Human history has been filled with an incredible volume of construction, so what makes any one structure magnificent? Is it a mix of complex engineering and incredible resilience, or is it the scale and devotion of enormous amounts of labor and resources? Could it be the utility of the building? And you can’t forget about cultural and religious connotations. Any number of things could contribute to how such a construction is perceived.
The task of really narrowing down the countless brilliant buildings that we have today to a shortlist of only the best of the best is a daunting task1. For ancient Greek and Roman writers though, it was a little less challenging; travel restraints, lack of information, and an absence of well-oiled and consumer-oriented tourism machines limited the available options.
The writers deemed 7 monuments2 fit for the title of world wonder.
The most intriguing of which (for me at least) being the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A truly incredible work of engineering for its time, it excites both my inner historian and love for complex systems. Just the name itself conveys a certain sense of awe or mysticism, of a lost oasis, a certain - fountain of youth - connotation. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I love it. It makes me want to learn more about its intricacies, its mysteries.
There are 5 surviving tellings of the great hanging gardens (accounts that I will go into detail about later).
Here’s my own rendition based on these various sources and an attempt to preserve their beautiful language:
A wife of Persian descent and possessed of a longing for the meadows of her native mountains, asked her king to imitate, through the artifice of a planted garden, the distinctive landscape of Persia.
And so it was that massive embankments along the Euphrates were constructed to stop flooding and a stone bridge built to span the river. And then a citadel, rising 80 feet above, on top of which the gardens were situated.
The garden was square and extended 123 meters on each side. The enormous walls were almost 7 meters thick, and the passage-way between was 3 meters, so wide that four-horse chariots could easily pass one another.
Sloped like a hillside, large arching vaults rose from one another tier on tier, resembling that of a theatre.
These terraced galleries carried the entire weight of the planted garden and lofty trees, and rose little by little one above the other up the slope; and the uppermost gallery, which was 50 cubits high, bore the highest surface of the garden, which at 93 meters was level with the circuit wall of the battlements of the city,
The ascent to the uppermost terraces was made by a stairway; and alongside these stairs there were screws, through which the water from the aqueducts and the Euphrates was continually conducted up into the garden.
The roofs of the galleries were covered with beams of stone 16 feet long, inclusive of the overlap, and 4 feet wide. Above these beams there was first a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of bitumen, then two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and as a third layer a covering of lead, so that the moisture from the soil might not penetrate beneath.
Earth had been piled on top to a depth sufficient for the roots of the largest trees, some with trunks as thick as 8 cubits in size; and the leveled ground was thickly planted with trees of every kind, broad-leaved and especially garden trees of many varieties, and all kinds of flowering plants that by their great size and other charms, could give pleasure to the beholder.
And since the galleries, each jutting out beyond another, all received the light, the trees could be seen towering to a height of 50 feet, and said to yield as much fruit as if they were growing in their native soil.
And although lapse of time gradually undermines and destroys, not only works made by the hand of man, but also those of Nature herself, this huge structure, although worked upon by the roots of so many trees and loaded with the weight of so great a forest, endures unchanged.
An absolute marvel of engineering, beauty, and ambition.
Truly a world wonder.
Also that last paragraph is my absolute favorite, Quintus really out did himself (it’s a direct quotation).
Also I just love, love, looove both the descriptions and the obviously latent engineering that went into such a work.
These gardens would on all accounts be a crowning achievement for the city of Babylon and of its king Nebuchadnezzar II. However, the idyllic descriptions, although awe-inspiring, might not give the full story. As we shall see, the history isn’t as clearcut.
So where does the first mention of these mysterious gardens appear? The earliest account comes from a Babylonian priest of Marduk (The primary babylonian god) named Berossus in 290 BCE:
“In this palace he erected very high walls, supported by stone pillars; and by planting what was called a pensile paradise, and replenishing it with all sorts of trees, he rendered the prospect an exact resemblance of a mountainous country.” (1)
This sounds like the gardens, but the problem with this description? It only survives as a quotation from a work by Josephus, a Roman-Jewish historian from the 1st century CE.
That’s a gap of about 400 or so years.
In fact, most descriptions of the enigmatic gardens come from this first century, from writers who never actually visited Babylon, compiling descriptions from long lost sources that may themselves have been secondary or even tertiary accounts of real eye-witness experience.
Berossus’ account is the only surviving tie of the gardens to Babylon and then king Nebuchadnezzar II.
Diodorus Siculus, an ancient Greek historian working off now-lost sources from 4th century BCE historians Cleitarchus and Ctesias of Cnidus, provided the most detailed description of the gardens (which was included in the earlier paraphrased section) but he ascribed them only to a ‘Syrian King’ (3).
Not overly helpful. The other accounts come from ancient historians Quintin Curtius Rufus, Strabo, and Philo of Byzantium. Each provides a slightly different account of the gardens, however still do not include a concrete location or associated monarch.
Dang.
Okay so maybe the historical accounts of the gardens are a little muddled, and obviously with so much time and lost information3 they are bound to be flawed or inaccurate in one way or another.
What isn’t muddled? The Earth.
Archaeology provides a sure fire way to get to the bottom of this mystery.
To think that these ancient civilizations and biblical kings didn’t inhabit some distant, archaic, mesopotamian outerworld, but in fact lived right here on Earth just like the rest of us do right now, it's comforting.
So if Babylon indeed possessed a hanging garden of such splendor and construction that it endured unchanged under the weight of an entire forest (still my favorite description), then through the process of excavation and careful digging, we will find traces of its foundation.
Lucky for us we also know exactly where to look.
Right?
Robert Koldewey excavated Babylon from 1898 to 1917 and he searched for the location of the mysterious gardens (5). However Koldewey came up very empty handed.
One spot of particular initial interest was a limestone building near the northeast corner of the royal palace (6). Limestone is not local to the area, so these blocks would have been transported long distances to reach the capital. What better material to build the most awe-inspiring gardens of the ancient world out of than an exotic foreign stone?
It’s now believed that this building was actually only a treasury.
The archaeological dig of Babylon is remarkably unconvincing in terms of providing the location of the gardens. Subsequent expeditions have yielded similarly disappointing results.
Really, I’m probably more devastated than you right now.
With traces of old structural foundations not bearing much fruit, there is one more place that we can look in order to determine whether or not this most intriguing world wonder perhaps even existed at all.
Aside from buildings, enormous amounts of written data (recorded on clay tablets and cylinders) have been unearthed from Babylon.
The subject of these writings are variable. Some are devoted to war and conquest, others have the inventories of goods, and a lot to the chronicles of kings.
Nebuchadnezzar II himself was incredibly thorough when it came to recording his various achievements.
But in all this contemporary Babylonian literature, no mention of a great garden ever surfaces.
And I have no doubt that a self-ascribed King of Justice and King of the Universe would have documented his exploits in creating a then-considered world wonder.
So with that, I’d the case for Babylon is pretty much closed, but that of the gardens isn’t done quite yet.
So at this point, life sucks.
Sure the description of the gardens are cool, and its mythical nature is intriguing, but it's no fun if a myth is really just a myth. It would be way cooler if it actually existed.
In desperation I started reading Stephanie Dalley’s book, The Mystery of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And when I tell you she knows what she's talking about, I mean, she knows. This woman is out here reading cuneiform and synthesizing knowledge across the ancient spectrum.
Her key finding? Descriptions of gardens mimicking those of the Greek and Roman writers appear in annals of a different Mesopatamian king, Sennacherib of Assyria. “I raised the height of the surroundings of the palace, to be a Wonder for All Peoples. I gave it the name ‘Incomparable Palace’. A high garden imitating the Amanus mountains I laid out next to it, with all kinds of aromatic plants, orchard trees…” (5) First of all, these guys are humble, second, this looks pretty promising. This is paired with the discovery of a bas relief from Sennacherib’s palace depicting mountainous gardens irrigated by aqueducts. Aqueducts that have since been discovered at a site called Jerwan, adding some archaeological credibility. So it seems pretty plausible that the gardens could have been in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh instead of Babylon.
Let’s get into the weeds for a second, the name Babylon can be translated to “gate of god”, and Sennacherib had named Nineveh's gates after different gods. In a way it could be considered that Nineveh was a “Babylon”.
Furthermore after Assyrian conquest and later destruction of the city of Babylon, Nineveh was occasionally referred to as the “New Babylon”.
This is on top of the fact that there is evidence for other ancient cities like Borsippa also taking the name of Babylon.
For a traveling Greek or Roman compiling a list of ancient wonders, they really couldn’t be sure which city was named what. And with whole populations being moved frequently after battle (a famous example being the exile of the Jews), it was all just a little bit uncertain.
To these classical writers, Babylon (or wherever they were) was hundreds of miles away and exotic in a way very similar to other cities like Nineveh. The two could have easily been confused.
The last thing I’ll say is that there is also cause to believe that there were multiple extravagant gardens in the old mesopotamian world (6). It’s entirely possible that different writers visited different cities and saw different gardens, however all thought them to be the so-called Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
It really is just too hard to tell.
I am of the mind that maybe the real Hanging Gardens of Babylon were the friends we made along the way.
First of all, why wouldn’t it?
Also I’m going to go off what I think is the most plausible theory, that the gardens were in Nineveh,
So imagine you’re Sennacherib. You have a few problems, how do I construct my gardens, how do I get enough water into my capital, and how do I raise that water. Let’s investigate how he accomplished this over two and a half thousand years ago.
A lot of what we know about how the gardens themselves come from the old classical accounts. According to them, the terraces that made up the garden were most likely constructed of brick and stone.
But with the enormous weight of soil and vegetation, the terraces had to be reinforced. A related problem was also making sure that the water used for irrigation didn’t seep through the roofs of the galleries.
Diodorus Siculus’ account gives us some answers:
“The roofs of the galleries were covered over with beams of stone sixteen feet long…and four feet wide. The roof above these beams had first a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of bitumen, over this two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and as a third layer a covering of lead…” (3)
This description was featured earlier in the article.
As we can see, many current technologies are on full display. The use of bitumen (modern day asphalt) and cement made this undertaking truly a remarkable example of contemporary construction. Every technique available to these ancient engineers was put to use.
Of course, if water did end up seeping through and then happened to get accidentally consumed, the lead wouldn’t be doing anyone any favors. But I’d say for more than two millennia ago, they did a pretty good job.
How would this water have eventually gotten to the garden though? Let’s find out.
If you’ve never been to what was once Mesopotamia (like I haven’t), it’s very plausible to think that because it is part of what’s called the fertile crescent, that the climate is mild and the soils are rich and there’s lots of happy animals dancing around and… No.
Well maybe.
No doubt there were a ton of different factors that contributed to the growth of civilizations in the area, but the climate itself is pretty arid, and it is HOT. These guys are dealing with 120°F plus during the summer. So if you want to get nice fresh water to your gardens year-round, that’s a little problematic.
The solution to this dilemma started 90km away at a site named Khinnis. Here, waters from the Gomel river were diverted, run through an enormous canal system, and then dispersed at the capital city of Nineveh and its surrounding farmland (7).
What I left out about this 90km journey was that the waters passed over what was once thought to be an ancient bridge. Now we know that this ‘bridge’ was in fact the Jerwan aqueduct.
Yep, this predates the Romans by more than five centuries.
The aqueduct used arches, as can be seen from the rubble we have today, spanned a length of 280m, and was constructed from 2 million individual stones.
This is on top of 89720m of regular canal that ferried the water for the rest of the journey.
That is quite the engineering achievement, and the result? Experts estimate that Nineveh had access to 300t of water per day.
Water, check.
With step one completed, Sennacherib needed to find a way to get all this new water up to the higher levels of his garden.
Here’s how he implemented this feature:
“Instead of shadufs I let … beams and alamittu stand over the wells.” (1)
A shaduf is a tool that uses a bucket, leverage, and a counterweight in order to raise water from rivers or lakes onto land. However Sennacherib lays out a different method, one that uses beams (cylinders) and alamittu (screws).
This water screw device predates Archimedes by around 350 years, of whom this device takes its namesake.
The Archimedes screw rotates, drawing water from below, and through its cylinder enclosed shaft, raises it to a higher plane.
Water, raised.
I’ve been writing this for a little too long now, if you want to learn more there's a BBC documentary on the whole Babylon vs. Nineveh conundrum on youtube, search for ‘finding babylon’s hanging gardens’. Ok done with that, now I want to turn to stuff a little more current and maybe a little more about the human condition.
I want to circle back to the beginning of this article, why is it that the idea of the hanging gardens are so intriguing? Why did they retain their spot as a world wonder when other great works like the Gate of Ishtar (which was indisputably real and also in Babylon) were inevitably written off?
Sure it definitely has the mystery, but I think it’s because of the integration and mastery it demonstrates with nature.
This world wonder was not only an engineering feat, but also one of horticulture.
The gradual shift from hunter-gatherer tribes to burgeoning civilizations has happened in a relatively short time frame. This has been in many parts thanks to agriculture and the domestication of many key plants and animals.
However does one have the same sense of awe when looking upon a terraced hanging garden and a sprawling artichoke farm? The feelings are altogether different.
Despite both these examples showing human prowess in cultivating plants based on our design, only one attempts to meld the two (human ingenuity and natural bounty) into a cohesive picture. One that retains the natural sense of awe we get when gazing upon an untouched landscape.
I think this fusion is incredibly beautiful, and I think many other people feel the same way. After all, landscaping and the middle class backyard have become staples of first world countries.
And a little tangent, I’m sure we’ve all had days where little nuisances, struggles, and anxieties fill our entire sensory capacity. What these symbols of nature and bounty can do is remind us of how vast and flexible the world around us can be, and in turn edify the idea that today's struggles can turn into tomorrow’s triumphs.
One of my favorite modern examples of the blending of nature and humanity is the Bosco Verticale located in Milan. There’s a certain intangible quality that buildings like these have that continues to capture wonder and amazement.
I’ll sum up this article (before I go back and revise) with my observation that although mediums often change, the human condition inevitably finds a way to express itself, there’s really not a lot we can do otherwise.
It’s been done, but most attempts really don’t take into account some spectacular feats of modern engineering. Noticeably lacking are newer buildings which may be less culturally significant but no less impressive ↩
The ever present number 7 in historical antiquity, biblical retellings, and all manners of different contexts is also an extremely interesting topic in and of itself. I may write something in the future about the phenomena but for now just know that the Greeks thought that 7 was a perfect number. ↩
It’s amazing to think of how much knowledge has just been disintegrated by the sands of time and other natural or man made phenomena; also equally amazing is the ability to record so much knowledge on such transient mediums, the emergent properties of ink and papyrus, or any pen and paper for that matter, is one of my great many joys in life. Now, it's funny to think that instead of having information become regretfully lost, it may stay with us longer than we like, how times have changed. ↩