The Hanging Gardens of Babylon: Is this the most mysterious wonder of the ancient world?

Happy Friday folks,

605 BC.

A new king ascends the throne of Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar II.

Babylon was a city that cemented itself into the annals of history. At one point, it was the largest city in the world and possibly the first to reach 200,000 inhabitants. While the city had its fair share of rulers, it was Nebuchadnezzar II’s reign that marked the true height of Babylonian civilization.

Sit Back. Relax. And grab your cup of tea. Let’s dive in:

He was a builder king, and his ambitious projects would leave a lasting imprint on the region. One of his most famous feats was the reconstruction and expansion of the city’s walls—it was made up of three rings of walls that were each 40 feet tall. From ancient Greek historian Herodotus, we are told that these walls were so thick that it would be possible to hold chariot races on top of them. He also mentions:

“Babylon lies in a wide plain, a vast city in the form of a square with sides nearly 14 miles long and a circuit of some 56 miles, and in addition to its enormous size, it surpasses in splendor any city of the known world,” he begins. “It is surrounded by a broad, deep moat full of water, and within the moat there is a wall 50 royal cubits wide and 200 high.”

Nebuchadnezzar was also involved with the construction of what is perhaps the most associated wonder of Babylon: the Tower of Babel.

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Nebuchadnezzar is credited with creating the Ishtar Gate, a monumental entrance to the city that was adorned with glazed brick tiles depicting dragons and bulls. Almost 2,600 years later, you can still see it for yourself though not in modern-day Iraq.

Before WWI, German archaeologists spend years unearthing and transported pieces of the gate via coal barrels, from Iraq. Today, the reconstructed, original Ishtar Gate stands in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany.

But Nebuchadnezzar is famous for a wonder much more grand… and mysterious.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built intentionally as a gift to his wife, Amytis, who longed for the beautiful vegetation of her native Media (the northwestern part of modern-day Iran). So he created an artificial paradise in the heart of the arid Mesopotamian plain.

Now, the earliest surviving mention of the Hanging Gardens does not come from Babylonian sources. No clay tablets, no inscriptions, no contemporary accounts from Nebuchadnezzar’s time. Instead, we hear of them centuries later.

A Babylonian priest named Berossus, writing around 290 BC, records the tale. Later historians narrate his account: the garden was a series of terraces, covered in lush greenery, watered by an ingenious system of irrigation.

After Berossus, Greek historians begin writing about the Hanging Gardens. Diodorus, from the 1st century BC, describes the gardens in elaborate detail. He speaks of terraces rising in steps, supported by stone columns. The gardens, he claims, were irrigated by a complex system that drew water from the Euphrates.

Likewise, Strabo, a geographer of the 1st century, tells us:

"The garden is quadrangular in shape, and each side is four plethra in length. It consists of arched vaults, which are situated one after another on checkered, cube-like foundations. The checkered foundations, which are hollowed out, are covered so deep with earth that they admit the largest of trees…. For the river, a stadium in width, flows through the middle of the city, and the garden is on the bank of the river."

Philo of Byzantium, in his work On the Seven Wonders of the World, says:

"The so-called Hanging Garden with its plants above the ground grows in the air. The roots of trees form a roof over the ground. Stone pillars stand under the garden to support it, and the whole area beneath the garden is occupied with engraved bases of the pillars."

So this all seems like concrete details to prove one of the 7 ancient wonders of the world, but the strange part is that we have no eyewitness accounts. These historians all lived long after the time of Nebuchadnezzar. And in fact, neither Nebuchadnezzar nor any inscriptions or clay tablets found from excavations mention anything about hanging gardens…

If they truly existed, why would such a wonder, reportedly so grand and important, go unrecorded by the Babylonians themselves?

One theory suggests that the gardens never actually existed in the city of Babylon.

Instead, they resided in Nineveh, some 300 miles north of the capital. And they weren’t built under Nebuchadnezzar II, but Sennacherib, a century earlier. We’ve found reliefs from Sennacherib’s palace that depict a lush garden, irrigated by an aqueduct. Something else to note is that Babylon was very flat, unlike Nineveh, which was surrounded by rugged terrain, allowing for transporting water downhill much easier.

But the real explanation for all of this confusion might actually be quite simple. When the Assyrians conquered Babylon in 689 BC, they renamed their capital, Nineveh, to the “New Babylon,” with many gates and buildings that were later built, taking Babylonian names.

So what do you think. Are the ruins of the Hanging Gardens waiting to be uncovered or is it all purely a myth?

Until Next Time,

World Scholar