The Hanging Gardens of Babylon is considered to be on of the seven wonders of the ancient world. While these gardens no longer exist today, the information that does exist about them through the transmission of early Greek historians helps us to understand how these gardens were constructed and why they were built. While they are known as the Hanging Gardens to the modern world, they were actually terraced gardens, something not so unusual today, but in the ancient world, it was considered an architectural feat.
Historically, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzer II built the gardens for his new wife, a young princess named Amytis from Medes. She was homesick and longed for her home country when he decided to build an artificial mountain complete with gardens for her. In 600 B.C.E. he started the construction of this garden for her which began with a 400 foot high terraced building outside of his palace that was located on the east bank of the Euphrates. This building consisting of five terraces complete with arches and columns. Fruit trees, lush grasses, and exotic flowers of all kinds were planted on each terrace which contained sections full of soil and rocks for drainage. A screw-pump was the most likely method of raising water from ground level to reach the upper terraces of the garden. The terraces themselves were made of stone and mud brick, with each terrace being accessible by a flight of stairs. Statuary also decorated the gardens. The former location of these once beautiful Hanging Gardens is in present day al-Hillah in Iraq.
The first historian to mention these gardens was a Babylonian writer named Berossus. Berossus wrote “The History of Babylonia” around 290 B.C.E. and described the gardens in his text. Only fragments of the text survive today through recounts by later Greek historians like Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. They confirm that a terraced garden really did exist during Nebuchadnezzer’s time but by 79 C.E., the garden was destroyed through earthquakes. It is also possible that rulers after Nebuchadnezzer simply allowed the terraced garden to be destroyed by invaders and the plants and trees eventually dying off due to neglect. It is recorded that Pliny the Elder came to visit the gardens in 79 C.E. when he discovered they were gone.
Some modern historians believe the hanging gardens were originally built by the Babylonian king Senaherib, dating the gardens back to 500 B.C.E. Evidence for the existence of the gardens has been scant until the twentieth century when a German archaeologist by the name of Robert Koldewey in 1899 excavated a site in ancient Babylon in Iraq that is believed the be the remains of the Hanging Gardens. A stone cellar was discovered in the location where the Hanging Gardens was supposed to exist that was next to the wall of the northern citadel of ancient Babylon. This find can help us to reconstruct what the layout of the terraces once looked like.
