Greek and Roman texts paint striking pictures of the luxurious hanging gardens of Babylon. Amid the hot, arid landscape of ancient Babylon, lush vegetation cascaded like waterfalls onto the 75-foot-high garden terraces. Exotic plants, herbs and flowers dazzled the eyes and scents wafted through the imposing botanical oasis dotted with statues and tall stone columns.
The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II is said to have built the luxurious Hanging Gardens in the 6th century BC as a gift to his wife, Amytis, who was homesick for the beautiful vegetation and mountains of her native Media (the northwestern part of the modern Iran). . To make the desert flourish would have required a marvel of irrigation engineering. Scientists have speculated that a system of pumps, water wheels and cisterns would have been used to raise and convey water from the nearby Euphrates River to the top of the gardens.
The multiple Greek and Roman accounts of the Hanging Gardens, however, were written second-hand centuries after the supposed destruction of the wonder. There were no first-hand accounts, and for centuries archaeologists searched in vain for remains of the gardens. A group of German archaeologists even spent two decades at the turn of the 20th century trying to discover signs of this ancient wonder, without success. The lack of relics has led skeptics to wonder whether the supposed wonder of the desert is just a “historical mirage.”
However, Dr Stephanie Dalley, an honorary researcher and member of the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford in England, believes she has found evidence of the legendary wonder of the ancient world. In his soon-to-be-published book “The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced,” published by Oxford University Press, Dalley argues that the reason no trace of the Hanging Gardens has ever been found in Babylon is due to to the fact that they were never built there.
Dalley, who has spent the better part of two decades researching the Hanging Gardens and studying ancient cuneiform texts, believes they were built 300 miles north of Babylon, in Nineveh, the capital of the rival Assyrian empire. She claims that it was the Assyrian king Sennacherib, not Nebuchadnezzar II, who built the wonder in the early 7th century BC, a century earlier than scholars previously thought.
Dalley, a specialist in ancient Mesopotamian languages, found evidence in new translations of King Sennacherib’s ancient texts that describe his own “peerless palace” and a “wonder to all peoples,” according to Oxford University. He also mentions a bronze screw for raising water, similar to the Archimedes screw developed four centuries later, which could have been used to irrigate gardens.
Recent excavations around Nineveh, near the present-day Iraqi city of Mosul, have uncovered evidence of a vast aqueduct system that carried water from the mountains with the inscription: “Sennacherib, king of the world… Over a great distance I directed a stream to the vicinity of Nineveh. The bas-reliefs of the royal palace at Nineveh depicted a lush garden watered by an aqueduct and, unlike the flat environs of Babylon, the more rugged topography around the Assyrian capital would have made the logistical challenges of raising the water up to ‘to gardens much easier for an elder. civilization to conquer.
Dalley explains that confusion over the location of the gardens may be due to the Assyrian conquest of Babylon in 689 BC. After this takeover, Nineveh was called “New Babylon” and Sennacherib even renamed the city gates after these names. entrances to Babylon. Dalley’s claims could debunk the idea that the elusive ancient wonder was a “historical mirage,” but they could also prove that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are mislabeled and should really be the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh.
