cleitarchos and Onesicritos, whose works have long been
lost to posterity – but significantly those particular historians’ works were
sometimes used as sources by the very authors who several centuries later
described the gardens in works that have survived to this day.
“It’s taken many years to find the evidence to demonstrate
that the gardens and associated system of aqueducts and canals were built by
Sennacherib at Nineveh and not by Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. For the first time
it can be shown that the Hanging Garden really did exist” said Dr. Dalley.
The Hanging Gardens were built as a roughly semi-circular
theatre-shaped multi-tiered artificial hill some 25 metres high. At its base
was a large pool fed by small streams of water flowing down its sides. Trees
and flowers were planted in small artificial fields constructed on top of
roofed colonnades. The entire garden was around 120 metres across and it’s
estimated that it was irrigated with at least 35,000 litres of water brought by
a canal and aqueduct system from up to 50 miles away. Within the garden itself
water was raised mechanically by large water-raising bronze screw-pumps.
The newly revealed builder of the Hanging Gardens,
Sennacherib of Assyria - and
Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon who was traditionally associated with them -
were both aggressive military leaders. Sennacherib’s campaign against
Jerusalem was immortalized some 2500
years later in a poem by Lord Byron describing how “the Assyrians came down
like a wolf on the fold,” his cohorts “gleaming in purple and gold.”
Both were also notorious for destroying iconic religious
buildings. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon
destroyed Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and according to one much later
tradition was temporarily turned into a beast for his sins against God. Sennacherib
of Assyria destroyed the great temples of Babylon, an act which was said to
have shocked the Mesopotamian world. Indeed tradition holds that when he was
later murdered by two of his sons, it was divine retribution for his
destruction of those temples.
Bizarrely it may be that the Hanging Gardens were the first
of the seven ‘wonders’ of the world to be so described – for Sennacherib
himself referred to his palace gardens, built in around 700BC or shortly
after, as “a wonder for all the
peoples”. It’s only now however that the new research has finally revealed that his palace gardens were indeed
one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Some historians have thought
that the Hanging Gardens may even have been purely legendary. The new research finally demonstrates that
they really did exist