Babylon at Its Height - The Wonder of the Ancient World
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are the only one of the seven wonders whose existence has never been established. The Greek and Roman writers who describe them — Strabo, Diodorus, Philo, Quintus Curtius — are all writing centuries after the fact and none had seen anything. They agree on an ascending series of terraces planted with full-grown trees, watered by a screw or a chain of buckets lifting water from the Euphrates, and built by Nebuchadnezzar II around 600 BC to console a Median wife who missed the mountains of her home. The problem is Babylonian silence. Nebuchadnezzar's own inscriptions describe his building programme at enormous length — the walls, the Processional Way, the Ishtar Gate, the ziggurat, the temples — and never mention a garden. Neither does any Babylonian administrative document, and neither does Herodotus, who describes the city in detail and was writing closer to it than anyone else. Robert Koldewey excavated Babylon for eighteen years and identified a vaulted building as the substructure; the tablets found there turned out to be storehouse records. Stephanie Dalley has argued that the gardens were real and were at Nineveh, built by Sennacherib around 700 BC — for which there is an inscription describing a wonder for all peoples, a bronze water-raising screw, and a relief showing terraced planting with an aqueduct. Babylon and Assyria were confused by later Greek writers routinely. The other six wonders are all attested. If they existed at Babylon, nothing has been found. If they were Sennacherib's, the wonder was attributed to the wrong king and the wrong city for two thousand years.
- Year: 605 BCE
- Category: Cultural
