A wonder without an address
Around the second century BCE the Greek poet Antipater of Sidon listed the sights every traveller should see, and the hanging gardens of Babylon were on it, next to the pyramids and the statue of Zeus at Olympia. Of the Seven Wonders, it is the only one whose very city is in doubt. The pyramids still stand, and the others left ruins, fragments or at least a known city. The gardens left words.
The idea behind them was real enough. Kings of the ancient Near East built walled parks and gardens to show their power over nature, and the Persians later gave this kind of garden a name: pairidaeza, “walled enclosure”, which became the Greek paradeisos and our “paradise”. The question is whether one such garden at Babylon was as spectacular as the legend says.
The witnesses who speak
Everything we read about the gardens comes from writers who lived centuries after Nebuchadnezzar II. The oldest is Berossus, a Babylonian priest who wrote a history of his country in Greek around 290 BCE. His book is lost, but the Jewish historian Josephus quotes him: Nebuchadnezzar built a “hanging garden” of stone terraces planted with trees for his wife, who had grown up in the mountains of Media and missed them. Later Greek and Roman authors, Diodorus, Strabo, Quintus Curtius and Philo of Byzantium, add terraces rising one above another, deep soil, large trees and machinery lifting water from the river.
“Hanging” is a translation problem more than a mystery. It means raised on terraces built over vaulted structures, like a roof garden, with nothing suspended in the air.
The witnesses who stay silent
The trouble is silence where you would expect a voice. Herodotus, who describes Babylon at length in the fifth century BCE, says nothing about the gardens. Nebuchadnezzar left many inscriptions boasting of his walls, gates, palaces and temples, and none of them describes a garden of this kind. Silence proves nothing on its own, but a king who described his building works in such detail would hardly have skipped a wonder.
The scene: Babylon on the ground
Could Babylon have had such a garden? In principle, yes. The city stood on the Euphrates, ran on canals and had baked brick and bitumen for waterproof building, and Nebuchadnezzar’s builders worked on an enormous scale around Babylon’s great ziggurat and the palaces.
Robert Koldewey, who excavated Babylon from 1899 to 1917, thought he had found the gardens. In the north-east corner of the Southern Palace he uncovered a building of fourteen vaulted rooms with unusually thick walls, the kind of base that could carry heavy, wet terraces. Then the tablets found there were read. About 300 of them turned out to be lists of rations of oil and grain, among them rations for Jehoiachin, the exiled king of Judah, around 592 BCE. The vaults were storerooms.
No other structure at Babylon has convincingly taken their place. What survives of Nebuchadnezzar’s city is spectacular in other ways, above all the blue-glazed Ishtar Gate. A garden, though, leaves weaker traces than a gate. Soil, plants and irrigation channels in mudbrick disappear quickly once the water stops.
The other suspect: Nineveh
The Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has argued since 1993 that the famous garden was in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital on the Tigris, built by King Sennacherib (705-681 BCE) about a century before Nebuchadnezzar. Her case rests on three kinds of evidence that Babylon lacks.
The first is plumbing. Sennacherib built a system of canals, dams and aqueducts about 80 km long to bring mountain water to Nineveh. Part of it survives at Jerwan, where an aqueduct of more than two million dressed stones carried a canal across a valley between 703 and 690 BCE. The second is his own words. His inscriptions describe a park beside his palace planted like the Amanus mountains and boast of devices that raised water all day long, which Dalley reads as water screws, about four centuries before the screw was credited to Archimedes. The third is a picture. Among the palace reliefs of Nineveh, a slab from Ashurbanipal’s North Palace shows trees planted on a slope, watered by channels fed from an arched aqueduct, with a pavilion at the top.
Dalley also argues that Greek writers confused Nineveh with Babylon, and points to other ancient texts that mix up the two cities. Not everyone is convinced. The classical tradition names Babylon, and the argument for a mix-up is itself indirect.
The verdict, for now
The texts are late and literary, but they agree on terraces, trees and water-lifting machinery, which suggests a real model behind them. Babylon has produced no garden and lost its best candidate. Nineveh has dated engineering and a king who boasted of exactly the kind of garden the Greeks describe. A cautious reading is that a royal show-garden of this type did exist, that Sennacherib’s is the best documented, and that later writers may have moved it to the more famous city. A garden at Babylon remains possible. It has simply never been found.
Where to see the evidence
Babylon, about 85 km south of Baghdad, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (2019), and the remains of the Southern Palace can be visited. The Jerwan aqueduct stands near Mosul in northern Iraq. The garden relief from Nineveh is in the British Museum in London. Check current travel advice before planning a trip to Iraq.
Sources
- Josephus, Against Apion 1.19 (quoting Berossus); Diodorus Siculus 2.10; Strabo 16.1.5; Quintus Curtius 5.1.35; Philo of Byzantium, On the Seven Wonders; Antipater of Sidon, Greek Anthology 9.58.
- R. Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon (1914); O. Pedersén, Archive und Bibliotheken in Babylon (2005).
- S. Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved”, Garden History 21 (1993); The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (2013).
- T. Jacobsen and S. Lloyd, Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan, OIP 24 (1935).
- J. Ur, “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals: New Insights from Satellite Imagery and Aerial Photography”, Iraq 67 (2005).
- British Museum, “Paradise on earth: the gardens of Ashurbanipal” (2018).
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