The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon have been claimed in recent years to be the first known examples of green roofing. Or maybe they can be classed as the earliest attempts at hydroponics. Although they found fame as one of the Seven Wonders of the World there is one problem: They may never have existed. At least, not built be Nebuchadnezzar who ruled his city-state of Babylon 605-562 B.C.

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According to one popular tale the ruler’s wife, Amytis of Medina, sickening of the dreary flat plains surrounding Babylon, pined for the uplands and plants of her native Persia. Nebuchadnezzar, according to this account, allayed her misery by building the extravagant terraced gardens. According to some accounts, the terraces, built on beams of palm, were sealed with reeds bound with bitumen, then two courses of cemented, baked bricks, and finally a layer of lead was applied to waterproof the entire structure. Modern estimates claim the gardens would have required 8,200 gallons of water per day. However, as no record exists of the exact size or plantings exactly what this estimate was based on remains a mystery. Indeed, no record ancient or modern, cuneiform, papyrus, parchment or paper has ever reliably revealed the nature of Nebuchadnezzar’s landscape project. This has not deterred writes, both ancient and modern from confirming that such did indeed exist.

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The late L. Sprague de Camp, in his The Ancient Engineers (1974), repeats to tale of forlorn Amytis. He tells us that, “Of Nebuchadrezzar’s pleasure dome, only the basement survives. Hence nobody really knows how the Hanging Gardens looked when new.” He also adds for good measure that while the name ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ is assigned by the Bible the spelling used by Ezekiel and Jeremiah, ‘Nebuchadrezzar,’ is nearer the original while to the Greeks it was ‘Naboukodonosoros’ while the Akkadian rendered it as ‘Nabukuddurri-usur.’ De Camp based his erudite explanations on the excavations of Robert Johann Koldewey (1855-1925) in the early 1900s. The German architect and self-trained archaeologist spent almost two decades in today’s Iraq excavating ancient Babylon. There he made many extraordinary discoveries among which he is often credited with unearthing the basement of the long-lost Hanging Gardens. In his brilliant Gods, Graves and Scholars, C. W. Ceram takes up the shovel, recalling the excitement as Koldeway sought to explain unusual stone vaults he had unearthed. These included a triple shaft he identified as a draw-well, although the chain pump had long disappeared. This, he concluded, must have once fed a continuous supply of water to – what else? – The long-lost Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Alas, it would seem that both ancient and modern authorities disagree with the distinguished architect and archaeologist, however enthused he may have been. Strangely the ‘Father of History,’ Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) fails in his famed Histories to make any mention the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The first record in writing of this fabled horticultural achievement is that by Berossus, a Babylonian priest of Marduk in the late 4th century B.C. In future centuries, as the Pax Romanica spread into the eastern Mediterranean regions, it encouraged tourism by Greeks and Romans and, inevitably, by travel writers. As with so many of their descendants, they often field to visit the places or “sights” of which they wrote. While the other six of the seven wonders certainly did exist, modern suspicion is that the entire affair was nothing more than a poetic legend. Indeed, last month a book by Stephanie Daley, a Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, U.K. blew away the accumulated dusts of time and literature to reveal it was just such – a fanciful folktale. Like many such, however, it may have some basis on fact but not from Babylon. In her recondite The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, Ms. Daley suggests such terraced gardens were likely came from kilometres to the north in another fabled city, Nineveh. There excavations have shown that the Assyrians were superb irrigation engineers. Around Nineveh, near modern Mosul, they built dams, canals and aqueducts to water their crops, supply potable water for washing and drinking – and to nurture ornamental trees and plants in terraced gardens. Proof of this lies with inscribed illustrations at the foot of columns from Nineveh itself. Until recently, the Assyrians have come down in history as fiercely bearded warriors, formidable foes who descended onto and conquered their neighbours. Indeed the first line of Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib” has it that ‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold . . .’ It would appear though that they had a softer, more relaxed side that appreciated natural botanical beauty . . . But legends die hard. A year ago, according to The Australian, Iraq reportedly extended an oil pipeline by drilling under Babylon’s Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

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