As one casts a critical eye over these many attempts at reconstruction, aware that the ancient descriptions have been wilfully ignored, one asks oneself why a roof or courtyard garden, or a sunken flat one, should qualify to be a World Wonder, since all the other World Wonders are marvels of engineering, construction, technical ingenuity, size and artistic accomplishment. Those who have asked themselves such a question, finding no answer, have fallen back on a denial that the gardens ever existed, preferring to relegate them to the realms of romantic imagination and the fantastic fabulations of late antiquity. This offers an unsatisfactory solution to the problem, partly because the various Classical descriptions were quite coherent while arousing no suspicion of a common source such as a folktale or novel, and partly because all the other six World Wonders certainly existed. A non-existent wonder did not fit the category.
Fig. 4 Cartoon of Robert J. Day from the New Yorker, 1960. Several reconstructions show long, steep staircases and jungle-like plants.
A different suggestion that ignored the Classical sources gained credence by disregarding descriptions of the garden as an adjunct to the royal palace, and placing it on the stages of the ziggurat at Babylon, the temple tower of the great god Bel–Marduk, famously described by Herodotus. The idea obviated the need to find a site on the ground with space for a garden. It germinated from a discovery made by Leonard Woolley, excavating the great ziggurat at Ur in southern Iraq, when he found holes at regular intervals in the solid mass of brickwork. Ziggurats are solid mud-brick structures with a skin of baked brick. If anyone had planted trees upon the terraced stages of the ziggurat and then watered them (hauling water unceremoniously from a well up the long flights of stairs in buckets) the brickwork would soon have disintegrated. The purpose of the so-called ‘weeper holes’ was to help the mass of solid brickwork to dry out evenly, so that a differential in moisture content between the core and the surface brick would not cause splitting and cracking; this was Woolley’s original interpretation.
But then Woolley changed his mind, and associated the holes with drainage for plants, a suggestion that appealed to the public, inspiring many reconstruction drawings of the Hanging Garden to show plants dangling from the terraces of a ziggurat, like a fancifully decorated wedding cake made of superimposed squares that decrease in size the higher they go, so that the foliage hung over from each terrace on the side of the building, rather like gigantic hanging baskets. His second interpretation is wrong for several reasons, including those just described, and has been discounted by later archaeologists.7 Unfortunately it was so picturesque, and seemed, on the face of it, so suitable for applying to Babylon, and the book in which Woolley published it so popular, that many of his readers looked no further, remembering what they had read; and Moorey retained the second interpretation in his otherwise fine revision of Woolley’s book.8 This is the image that has endured in many artistic reconstructions of the Hanging Garden.
Another reason to discard the idea comes from several depictions of ziggurats engraved on cylinder seals. Plants are never shown rising from the terraces of those temple towers, which are bare of ornamentation (see Figure 5).9 A few Assyrian sculptures showing tall buildings were occasionally thought by early interpreters to show plants growing from the walls, but further careful study showed either that flames of destruction were intended, or the horns of wild deer and gazelles, such as one still sees decorating the walls of houses in the Arabian peninsula (as well as German hunting lodges and Scottish baronial castles).10 The misconception gives an insight into the difficulties of interpreting an ancient form of art, especially when the carved surface is damaged and no colour survives. Flames and leaves are both grey on bare limestone sculptures.
Fig. 5 Cylinder seal impressions showing ziggurats without any plants on their terraces. (a) From Tell Muhammed Arab, Late Bronze Age. (b) Provenance unknown, Babylonian Iron Age. Ht. 3.85 cm.
Above all, the idea of a ziggurat-garden bears no relationship at all to the rather detailed descriptions of the Hanging Garden given by the Classical authors, from whose accounts the main evidence is drawn. We cannot simply dismiss our chief sources of information, which were ostensibly written while the garden still existed.
Some confusion arose from misunderstanding of the English word ‘hanging’. In modern times we may think of hanging baskets, in which drooping plants have their roots at a higher level than much of their pendant foliage (see Figure 6). Or, in a less urban environment, we may think of ‘hangers’, steeply sloping hillsides covered in forest trees such as Gilbert White described in his village of Selbourne in Hampshire.11 Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘pensile paradise’ was preferred for its poetic alliteration derived from a Latin description.12 For people who only knew of the World Wonder as Hanging Gardens (in German, hängende Gärten),13 the semantic range of the English word could be exploited regardless of the Classical texts, encouraging the idea of plants on the stages of a temple tower. ‘Hanging’ is the English word that translates the ancient Greek word kremastos, applied to the Hanging Garden, and its meaning may be discerned from other contexts: it does not have the same range of meaning in Greek as in English. I have not identified an Akkadian equivalent. In Greek it was used by Sophocles to describe Antigone, found hanging by the neck, suspended by a noose of fine linen, and Oedipus’ mother hanging by a plaited rope. Less dramatically the word is used of a hammock, of the rigging of a ship, and of dried grapes.14 Some of the Greek descriptions of the Hanging Garden make it clear that the upper part was built upon artificial terraces of stone, like a Greek theatre, so that the trees planted there could not reach the water table with their roots, and had to be kept moist artificially, as Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Q. Curtius Rufus and Philo of Byzantium describe them. Thus the terraces which were actually elevated on vaults above the ground appeared as if suspended from the sky. This is not a feature of the ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat, which is made of solid brick.
Fig. 6 Cartoon by ‘Knife’. The word ‘hanging’ has caused much confusion.
Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon for forty-three years, is named by Josephus as the creator of the Hanging Garden, and it is his name that has generally been accepted in that context, helping to qualify him for the modern epithet ‘the Great’. Contemporary records show that he had at least seven sons and three daughters whose names are known;15 that he benefited from a long reign to complete the enormous building works that his father had begun, in and around Babylon, and he took the credit for them by recording his works in quite lengthy inscriptions, and by inscribing hundreds of bricks that were inserted into the constructions (see Figures 2 and 7). We have more than 200 of his official building inscriptions, many of them complete, which he wrote at various times after he became king. Even as crown prince he had taken an active part in building work. In the words of his proud father Nabopolassar, ‘I had builders’ baskets made of gold and silver, and I made Nebuchadnezzar, my eldest son, beloved of my heart, carry soil mixed with wine, oil and aromatic shavings, alongside the workmen.’16
Nebuchadnezzar had campaigned as crown prince with great success, driving the Egyptians out of Syria and back into the Nile valley. After inheriting the kingship from his father he established control over Syria and Palestine in the course of many campaigns, but never controlled Egypt, Anatolia or Iran.17 This limitation sometimes causes surprise because the modern epithet ‘the Great’ invites comparison with Alexander, whose conquests included those lands. After his death legends inflated Nebuchadnezzar’s achievements, giving him an undeserved reputation as a world conqueror; but his triumphs in the Levant, and the riches heaped up earlier from the conquest of Assyria, must have given him enough wealth for his ambition to make his city the greatest in the known world. He celebrated his prowess by inscribing on two rock faces in the Wadi Brisa, a ravine in the cedar mountains of Lebanon (see Figure 8 a, b).18 This was the region where the legendary Gilgamesh and Enkidu had fought and killed the monster Humbaba. Nebuchadnezzar referred to it
as a place where he had cut down gigantic cedar trees for his temple doors—implying that he was like Gilgamesh. On the surface of the rock he also had scenes carved that showed himself grasping a tree, presumably intending to cut it down, and fighting a lion,19 as Gilgamesh had done with Enkidu:
Fig. 7 Barrel cylinder of Nebuchadnezzar II. His long and complete inscriptions do not mention any garden. Length 20 cm.
Gilgamesh was cutting down the trees;
Enkidu kept tugging at the stumps …
We who met and scaled the mountain, …
Killed lions in the passes of the mountains.
The Roman emperor Hadrian was to imitate him by carving his own rock inscriptions in the same area, many centuries later.20
Nowadays Nebuchadnezzar is most famous for taking direct control of Jerusalem, plundering and destroying its temple, and taking its rebellious kings into exile in Babylon. Other kings suffered a similar fate—at Arvad, Sidon, Tyre, Ashdod and Gaza—in episodes that had no biblical texts to prolong their notoriety; we know about them mainly from very brief chronicle texts. Compared with Assyrian kings, whose annalistic royal inscriptions relating military events are known in abundance, Babylonian kings were much more reticent about the details of their conquests, and put their main emphasis on pious works, building temples, making objects for use in the cult, and listing the exact offerings they instituted for the deities. The different nature of their texts, and the lack of narrative sculpture, makes it impossible to trace the kinds of details that might reveal a particular king’s character and his intellectual interests. We do not know if he liked hunting, or collecting plants,21 or whether his official piety was linked to personal religious fervour, or whether he loved his wife. Our knowledge of the king is far more restricted than of late Assyrian kings.
After his death Nebuchadnezzar’s reputation polarized sharply. For the Babylonians he was, like Gilgamesh, a model king, to such an extent that two rebels who briefly snatched the kingship from Achaemenid Persian control both called themselves ‘Nebuchadnezzar’. When eventually Seleucid kings ingratiated themselves with the Babylonians, nearly 250 years later, they imitated the famous king’s inscriptions for at least one of their building works, and one of their number wore his ancient robe for celebrating the festival of the New Year in Babylon. But for Jews and Christians he was the wicked, cruel emperor who had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, caused the Babylonian Captivity, and sent Daniel into the lion’s den. Some of the later traditions confused him either with the Assyrian king Sennacherib because both had attacked Jerusalem, or with Nabonidus the last king of Babylon, distorting the facts to allow the inference that God had punished the great leader for his sacrilege in Jerusalem, by causing the fall of Babylon to the foreigner Cyrus.
To Nebuchadnezzar the Hanging Garden is nowadays attributed, so it comes as a surprise to find that most of the Greek and Latin texts mentioning the garden do not name him as the builder. Diodorus Siculus said it was built ‘not by Semiramis but by a later Syrian king’ (‘Syrian’ meant ‘Assyrian’ from at least the 7th century BC onwards); and Quintus Curtius Rufus wrote, ‘Tradition affirms that a king of Assyria reigning in Babylon executed this work’. Strabo specified Babylon and the river Euphrates, but did not name the builder. The only ancient author to name Nebuchadnezzar was Josephus. He ostensibly quoted from the writings of Berossus, a Babylonian scholar-priest who wrote an account of Babylonian traditions in Greek for his patron the Seleucid emperor.
These attestations, and the single attribution to Nebuchadnezzar, give rise to doubts, whether about the veracity of Berossus himself, or about the use of his work by Josephus. But it is not just a question of denying Nebuchadnezzar his rightful place as builder of the World Wonder on the suspect testimony of much later sources. As luck would have it, among the many building records of Nebuchadnezzar that have come to light from Babylon and other Babylonian cities, not least is the great East India House Inscription on stone which describes the building of his palace. (See Figure 2) The king was far from reticent about his achievements in building: the marvellous walls of the city as well as wonderful temples and palaces; but he never mentions a garden.
Later, Greek writers describe Babylon without referring to the garden. Chief among them is Herodotus, writing in the time of Artaxerxes I (464–424 BC) who would surely have mentioned that the city contained a World Wonder, whether he had seen it himself, or had relied on hearsay for his information.22 Much later the Roman writer Pliny the Elder described the city, again without referring to the garden. Equally surprising, the patchwork of texts in several different languages and widely divergent versions now known as the Alexander Romance does not mention it even though the final days and premature death of Alexander the Great in Babylon gave every opportunity to incorporate a reference at the very least to one of the world’s marvels. There is no mention in the writings of Plutarch, or of Quintus Curtius Rufus, when they refer to Babylon. Nor does the Book of Daniel mention it; Nebuchadnezzar went up on to the roof of the royal palace to admire his city, but the tale does not mention the supposed garden. It is as though the World Wonder never existed.
Fig. 8a Two rock sculptures at Wadi Brisa, Lebanon showing Nebuchadnezzar II killing a lion, and cutting down trees, reflecting the deeds of the legendary hero Gilgamesh: (a) 200 x 550 cm.
Fig. 8b (b) 280 × 350 cm.
The problems seemed insuperable to many scholars. When Irving Finkel wrote his chapter for Peter Clayton’s book The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in 1988, he began his contribution with these words: ‘It must be admitted at the outset that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, although famed far and wide as one of the celebrated Seven Wonders of the World, have never been conclusively identified, nor, indeed, has their existence been proved.’ John and Elizabeth Romer came to an even more negative conclusion, writing in 1988 that ‘of all the Seven Wonders, they are the one that everyone first names, but they are also the one that is most insubstantial and elusive … for there never was such a thing in Babylon’.23
Since all the World Wonders in early lists were in some way astonishing not just for aesthetic reasons, but also from a technical point of view, in looking for the original Hanging Garden we have to find rather more than just an attractive garden such as many kings would have enjoyed in their capital cities, whether within their palaces as a courtyard garden, or on a more malleable plot of land adjacent to a palace. This excludes all of the reconstructions described earlier.
For those who suggested that the garden never existed, but was a purely fictional tradition invented to satisfy a Greek appetite for oriental marvels, it was not just a matter of invoking the infamous name of Nebuchadnezzar, sacker of Jerusalem, or the feminist allure of Semiramis the warrior queen. They thought that Babylon during the Achaemenid Persian period went into a severe decline which was subsequently exacerbated by the foundation of a new capital, Seleucia, when Hellenistic rule eventually settled down after the death of Alexander the Great and the ensuing power struggles.24 But new evidence has overturned that view. Babylon lay on the Euphrates, whereas Seleucia lay on the Tigris, so the new capital had little effect on trade or population around the old city. When the strife that followed the death of Alexander the Great subsided, Antiochus I (281–261) and his successors engaged in the traditional rituals of Babylon, and worked to restore the temple of Marduk there, as well as the temple of the god Nabu in the neighbouring city of Borsippa, encouraging a renaissance of indigenous traditions.25 More than that, recent excavations have discovered that renovations previously attributed to Nebuchadnezzar may be dated to the Seleucid period, a revision which calls into question the whole understanding of Babylon’s history at that time.26 Presumably those Seleucid rulers found the inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar within the brickwork, and piously replaced them when the work of renovation was completed—many examples of such a practice are known from the reigns of indigenous kings in much earlier times. We can no longer claim, therefore, that Babylon was too
ruined to support a famous garden as World Wonder at a time when the Hanging Garden was famous for Greek and Roman writers, and when it had not been displaced from the listing by a more recently built marvel. Nor can it be supposed that the people of Babylonia were no longer interested in their glorious past.27
As for records written on clay tablets, it was thought until recently that by the end of the Seleucid period a very few esoteric scholars still wrote and studied literature written in cuneiform. We now know that not only was there a cuneiform library with an archive at Babylon, but also no less than three cuneiform libraries with archives in the southern city of Uruk.28 Among the tablets from those late libraries comes the latest piece of the Gilgamesh Epic in cuneiform, dated to the Parthian period perhaps a few years before 127 BC, written by the son of a top astrologer-scholar.29 Those libraries with their literary tablets and archives have helped to amplify our view of the city of Babylon and its more or less uninterrupted tradition of education and scholarship beyond the end of the Seleucid period.30 In the time of Parthian rule, when many of the Greek and Roman books describing the Hanging Garden were written, there is not a trace of indigenous evidence for its existence, past or present, in Babylon.
The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced Page 4