Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The Most Questionable Wonder of the Ancient World
Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, as first listed by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. and Callimachus of Cyrene in the third century B.C., there is almost universally great historical confirmation.
Records exist of each and every one of these great marvels of human innovation, both from those who actually beheld them with their own eyes and from those who heard tell of them from the awestruck descriptions of others.
While only one of these seven majestic creations still stands today (the Great Pyramid at Giza), there is absolutely no question in our minds that these wonders both existed and were just as inspiring as they have been described.
That is, all except for one.
The Mysterious Gardens
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are perhaps the most mysterious of the seven wonders. They are remarkable in that they compose the only wonder whose very existence has been very seriously called into question. That’s right, it appears uncertain at best that the hanging gardens ever really existed; the alternative being that they were some sort of hypothetical flight of fancy from the minds of some of the more poetic historians of ancient times.
If the hanging gardens did exist (and it’s safe to assume for the moment that they indeed did, just to give ancient historians the benefit of the doubt), they would have existed just south of Bagdad in modern-day Iraq on the Euphrates river.
Babylon was the capital of the Neo-Babylonian empire, which thrived in the region of Mesopotamia (a region covering today’s Iraq, part of Syria, southeastern Turkey and Southwestern Iran) from 612 B.C. (when the Babylonians threw off rule by the Assyrians, with whom they had continual conflict) until 539 B.C. when it fell to Cyrus the Great of the Persian Empire. For just under a century, Babylon was the place to be in the middle east.
The Time of the Gardens
It was sometime during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 B.C.) that the hanging gardens were supposedly built. As far as can be told from what few later records exist, the reason behind this immense project (like so many other things) may have been Nebuchadnezzar’s wife, Amytis, who being from a place rich in flora, desired the diverse plant life of her homeland.
Being the head of a rich empire, Nebuchadnezzar commissioned the building of a vast garden, 100 feet by 100 feet in size, rising up through several levels, full of every imaginable kind of plant, along with water features such as ponds and waterfalls, and even large trees on the top level.
Clearly, the hanging gardens must have been a sight to behold, especially in the context of the Mesopotamian desert. Descriptions of the gardens even include an ancient version of a device for lifting water up to the highest levels of the gardens; a device later “re-invented” by Archimedes in the third century B.C. (and called, appropriately enough, the Archimedes’ Screw).
The Destruction
The hanging gardens are said to have survived more than five hundred years, until they were destroyed by an Earthquake in the first century B.C. They survived rather well, considering the kind of turmoil that this entire region continually went through on a regular basis.
So, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon clearly deserve their position in the annals of history as one of the seven ancient wonders. But this leads to a serious problem. After all, every description known of the hanging gardens come from just a couple of sources, and neither of them primary.
The Greek historian Strabo (1st century A.D.), and Diodorus Siculus (1st century B.C.) are the two main sources for information about the gardens, though neither of these ever personally witnessed the hanging gardens for themselves.
Supposedly, these two must have gained their knowledge from other sources, though the works of other eyewitnesses, if they ever existed, have been lost somewhere in the distant past.
Furthermore, while these two witnesses are rather descriptive in their precious few paragraphs about the gardens, in all of the records from ancient Babylonia (and there are many, including some very good descriptions in the Old Testament of the Bible), there is absolutely no mention of the Hanging Gardens. Anywhere. Not even a vague implication.
So this is the crux of the problem. Two decent witnesses, but neither of them firsthand, and a very notable absence of witnesses from the culture out of which these gardens were supposed to be one of the major landmarks. What does this mean?
In essence, it means that historians simply don’t know. There’s a good chance the hanging gardens were real, but there’s an equally good chance that they are a mere fabrication. And there’s also a good chance that that the gardens of Babylon may have been confused with a similar garden which was known to exist in the Assyrian city of Ninevah (supposedly located near present day Mosul, Iraq to the north).
Mysteries such as this regarding the ancient world are a great part of what makes history so interesting and challenging at the same time.
See also:
The Temple of Artemus at Ephesus
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
References:
“The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.” The Unmuseum.
“Hanging Gardens of Babylon.” Authentic Wonders.
An Artiist's Depiction of the Hanging Gardens
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