The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced

by Stephanie Dalley

  Assyrian gardens in the north, on the other hand, were created in or near cities with far more energetic design, expressly to imitate a natural mountain landscape, by heaping up artificial hills, by planting fragrant mountain trees on their slopes, and by engineering running water to cool the air, keep the herbage green and provide the soothing sound of rippling streams. Where the royal palaces of Nineveh, Nimrud and Khorsabad were built for the great Assyrian emperors, the river Tigris runs through undulating landscape. To the east a spectacular range of mountains limits the horizon. Therefore tributaries come down to the Tigris, bringing clear mountain water which can be diverted through channels and aqueducts to serve the high citadels with their palaces, even though the bed of the Tigris itself lies far below the citadel. The Khosr was a tributary that brought mountain water swiftly down to Nineveh, and the Upper Zab flowed down likewise to Nimrud (see Figures 1 and 66).

  So prolific are the waters from the tributary river Khosr and the streams that feed into it that they caused damage to buildings on the citadel at Nineveh when the spate of spring was excessive, as several Assyrian building inscriptions record.

  The flood-prone river, a raging, destructive stream, which in its commotion had destroyed the gegunnu-shrines in the middle of the city and had exposed to sunlight their heaped up burials, and from long ago had flowed past close to the palace, and in its powerful spate had washed out its foundations …4

  By controlling the flow of several mountain streams, by judicious use of canals, sluice-gates, dams and aqueducts, the Ninevites could obviate the damage and reap the benefits of a water supply that reached the citadel at the appropriate height, providing fresh mountain water for palaces and temples, and irrigation for surrounding fields and gardens alike. Thus the natural environment made it possible to plant a landscape garden within a citadel—even though, as at Babylon, the latter rose high above the level of the plain—and to plan it with slopes so that streams of running water continually refreshed the plants and the senses of pleasure-seekers. In Assyria the aim was to recreate beauty-spots, natural groves and tree-clad hills, with running water and serendipitous pleasures, conveniently located beside the king’s palace. This is the type of garden described by the Greek authors. The type of royal garden known for Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh in Assyria could not simply be the prototype for one that was eventually created in Babylon, because conditions in the south were too different.

  Sargon and Sennacherib, both of whom created extraordinary palace gardens, stood in a long line of Assyrian tradition. In the 9th century BC Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) had constructed this type of garden with its associated engineering at Nimrud. He diverted water from the river Zab before it debouched into the Tigris through the famous Negoub tunnel in which the flow could be regulated by sluice-gates (see Plate 2). Maintenance was facilitated by shafts with steps leading down from the ground surface. His description of the garden is inserted into a long text recording the king’s conquests, the building of his new palace, his renovation of temples in Nimrud, his hunting exploits, and the huge quantities of food supplied for the party held at the inauguration of his palace. He mentions with delight the streams of water that chuckle through the plantings of fruit and nut trees.

  I dug out a canal from the Upper Zab, cutting through a mountain peak, and called it Abundance Canal. I watered the meadows of the Tigris and planted orchards with all kinds of fruit trees in the vicinity. I planted seeds and plants that I had found in the countries through which I had marched and in the highlands which I had crossed: pines of different kinds, cypresses and junipers of different kinds, almonds, dates, ebony, rosewood, olive, oak, tamarisk, walnut, terebinth and ash, fir, pomegranate, pear, quince, fig, grapevine … The canal-water gushes from above into the garden; fragrance pervades the walkways, streams of water as numerous as the stars of heaven flow in the pleasure garden … Like a squirrel I pick fruit in the garden of delights …

  This clear description shows the type of garden favoured in Assyria where each king tried to create his own horticultural haven even more ingeniously than his predecessors.

  The ‘joyful palace, the palace full of wisdom’ that Ashurnasirpal built at that time was the marvellous North-West Palace at Nimrud which has been excavated with many of its interior sculptured panels intact. The king called it ‘a royal residence for eternity’ and enjoined future kings to maintain and protect it. Like Sargon and Sennacherib more than a century later, his monumental achievements combined a major project of water management with a garden and an exceptional palace.

  The great Assyrian palaces of the 9th to 7th centuries BC all had state rooms decorated with a dado of stone panelling. The types of stone were carefully chosen, mainly different kinds of limestone, and were carved in low relief with scenes that displayed the king’s power in conquest, receiving tribute, and building works. Many of them were excavated in the 19th century and brought back to western museums, but no doubt others had been eroded beyond recognition, or had long been removed as useful building materials for buildings in the vicinity. Some panels were packed and sent off but never reached the west.5 No panel surviving from Ashurnasirpal’s palace at Nimrud shows his garden, and it is possible that the subject was considered unsuitable for display in palace sculpture at that time. Later, however, it became fashionable to include a garden scene. In the palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad a rather eroded garden scene was drawn at the time of discovery, and the drawing is easier to look at than the original stone, which is now in the museum of the Oriental Institute in Chicago. (See Figure 11) It shows a lake with a boat, a boat-house or pavilion, and an artificial-looking hill with an altar on top; the ground is planted with trees. The sculpture was found in excavations of the early 20th century, long after the discovery that excited Rawlinson at Nineveh, and shows many similarities of design. The latter panel was in a better state of preservation, although the top part had eroded away. Another set of panels was found in Sennacherib’s South-West Palace; although they do not survive, luckily they were drawn at the time of discovery, and the drawing survives in the British Museum, known as Original Drawing IV 77 (see Figure 13). So three pictorial records of palace gardens complement descriptions in cuneiform texts.

  While excavations took place at Nineveh, mainly by tunnelling, drawings were made of many of the sculptures. When the originals are preserved in museums, direct comparisons can be made to check reliability. Layard, the chief excavator, himself did much of the drawing, and F. C. Cooper did some; both are rated ‘very faithful’ to the originals when a drawing can be compared with one.6 Both men would have used the camera lucida, which Layard took from England to Nineveh, to give a clear image in poor light and enable correct spacing.7 The instrument had been used successfully by Napoleon’s artists recording the monuments of Egypt in the previous generation. For a while nobody was sure where the garden scene should be located within the palace, but recent study shows that the panels belonged in a room which showed many scenes of Nineveh, for the glorification of Sennacherib’s peacetime achievements, and it was carved in the time of his grandson Ashurbanipal.8

  The Classical descriptions of the Hanging Garden accord in several crucial respects with the Nineveh panels known from Original Drawing IV 77, and with the stone bas-relief panel found in the North Palace of Ashurbanipal. Those Assyrian monuments are more than a century earlier than the lifetime of Nebuchadnezzar II.

  Fig. 13 A garden at Nineveh, drawn from damaged stone panels of bas-relief, now lost, which lined the walls of a room in the South-West Palace. The pillared walkway surmounted by trees is shown top right.

  Original Drawing IV 77 shows three very badly damaged panels that represent a park including a lake on which several military-style activities take place. They were located in the South-West Palace, and presumably represent the garden at a very early stage, recently planted and immature. On the left of the main panel, pairs of men propel boats on which horses have embarked; several naked men are swimming, perha
ps racing, on inflated skins. A man who appears to swing on a rope above the water perhaps prepares to plunge in. On the upper right a hillside is shown with two streams of water flowing down into a horizontal stream. At least four terraces below that stream are indicated by horizontal lines; and above the stream are two more, less clearly articulated. The right hand panel cannot be directly related to the edge of the main panel, so part of the scene is missing in the gap; this panel shows two pillars, of which one probably has a proto-Ionic capital, with the capital of a third just visible. Above the pillars, horizontal lines show 4 + 4 layers of roofing, upon which are planted evergreen trees interleaved with small bushes or young trees. The pillars, surmounted by thick roofing in which trees grow, comprise a unique feature of the garden, and match the feature of the Hanging Garden as described by Philo, as Layard realized when he excavated the panels, commenting that it showed ‘a hanging garden, supported upon columns … This representation of ornamental gardens was highly curious.’9 The artist has shown sloping and flat terrain together without perspective, using only the flow of water to indicate which is which. In the centre of the main panel is a group of three rows of four identical trees which may be saplings, as they are shown much smaller than adjacent trees. The right-angled lines beneath and beside them are probably irrigation channels. As with the sculptured panel of Ashurbanipal, the foreground of the garden is cut off by a stream and by a file of men who perhaps march along the citadel wall.10

  The lake would have reflected the terraces that surrounded it and the architecture associated with the garden. The trees growing on a roof over a pillared walkway form an astonishing feature of the design which, taken together with Philo’s and Strabo’s references to screws, give a very specific idea of why the garden was a World Wonder. But no screws are shown on Original Drawing IV 77, nor on the surviving panel of Ashurbanipal.

  The panel of bas-relief installed by Ashurbanipal in his North Palace, showing the garden several decades after it was planted,11 is another major source of information for the appearance of the garden at a more mature stage of growth. It is not a simple matter to understand how three dimensions have been reduced to two (see Figure 14).

  To interpret the scene we begin with the arches supporting the aqueduct, mid-right. The arches resemble those found on the remains of the aqueduct at Jerwan, with their pointed tops. The stonework is represented as three or four courses above the peak of the arches. Stonework rather than brickwork is indicated because of the scale of the arches, and because brickwork was not normally shown with courses picked out, according to Assyrian artistic convention. From the left end of the aqueduct the water, which contains fishes, flows down and separates into subsidiary streams, implying steeply sloping ground. This implication is reinforced by the way that trees are shown in the central triangle of the picture, some set behind others. If it is correct to suppose that the lake shown in the Original Drawing described below is out of sight in this picture, at the bottom of the garden, it is possible that there was one or more small waterfalls where the streams ended at the lake. In the top right corner of the panel, terracing above the aqueduct is indicated by the rows of trees, suggesting at least two terraces above the level of the top of the aqueduct.12 To them water had to be raised by mechanical means because they were planted, at least in part, on vaulted terraces and so their roots could not reach the water table. The pavilion in the centre top of the panel has a cavetto cornice beneath the roof which is topped with small crenellations (also known as merlons). The two central pillars have proto-Ionic-style capitals, smooth columns, and a repeat of the proto-Ionic motif for the column bases. The heavier pilasters that have no separate bases mark the corners of the main building. On the left side of the pavilion an extension to the building with a path leading up to a stela showing the standing king probably follows a convention for showing two sides of a building on a single plane surface.13 If so, it would be the portico which is a feature of the bīt hilāni, a type of residential building with a pillared portico that the Assyrians adopted from Syria.14 Maybe the stela showing the king stood just outside the front door. Halfway down the path stands a feature that can be interpreted either as an outdoor altar, or as a stand on which a lamp would have been placed, a porch-light for moon-lit trysts and midnight feasts. To the left of the path and the building, upper terraces are again shown,15 partly matching those on the right side of the pavilion; lower down, the lines of trees slant, implying again steeply sloping ground. Further to the left, a triangle of space is shown empty: at the top left corner of the panel the corner of the roof of a building projects slightly from the damaged edge. This is all that remains of the edge of the South-West Palace, the line of its wall presumably broken away at the damaged edge, and it is clear evidence that the garden was not a park outside the city as has sometimes been suggested. Accordingly the triangle of empty space may represent the forecourt area on to which people coming out of the palace gate would step before entering the garden.

  Fig. 14 Part of the garden at Nineveh two generations after planting, damaged stone bas-relief from walls inside the palace of Ashurbanipal. Length 208.3 cm.

  If it is correct to interpret the left part of the pavilion as showing by rabattement the side that in fact faced the palace and the triangle of forecourt space, it follows that the stream did not actually flow across the path.

  The trees cannot be identified botanically, and may be stereotypes of deciduous trees and bushes or saplings, interspersed with pine-like evergreens. Some variation, mainly in proportions, may be due to efforts to fit into a particular space without obscuring any other element in the composition. The foreground of the garden is cut off by a band of water, perhaps representing the Khosr river, and a row of men marching. A substantial amount of the top of the panel is broken away.

  The adjacent panel shows the palace with pillars placed upon lion bases (see Figure 15). There seems to be a gap between the two panels, perhaps because several inches have been lost from the edges of each. The horizontal lines for the lower register, beneath the garden and continuing below the palace, do not match up exactly, and only the hindquarters of quadrupeds are left on two of the lower registers.

  Some parts if not all of the panel would have been painted. The water would have been fairly dark blue (at Khorsabad traces of dark blue remain on the depiction of water), the fishes perhaps silvery. The trunks and branches of the trees would have been brown; the foliage probably in more than one shade of green and greenish-blue. The king’s crown and staff would have been covered with gold leaf. The background may have been left unpainted. Since two shades of red and three shades of blue survive on stone panels found at Khorsabad, we know that nuances of colour were certainly used to produce subtle effects.

  Fig. 15 Pillared façade, probably depicting part of Sennacherib’s South-West Palace, shown on a panel from the palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The perspective convention is not understood.

  There are so many matches between the Classical descriptions of the Hanging Garden and the scenes sculptured in those Assyrian palaces that it is clearly worth looking to see if the detail about the screws can also be matched from that period. Neither Strabo nor Philo gives the name of Archimedes in connection with the screw, an omission which may imply that their readers would not have associated the man with the invention. Both authors would have known that the garden, if built by Nebuchadnezzar or by one of those Assyrian kings who ruled Babylon, was created long before the lifetime of Archimedes, a well-known historical character of the 3rd century BC, who flourished two centuries before Strabo.

  Since most people now think Archimedes invented the water-raising screw, we need to examine in more general terms traditions about inventors, assumptions about how innovations are made, and what economic and social forces promote or inhibit technical progress.

  Among some modern scholars the idea is quite entrenched that the ancient Orient endured for centuries—millennia even—without change or new inventions, once
cities had come into existence and bronze-working had spread. Partly it arose from a romantic view held by 19th- and 20th-century travellers for whom camels, donkeys and shepherds with their flocks seemed to belong in an unchanging continuum stretching back into early biblical times. And partly it was the result of Marxist theory, that in a slave-owning society there was no stimulus to improvement. This latter view included a rigid understanding of slavery, based upon questionable analogies with cotton and sugar plantations in the New World, and with colonial mining in Africa. Two influential scholars promoted the view of static society: Gordon Childe, especially in his 1952 book New Light on the Most Ancient East: The Oriental Prelude to European Prehistory, widely read by archaeologists and prehistorians; and Moses Finley who enjoyed a great following among classicists.16 Their persuasive prose suggested that there was no need to look for inventors or inventions, because pre-Greek civilization in the Near East was static. They envisaged a society in which the prestige of the elite was the sole motivation for great works and the accumulation of wealth, so that efficiency and productivity were alien concepts. Agriculture and irrigation occupied the efforts of the workforce, which had no incentives for improving technical skills, leading to a stagnant society in which financial credit had not yet evolved.

  Evidence to the contrary is now clear from cuneiform texts which show how kings at various times were personally keen on innovation, whether in viticulture, metal and glass alloys, bee-keeping, astronomy or architecture; and the concept of financial credit had already been put into practice.17 Royal interest and patronage gave the required stimulus to improvements and development. Another part of the impetus came, inevitably, from warfare, where the need to stay ahead of one’s enemy, or at least to incorporate his best ideas into one’s own armoury, is critical for victory. The intellectual environment of the late Assyrian period with specific royal interest in new machinery opens the way to search for pre-Greek inventions.18