Nineveh

Probably not in Babylon

For two thousand years the Hanging Gardens were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, attributed by Greek writers to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, supposedly built for his homesick Median wife Amytis.

One problem.

No Babylonian source — and Babylon left an enormous archive of cuneiform tablets — mentions them. Nebuchadnezzar himself, who recorded his building projects in obsessive detail, never wrote about a hanging garden. The Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley spent twenty years tracking down the contradiction and published her conclusion in 2013: the famous gardens were in Nineveh, not Babylon, and they were built about a century earlier by the Assyrian king Sennacherib.

Sennacherib's "wonder for all peoples"

Sennacherib, who reigned over the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 705 to 681 BC, made Nineveh his capital and lavished it with what he called the "palace without rival".

In his royal inscriptions, copied from the foundation tablets, he describes a planted garden raised on arched stone terraces beside his Southwest Palace, irrigated by "bronze water-lifting devices" that worked continuously. The description matches the Greek accounts of the Hanging Gardens almost exactly, including the rare detail of bronze water-lifting machinery.

Dalley argues the Greeks, working from much later second-hand sources, confused Nineveh with Babylon. Both were great Mesopotamian cities. Both eventually fell to ruin. The name of Babylon was more familiar.

How a hanging garden was irrigated

Building a garden on stacked terraces in northern Mesopotamia required moving water uphill from a river.

Sennacherib's solution, described in his inscriptions and partly preserved in the archaeological record around Nineveh, was a remarkable hydraulic system. A canal 50 kilometres long brought water from the foothills of the Zagros mountains. An aqueduct — the Jerwan aqueduct, still partly standing — bridged a valley with 300 metres of dressed-stone arches. At the palace the water was lifted to the upper terraces by a continuous-screw water-lifting device.

What the Romans would later call an Archimedes screw, three hundred years before Archimedes was born.

Each terrace then drained back to the river through buried clay pipes, producing the constant flowing sound that ancient visitors described.

Burned and forgotten

In 612 BC a coalition of Medes and Babylonians sacked Nineveh and burned it to the ground. The palaces collapsed; the gardens, which required constant maintenance to sustain their water-lifting machinery, died within seasons.

By the time Alexander the Great passed through the region three centuries later, Nineveh was a low mound of rubble overgrown with grass. The displaced Greeks who saw the still-functioning gardens of Babylon — themselves a respectable piece of horticulture, though less elaborate — wrote home that they had seen the famous "Hanging Gardens", and the name stuck to the wrong city.