The Hanging Gardens
of Babylon
By the third century B. C. E., the Hellenistic Greeks
controlled the lands of many ancient civilizations, including Egypt and
Mesopotamia. It was an age of cultural, scientific, and philosophical enquiry
and technological inventiveness, in which the achievements of the older
civilizations were critically compared with those of the Greeks and with
contemporary works. Some were singled out as exceptional feats of architecture,
craftsmanship, and engineering, a changing list that became known as the Seven
Wonders of the World. Among these were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
The earliest surviving mention of these gardens is around
270 B. C. E. by the Babylonian author Berossus: He wrote of a palace built by
Nebuchadrezzar II in just fifteen days, in which a "hanging garden"
was constructed to please the king's Median queen, an edifice resembling a
mountain with stone terraces planted with trees. An inscription of the king
himself described this palace as being high as a mountain and partially
constructed of stone, although he did not mention a garden. Later Greek writers
furnish more details of the gardens: They were built on stone foundations with
brickwork above and layers of reeds and bitumen, all standard features of
Mesopotamian architecture. A hidden mechanism fed the terraces with water to
support the trees, and there were pavilions among the vegetation. Pleasure
gardens stocked with exotic trees and plants were often part of Babylonian and
Assyrian palaces, an extension of the common shade-tree gardens. What made
those of Babylon a Wonder of the World was probably their magnificence, their
tiered arrangement, and the engineering feat involved in supplying them with
water.
Water-lifting devices were well known to the Mesopotamians.
The simplest was the shaduf, used for lifting water from canals for irrigation,
and for raising water from a lower to a higher watercourse or reservoir. To supply
the hanging gardens with water in this way would have required an army of
gardeners and, more importantly, would have been visible. The Greek texts refer
to a hidden mechanism: This could have been an Archimedes screw, a device that
seems to be described in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Sennacherib,
centuries before Archimedes. Can the Hanging Gardens be identified? Babylon has
been thoroughly plundered by brick robbers, and only the foundations of its
buildings remain. Following the texts, those of the Hanging Gardens should be
of stone, massive enough to support a substantial tiered superstructure, and
situated close to the river from which the water was raised. A possible
candidate for this is the series of structures that lies between the river and
the North and South Palaces. The Western Outwork is a walled enclosure built of
baked bricks set in bitumen, with walls 20 meters thick. To its north lies an
unexcavated area, west of the North Palace. Perhaps here there was once an
arrangement of terraces supporting gardens planted with trees and irrigated
with water drawn from the Euphrates: Detailed investigation of this area is
needed to further this suggestion, which many scholars find unconvincing.
Some doubt that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon ever existed.
Herodotus, who may have visited Babylon in the fifth century B. C. E., made no
mention of the gardens, although he accurately described many of the city's
most impressive features. Coupled with the difficulty of identifying a
convincing location for the gardens in Babylon, this seems strong grounds for
dismissing the Hanging Gardens as merely a legend.
Another theory, however, has recently been proposed.
Herodotus, writing only a century after the fall of the Babylonian Empire,
often did not distinguish between the Babylonians and the Assyrians, whose
cities had fallen into decay after the Babylonians sacked them in 612 B. C. E.
Babylon, however, continued to flourish for many centuries. Suppose the Hanging
Gardens had been located not in Babylon, but in the now-ruined Assyrian
capital, Nineveh, and the tale of their glories transferred to Babylon, famous
for its magnificence?
There is much to support this view, first suggested in the
1850s, forgotten, and recently proposed anew by Stephanie Dalley. The Assyrians
constructed magnificent gardens in their palaces, described in royal
inscriptions. Scenes from the palace walls at Nineveh often depict these
gardens: One, for example, shows Ashurbanipal and his queen picnicking beneath
a grapevine, laden with fruit, among the trees of their garden whose diverse
varieties the sculptors have been careful to depict. Significantly, another of
Ashurbanipal's palace reliefs shows the gardens of his grandfather
Sennacherib's vast "Palace without a Rival:" They rise up over
tree-clad slopes to a terrace with a pillared pavilion, and through them run
streams fed by an aqueduct. Sennacherib took a keen interest in civil and
hydraulic engineering and the creation of artificial landscapes. His
inscriptions describe and his reliefs show a nature reserve outside Nineveh, a
swamp created for water management, stocked with wild boar, deer, and fish, and
attracting heron and other birds. The aqueducts, weirs, dams, and tunnels he
constructed to bring water to Nineveh from the Zagros, some of which are still
in use today, watered a huge area of arable land and orchards around the city
as well as parks and gardens within it, of which the most sumptuous was the
royal pleasure park beside his palace. This he described as "A park, the
image of Mount Amanus, in which all kinds of spices, fruit trees and timber
trees, the sustenance of the mountain and Chaldea, I had collected and I
planted them next to my palace" (quoted in Leick 2001: 228).
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