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The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The terraced gardens of ancient legend whose existence and location are still debated
The Hanging Gardens are the one ancient wonder that may never have existed, at least not where tradition puts it. Greek and Roman writers described terraces of trees and flowers rising like a green mountain beside the Euphrates, watered by machines that lifted river water to the top. The usual story credits Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, who is said to have built them around 600 BCE for his wife Amytis, homesick for the hills of Media. Yet no Babylonian text mentions them, Herodotus says nothing of them, and excavators have never identified their remains. Both their existence and their location are debated, which keeps them on every list of wonders and at the center of a lively scholarly argument.
If the gardens stood in Babylon, they rose on a flat floodplain about 85 kilometers south of modern Baghdad, where the Euphrates once ran through the city past the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar. Ancient accounts, written centuries later, give dimensions of roughly 120 meters a side and describe vaulted terraces waterproofed with reeds, bitumen and lead. The German excavator Robert Koldewey proposed in the early 1900s that a vaulted building in the Southern Palace was their base, but most scholars now read it as a storehouse or administrative building. Today Babylon is a broad field of mud-brick ruins near the city of Hillah, partly rebuilt in the 1980s, with a replica of the Ishtar Gate. There is nothing a visitor can point to as the gardens themselves.
The main alternative, argued by the Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley, places the gardens at Nineveh, near modern Mosul, about 450 kilometers to the north. There the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who reigned from 705 to 681 BCE, described in his own inscriptions a palace garden fed by canals and an aqueduct at Jerwan, and a palace relief shows trees planted on terraces. Later Greek writers, the argument runs, confused Assyria's capital with Babylon. Other scholars defend the Babylon tradition or regard the gardens as largely a literary invention. The question is unlikely to be settled without new evidence from the ground. Babylon became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2019, while Nineveh suffered deliberate destruction during the Islamic State occupation of Mosul from 2014 to 2017.