The legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon are exactly that: legendary. And they may not have been located in Babylon.
The gardens, famous as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, were, according to Stephanie Dalley, an Oxford University Assyriologist, located some 340 miles north of ancient Babylon in Nineveh, on the Tigris River by Mosul in modern Iraq.
Dalley, whose book The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon will be published later this summer, writes that earlier sources were translated incorrectly, leading to the confusion. The misinterpretation also explains why years of excavations never yielded any credible evidence of the fabled gardens in Babylon, the capital city of Babylonia on the Euphrates River. Historians have questioned their existence for some time.
An illustration of the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of many renderings of the popular ancient site.
Illustration from Corbis
"It must be admitted at the outset that the hanging gardens of Babylon ... have never been conclusively identified, nor, indeed, has their existence been proved," wrote Irving Finkel, the British Museum's curator of cuneiform in 1988.
Dalley credits the hanging gardens to Sennacherib (704-681 B.C.), the Assyrian king who made Nineveh his capital and created a massive system of waterworks, including an aqueduct that carried water to the city from hills 40 miles away. Sennacherib also left a number of inscriptions trumpeting his irrigation and garden-building prowess. "The inscriptions of Sennacherib in particular refer proudly to his great network of canals, and often describe them in the context of luxurious gardens and parks," says Jason Ur, an anthropological archeologist at Harvard University.
On the other hand, Nebuchadrezzar—the ruler traditionally associated with Babylon's hanging gardens—never mentions gardens, despite many extant inscriptions boasting of his accomplishments in Babylon.
Gardens May Remain Buried
Not all Mesopotamian academics believe in the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh, however, contending that a lack of evidence so far doesn't necessarily mean the gardens weren't in Babylon.
McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, says that there is a location in Babylon that would have been suitable for raised gardens—the Southern Citadel, "a massive group of walls that are right on the river. This is the only place that would have made it easy to gain access to the water." The royal family's living quarters were convenient to any gardens there, he says, and "the technology, even then, would have allowed the raising of the water in stages."
Archeologists and the Iraqi government are trying to remove thousands of people living in historical sites, like this family living atop the remnants of Nineveh, in an attempt to prevent irreparable destruction.
Photograph by Adam Ferguson, New York Times/Redux
For the time being, Dalley says, it's unlikely that anyone will excavate at Nineveh, or even that excavation would end the debate. Its location, next to Mosul, the site of continuing violence between the Sunni minority and the Shiite-led government of Iraq, means it is too unsafe for archaeological work. Because the site has been subject to pillaging over the years and was used as a military base by Saddam Hussein's army, excavators may never find traces of a hanging garden.
