Hanging Gardens of Babylon: The Lost Wonder of the Ancient World

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are the most mysterious of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Greek and Roman writers described a towering garden of terraces and trees built by a king of Babylon, traditionally Nebuchadnezzar II around 600 BC. Yet no contemporary Babylonian text mentions them and no trace has been firmly identified in the ruins of Babylon, so historians still debate where, and even whether, they existed.

The ancient accounts

Everything we know about the gardens comes from writers who lived centuries after Nebuchadnezzar. None of them is known to have seen the gardens personally, and their descriptions differ in important details.

The earliest surviving account goes back to Berossus, a Babylonian priest of the god Marduk who wrote a history of Babylon in Greek around 290 BC. His work is lost, but the Jewish historian Josephus quotes it in the first century AD. Berossus says that Nebuchadnezzar built high stone terraces planted with all kinds of trees inside his palace, making them look like mountains, because his wife had been brought up in Media and longed for mountain scenery.

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC and drawing on earlier historians of Alexander the Great’s campaigns, gives the fullest description. He says the garden was about four plethra on each side, roughly 120 metres, and rose in terraces like a theatre. The terraces stood on vaulted galleries, and the planting beds were sealed with layers of reeds, bitumen, baked brick and lead to stop water leaking through. Water was raised from the Euphrates by machines hidden inside the structure. Diodorus credits the work not to Nebuchadnezzar but to a later “Syrian” king who built it for a Persian concubine.

The geographer Strabo, around the turn of the era, and the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, in the first century AD, add similar details: vaulted supports, large trees, and water lifted from the river. A short treatise on the wonders attributed to Philo of Byzantium, of uncertain date, describes trees planted on a roof held up by stone columns and watered by screw-like devices.

The silence of Babylon

The most serious problem is what is missing. Nebuchadnezzar II left many building inscriptions in which he boasts of his palaces, city walls, temples, the Ishtar Gate and the great ziggurat Etemenanki. None of them mentions a garden on terraces.

Herodotus, who described Babylon in detail in the fifth century BC, does not mention the gardens either. It remains uncertain whether Herodotus actually visited the city, but his silence is striking for a monument later counted among the greatest sights of the world.

Babylonian astronomical diaries, business documents and chronicles, thousands of which survive, are also silent. Some historians conclude that the gardens were a modest palace garden enlarged by legend; others that they belong to a different city altogether.

The search at Babylon

The German archaeologist Robert Koldewey excavated Babylon for the German Oriental Society from 1899 to 1917. In the north-east corner of Nebuchadnezzar’s Southern Palace he found an unusual structure of fourteen vaulted rooms with thick walls and a well with three shafts side by side. Koldewey proposed that this “Vaulted Building” was the substructure of the Hanging Gardens, the three-shaft well holding a chain-of-buckets water lift.

Later study made this unlikely. The building lies far from the Euphrates, which would have made watering difficult. Clay tablets found in it record rations of oil and barley issued to dependants of the palace, including the exiled king Jehoiachin of Judah, which suggests it was used for storage and administration.

Other scholars have suggested sites closer to the river, such as the massive western outworks of the Southern Palace or the area of the Northern Palace. Excavations have not produced clear evidence for any of them. Much of Babylon lies under a high water table, so some structures may never be recovered.

The Nineveh theory

In the 1990s the Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley began to argue that the famous garden was not at Babylon at all, but at Nineveh, the Assyrian capital on the Tigris near modern Mosul. She set out her case in full in her 2013 book on the subject.

Dalley’s argument rests on several points. The Assyrian king Sennacherib (reigned 705–681 BC) built a vast new palace at Nineveh and described, in his own inscriptions, a garden planted with trees from many lands beside it. He also built a network of canals and aqueducts to bring mountain water to the city, including the stone aqueduct at Jerwan, more than 280 metres long. Dalley reads a passage in his inscriptions as describing water-raising devices cast in bronze, which she compares with the screws mentioned by Greek writers.

A relief from the palace of Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, now in the British Museum, shows a garden planted on a slope, with trees and an aqueduct with pointed arches feeding water to it. Dalley argues that later Greek writers confused Nineveh with Babylon, noting that after Sennacherib conquered Babylon some Assyrian texts gave Nineveh’s gates names borrowed from Babylon.

Many scholars find the theory attractive because it explains the silence of Babylonian sources. Others remain unconvinced, pointing out that the classical writers clearly locate the gardens at Babylon, and that the Nineveh evidence also falls short of proof. The question is still open.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the gardens literally hung in the air. The Greek term meant overhanging or raised. Ancient writers describe terraces on vaults, not plants suspended from chains.
• Myth: Queen Semiramis built them. Semiramis is a legendary queen loosely based on the Assyrian queen Sammu-ramat of the ninth century BC. The name “Hanging Gardens of Semiramis” is a later tradition with no historical basis.
• Myth: the gardens were built for Queen Amytis. Berossus says Nebuchadnezzar built them for his Median wife. The name Amytis appears in later reports of Berossus, but no Babylonian document records the queen’s name or a garden built for her.
• Fact: the original list of wonders varied. Ancient lists of “sights” (theamata) differed. The list that became standard, including the gardens, is preserved in a poem by Antipater of Sidon in the second century BC and in the treatise attributed to Philo.

How the gardens might have worked

If the gardens existed at Babylon, watering them would have been the greatest engineering challenge. Southern Mesopotamia receives little rain and summers are very hot, so a terraced garden would have needed a constant supply of water lifted many metres above the river.

Ancient engineers had several possible methods. The shaduf, a counterweighted pole and bucket, was common for irrigation but lifts only small amounts. A chain of buckets driven by people or animals could raise water higher. Greek writers speak of screws, and the Archimedean screw was known in the Hellenistic world, though it is not certain that such devices existed in Mesopotamia as early as the seventh or sixth century BC.

The terraces themselves would have needed waterproofing to protect the brick vaults below. Babylonian builders used bitumen, a natural tar found in Mesopotamia, which matches the layers described by Diodorus.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 700–690 BC: Sennacherib builds his palace, gardens and water system at Nineveh.
• 605–562 BC: Reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, the traditional builder of the gardens at Babylon.
• c. 430 BC: Herodotus describes Babylon without mentioning any hanging gardens.
• 323 BC: Alexander the Great dies at Babylon; historians of his campaigns later describe the city’s wonders.
• c. 290 BC: Berossus writes his history of Babylon, the earliest known account of the gardens.
• Second century BC: Antipater of Sidon includes the gardens in a poem listing the Seven Wonders.
• 1899–1917: Robert Koldewey excavates Babylon and proposes the Vaulted Building as the gardens’ site.
• 2013: Stephanie Dalley publishes her full case for locating the gardens at Nineveh.

Legacy

Even without physical remains, the Hanging Gardens have shaped how people imagine Babylon. Artists from the sixteenth century onwards, including the Dutch engraver Maarten van Heemskerck and the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, pictured them as stacked terraces of trees rising above city walls. These images, though imaginary, fixed the gardens in the European mind as the ultimate symbol of luxury and lost splendour.

Of the seven ancient wonders, only the Great Pyramid of Giza still stands. The others, such as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, are known from ruins, fragments or reliable descriptions. The Hanging Gardens are unique in that their very location has never been confirmed.

Why it matters

The Hanging Gardens show how ancient fame and historical evidence can diverge. A wonder known around the world rests on a handful of late Greek and Roman texts, and the debate over Babylon or Nineveh reminds historians to test even the most famous stories against contemporary sources.