I’ve saved the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for last in my description of the ancient world’s wonders. I have several reasons for doing so.
First, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are anomalous in several ways when compared to the other six wonders I’ve featured on my blog. They are the only wonder located outside the Mediterranean Basin. All of the other six ancient wonders were in places familiar to the Greeks. (Those Greeks with sufficient money to travel and see them, at any rate.)
But Babylon was a city far from the Mediterranean. It was in the heart of Persia, the traditional enemy of the Greeks. And, unlike the other wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were alive. It included living plants and trees.
Several commonalities existed, too. Viewers considered it an engineering marvel. It was large in size and stood out even in a city as vast as Babylon.
One problem exists, however, in describing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. No archaeologist has ever found evidence for such a massive structure in the ancient city of Babylon. Some question, therefore, whether these famed gardens ever existed.
Who Built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?
I’ll start with the traditional story. Supposedly, the powerful Neo-Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II ordered the construction of the gardens. He ruled from 605 to 562 BCE. According to legend, his wife, Amytis, came from a region to the north and east of Babylon that was much cooler than Babylon, which is on the relentlessly hot central plains of modern Iraq.
As a result, Amytis became homesick for the cooler mountains of her homeland. Not wanting to part ways with his queen, Nebuchadnezzar instead ordered the construction of gardens to remind Amytis of her home. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were the result. A main source of this account is a Babylonian priest named Berossus. He lived in the 200s BCE.
What Did They Look Like?
The term “hanging gardens,” according to some sources I reviewed, is a somewhat incorrect translation from Greek. A better term might be “terraced gardens.” That seems to be what the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were—terraced gardens that rose high into the air.
Considering the Babylonian proficiency in the construction of ziggurats, this would not be a stretch for their technology and engineering skill. The exact type of trees, shrubs, and flowers that comprised the gardens is not known today. According to Diodorus, a Greek from Sicily, each layer or terrace was “thickly planted with trees of every kind that, by their great size or other charm, could give pleasure to the beholder.”
Click Here to Subscribe to Rob’s History Blog!
Each layer of the garden rose somewhat above the prior one. This created a cascading terrace of verdant foliage that impressed onlookers. In a city mainly constructed of bricks of baked clay, I’m sure it stood out as a pleasant change in a landscape that was monochromatic in the extreme.
Interestingly, Diodorus also wrote that “machines raising the water in great abundance from the river” watered the gardens. Archaeologists have put forward many theories about how the Babylonians kept the gardens growing. Rain is infrequent in the region and the temperatures scorching. The most common explanations are that the Babylonians used chain pumps or a version of the Screw of Archimedes to accomplish this task.
Were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Real?
All of this sounds amazing, but a few problems exist with the traditional explanations. For one, accounts preceding those of Berossus and the time of Alexander the Great don’t mention any famous gardens. Herodotus says nothing about them in his account of Babylon. Perhaps more damaging, extant texts from Nebechadnezzar’s time don’t mention any notable gardens, either.
Modern excavations have fared no better. One German team thought they’d discovered the foundations of a major structure. But most consider this only a royal storeroom, based on contextual evidence. (The excavation wasn’t completely in vain, happily. It did locate the foundations of the famed Tower of Babylon.)
What can we make of this, then? Several ancient accounts mention beautiful gardens, but no one can find modern evidence of them. Contemporaries of Nebuchadnezzar didn’t see fit to mention them, either.
Click Here to Get Your Free Ebook of Rob’s First Novel!
An Alternate Explanation?
Some modern scholarship believes the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were real. However, they were not located in Babylon, but in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria. Assyria was the empire immediately preceding the Neo-Babylonians in the region.
It seems ancient sources often confused Assyrian and Babylonian civilization. The writer Diodorus mentioned above was one. He wrote of Nineveh as being located on the Euphrates River. (It is actually on the Tigris.) He also describes hunting scenes on palace walls that don’t exist in excavations of Babylon but do exist at Nineveh.
And we also have contemporary accounts to buttress this theory. The Assyrian ruler Sennacherib boasted in inscriptions: “I raised the height of the surroundings of the palace to be a Wonder for all peoples.” This wonder was “A high garden imitating the Amanus Mountains I laid out next to it with all kinds of aromatic plants.”
Furthermore, the Assyrians during the time of Sennacherib built many irrigation systems. One relief from the reign of Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal shows sloped gardens with a pavilion on top, as well as waterways filled with fish.
This, then, seems the most likely source of the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Until a more convincing explanation appears, at least.
Please subscribe so that you won’t miss the other posts of this series on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Past posts are:
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
Please Subscribe!
If you enjoyed this blog, please sign up to follow it by scrolling down or clicking here, and recommending it to your friends. I’d love to have you aboard! You can also join the more than 1,000 members of my Readers Club for Rob Bauer Books by clicking here or like me on Facebook and Instagram. Please check out my historical fiction novels, too. If you find this information valuable, supporting me helps keep this blog going.
As always, I welcome constructive and polite discussion in the comments section. Thank you!
I don’t know enough history to have guessed Assyria, but I assumed “Hanging” could only mean something like “terraced” and probably lots of vines. Truth and trivia! Thank you, Rob.
Hi Vernon, thanks for responding.
Your assumption was the same as mine when I started researching for this post. When I thought about what hanging gardens might look like, I was thinking vines and foliage running rampant.