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

by Stephanie Dalley

  Several centuries earlier, Herodotus had written with admiration of the pyramids in Egypt and of the walls of Babylon without mentioning or implying a group of seven. Those two phenomenal constructions had stood the test of time, and reminded the Greeks that they were relative newcomers on the scene of great civilizations. In Herodotus’ day some of the works that would eventually join lists of wonders such as the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes were not yet created, and King Mausolus was not yet born. In the various lists known from later times, very ancient constructions sit alongside recent ones, the juxtaposition implying that men could still rival the wonders of the remote past, in lists advertising with the rhetoric of the travel agent ‘modern’ marvels as worth a visit for enterprising travellers. Some of the later lists have fewer or more than seven, yet the idea of seven persisted.

  What was so important about the number seven, and where did the idea of seven for this context of World Wonders come from? In quite different spheres of Greek culture, such as the Seven Against Thebes—a legend used for a famous play of that name written by Aeschylus—or the Seven Sages, the choice of that number is thought to come from ancient Mesopotamia.9 In the literatures of Mesopotamia, seven was the number of heavens and of earths; seven the gates to the Underworld, seven the Sages who brought the arts of civilization to mankind, and above all, seven the celestial bodies—sun, moon and five great planets—whose movements and conjunctions affected the fate of men, cities and nations.10 The war-mongering group of gods Sibitti whose very name means ‘Seven’ was identified with the constellation of the Pleiades, and was also known as ‘Stars’. In myths and legends there was a tendency for demons to appear in groups of seven, and winds, quite improbably, could rise up seven at a time. Many actions in rituals and magic had to be performed seven times. Seven contained the concept of totality, Akkadian kiššatu, the number serving as a logogram for that word. In later times and in some spheres such as the number of heavens and the recitation of spells, three superseded seven, but did not always replace it because seven carried the authority of earliest antiquity.

  The walls of Babylon, with their great gates and cunning access through them from the citadel to the river, were described by Herodotus in detail. Although they are included in several of the Greek lists—those given by Antipater, Strabo, Philo of Byzantium, and a few Roman and Christian writers subsequently—they are often omitted in modern listings. We know that some walls for the city must have been constructed before the time of king Hammurabi who ruled Babylon early in the second millennium BC, and no doubt there were many occasions during the following centuries when they were remodelled, restored and repaired.11 This was done, to our certain knowledge, by Assyrian kings as well as Babylonian ones. Four generations of great Assyrian kings carried out building work on the walls of Babylon before the dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar. The mixture of Babylonian and Assyrian kings responsible for restorations added to confusion when later conflation simplified a long and varied history.

  The citadel was encircled by two concentric walls which were given names as if they were people: the inner one was Imgur-Enlil ‘the god Enlil approved’, and Nemetti-Enlil ‘Enlil’s Bulwark’ was the outer one. These names for the two walls are known at least 500 years before Nebuchadnezzar II. The inner one was by far higher and thicker than the outer one, which was built at a lower level.

  In the late 8th and 7th century when Assyria ruled Babylon directly, repair and partial rebuilding were carried out frequently. Sargon II (721–705 BC) repaired and strengthened both walls, piously claiming to have moulded bricks for baking. His son Sennacherib at first did building work there, but later besieged and sacked the city, and when eventually peace was restored, Esarhaddon (680–669 BC), followed by his son Ashurbanipal,12 made a major effort of atonement by repairing the walls, recording his work on formal inscriptions:

  With the large cubit I measured the dimensions of Imgur-Enlil, its great wall—each length and width was 30 cubits. I had it built just as formerly, and raised its top like a mountain. I built it perfectly, and filled it with splendour, for the wonder of all people.13

  The word used to express ‘all’ is kiššatu. Here we encounter the remarkable fact that an Assyrian king of the 7th century BC describes as a wonder a wall listed half a millennium later likewise as a wonder, and incorporates the concept of seven into the expression. But the usage is different, and one might think of a link through creative misunderstanding or a deliberately clever shift of interpretation rather than coincidence. About fifty years after Esarhaddon, when power had passed from Assyria to Babylon, Nabopolassar, who founded the new dynasty in Babylon, wrote a much more fulsome account, linking his victory over Assyria to the rebuilding of that wall. It has been found on seven barrel cylinders.

  I chased the Assyrians out of Akkad and so the Babylonians threw off their yoke. At that time I, Nabopolassar…—Imgur-Enlil the great wall of Babylon, the primeval boundary that has been famous since the distant past, the firm frontier as old as time, the lofty eyrie as high as the heavens, the strong shield that bars access from enemy lands, the spacious enclosure of the Igigi-gods …14

  After the fall of Nineveh Nabopolassar also repaired the outer wall of Babylon, helped by his son, the king-to-be, Nebuchadnezzar,15 depositing a building inscription in it. Although Nabopolassar did not use the expression ‘wonder of all peoples’, his poetic language shows the supreme status attributed to the city wall in his time. When Nabonidus, who ruled Babylon half a century later, repaired the same wall, he imitated the wording of his predecessor, added to it the phrase ‘for a wonder’, and not only inserted one of Nabopolassar’s cylinders alongside his own into a brick box within the wall,16 but also found and reinstated an inscription of Ashurbanipal.17 Even Cyrus the Great, a foreigner who conquered Babylon, issued an edict written in deliberate imitation of the style of Ashurbanipal,18 while at the same time quoting the previous work on the inner wall done by Nebuchadnezzar.19 Such inscriptions could still be found and read when the successors of Alexander ruled Babylon.

  This extended and self-conscious tradition—a long line of powerful kings aware of their predecessors’ fame in building the walls, and a virtual chain of inscriptions deposited in the walls to perpetuate their memory—is exceptional.

  The importance and emphasis placed on building the city wall reflects the Mesopotamian ideal of kingship in the character and achievements of the legendary Gilgamesh whose epic deed as a builder is recorded in this way:

  He had the wall of Uruk built, the Sheepfold

  Of holiest Eanna, the pure treasury.

  See its wall, which is like a copper band,

  Survey its battlements, which nobody else can match,…

  Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinize the brickwork!

  Testify that its bricks are baked bricks,

  And that the Seven Sages must have laid its foundations!

  So to Babylonians wall-building was a supreme act of kingship. This passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh shows it was worthy of a great hero, linked to the Seven Sages.20

  Tracing back to look at the use of the expression ‘wonder’ in inscriptions of an earlier period, we find that its earliest known use was when the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727 BC) described his new palace at Nimrud on the Tigris, with special emphasis placed on ‘the colossal lions and bulls with very skilfully wrought forms, clothed with allure, I placed at the entrance and set up as a wonder’.21 A couple of decades later Sargon II, describing his new capital at Khorsabad, used the same term for the doors and the pictures on their bronze bands in his palace. His son Sennacherib, after describing the decorative features of his ‘palaces’ at Nineveh, wrote, ‘I made them “wonders”.’ Then, after the lines describing a new water-raising device, he wrote, ‘I made those palaces beautifully. I raised the area surrounding the palace to be “a wonder for all peoples”, I named it Unrivalled Palace.’22 Esarhaddon in the 7th century, expanding the use of
the term, used it on at least six occasions: for his restoration of a temple to Ashur, for the temple of Marduk in Babylon, for his restoration of the walls of Babylon, for his restoration of the Military Review Palace at Nimrud and his new Review Palace built in Nineveh, and for the palace he built for the crown prince in the town Tarbiṣu close to Nineveh. This was part of a competitive spirit that drove each new king to claim that he was even better than his predecessors, in phrases such as ‘more than previously’, and ‘more than the kings my predecessors’.

  The expression was taken up by later kings of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar used the phrase for at least four public spectacles: a cultic boat used for processions of Marduk’s statue; one of his palaces in Babylon (using the term at the beginning and end of an inscription, but with no mention of a garden); the city gates of Babylon; and the main temple in Borsippa. Finally, Nabonidus used it at least twice: for the walls of Babylon, and for the great temple of the sun-god in Sippar.

  All of these were spectacles. The Babylonian term corresponds closely to the Greek word theamata ‘sights’ first used for World Wonders, later changed to thaumata ‘wonders’. In the expression used, ‘wonder for all people’ tabrâti kal niši, the word tabrâti means literally something to gaze upon with admiration, and corresponds to the earlier Greek theamata. This correspondence between Babylonian and Greek may be coincidence, but it raises the possibility that the Greek expression was modelled upon the Babylonian phrase. Both the concept and the expression could thus have been taken over by Greeks from a tradition that had begun in 8th-century Assyria, continued in Babylonia, and would have been known to the Seleucid kings from their study of neo-Babylonian inscriptions.

  Cuneiform records often seem to offer a scatter of unrelated minutiae, bits of information that refuse to yield a coherent story, scraps of detail transmitted by ancient writers in several languages—Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek and Latin, and in different scripts—cuneiform and alphabetic—covering a span of many centuries. In addition to the crucial role played by the study of cuneiform texts, excavation, field survey and art history play their part in finding the solution to this puzzle through persistent research. Inscriptions show that many exceptional constructions had been proclaimed as wonders in Assyria as well as in Babylonia, with a concentration on the city of Babylon. The inner wall of Babylon was explicitly a wonder under an Assyrian king, a Babylonian king, and in lists of wonders compiled by Greek authors from at least the time of Alexander onwards.

  Fig. 2 East India House inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II, a complete text written in an archaic script in stone, recording the king’s building work, but no garden, in Babylon where it was found. 56.51 × 50.16 cm.

  This book is the result of a long process of investigation which has uncovered at last the reality behind the legend of the Hanging Garden of Babylon.

  1

  Drawing a Blank in Babylon

  Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at a shadow

  Aesop, Fable of the Dog and his Shadow

  When a German team led by Robert Koldewey excavated in Babylon from 1898 to 1917, it made a thorough excavation of the citadel on which the royal palaces stood, along with the splendid processional way, the great temples, and the Ishtar Gate. Of course those archaeologists were keen to discover at least the site of the Hanging Garden, both out of interest and because further funding would follow from the resulting publicity. They treated Josephus’ information as correct, and expected to find inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar confirming that he built the garden. To their dismay they could not find any possible location with enough space in the vicinity of the palaces, nor did they dig out any written confirmation from the many texts they unearthed.

  To uncover the site of the World Wonder would have given a great impetus to their work. Every visitor to the site, every journalist, every colleague, must have asked the same questions: where is the Hanging Garden, and why haven’t you found it? Every audience at Koldewey’s public lectures in Germany would have expected an answer. Eventually the excavators made an unsatisfactory case for interpreting a complex of rooms within the Southern Palace, where the walls were especially thick, and where baked brick rather than sun-dried brick was used, along with much bitumen to make the building waterproof. A roof-top garden might explain the use of those materials. But there was no sign of how it might have been watered, no sign of tree roots, and the building was much too far from the river for water to be raised up to supply the supposed trees (see Figure 3).

  As Koldewey well knew, the suggestion of a roof-top garden did not agree with the descriptions of the Classical authors. Wells inside the building would have been the only feasible source of water, and they would have been unsatisfactory for the purpose of keeping trees alive, besides the objection that the Classical texts certainly do not name wells as providing irrigation for the garden. In that part of the building suggested for the roof garden were stored administrative records of unbaked clay.1 Such a function would be impractical beneath a roof garden, from which leakages of water might from time to time reduce clay tablets to puddles of mud. Nevertheless, the idea of a roof garden that would give a bird’s eye view of the city caught the imagination of the public, and gave rise to a number of florid reconstructions, regardless of the fact that plants would have shrivelled in the fierce heat of a Babylonian summer when shade is utterly desirable during those long, hot days and months.

  Much later, in 1979, Wolfram Nagel, soon followed by Donald Wiseman, Professor of Assyriology at SOAS in London, made an alternative suggestion, going to the opposite extreme.2 Realizing that the garden must have been located beside a river, as Strabo described, they proposed the area to the west of the main palace, where the massive structure known now as the Western Outwork lay, a narrow near-rectangular building which the excavators had assumed simply protected the palace against erosion when the river level rose with the spring floods. The disadvantages of Nagel’s idea, however, outweighed its advantages, for there were several thick walls barring the king’s way from the palace to the garden, and the walls would have denied the plants any sunshine for most of the daylight hours.

  A further objection to both those locations is that there had been a change in the course of the Euphrates. The phenomenon is thought by some to have been the result of a deliberate act, whether on the part of Cyrus the Great when he advanced to capture the city in 539 BC, or on the part of Darius I when he quelled the rebellion of 522–521 BC in Babylon, or much later in the Seleucid period.3 But this is only guesswork based on historical probability, for although the altered river bed is clear from aerial photographs and surface surveys, surface observation does not allow precise dating.4 The river was diverted just upstream from the Western Outwork, and then flowed to the east of the Southern Palace, leaving the Western Outwork high and dry. Any mechanisms set up to water the garden from the river would have been useless, and the plants would quickly have dried out. A garden marked only with dead trees, abandoned whether before Greeks came to work and travel in Mesopotamia under the benevolent protection of the Seleucid kings, or during Roman times, would not have been worth a visit when the World Wonders were such a popular theme for Classical writers.

  Fig. 3 Plan showing the location of Nebuchadnezzar’s Southern Palace on the citadel of Babylon with suggested locations of the garden: in the palace and in the Western Outwork.

  Ignoring these difficulties, several artists attempted to draw a reconstruction of the garden in Babylon, showing the walls of the Western Outwork or the Southern Palace enclosing the garden at too great a height to have made a pleasant environment for growing plants, and they were obliged to include very steep steps to allow the king to reach the top of the garden before he could enjoy the view (see Figure 4). Others showed a terraced garden sunk within a courtyard inside a palace, enclosed again by high walls on each side, and accessible by walking up and down a steep stairway: claustrophobic, tiring, lacking a view or a breeze, it would have been a gloomy place, produci
ng etiolated plants. Other reconstructions ignored the walls, and set the garden on a series of terraces out in the open. One of them depicts enormous water wheels on each terrace, but as we shall see, water wheels are not an option for Babylonia in the 6th century BC, nor is there any reference to their use in Babylonian or Greek texts. Another reconstruction drawing showed the garden on that site as an internal courtyard surrounded by high walls decorated in an Assyrian, not a Babylonian, style of palace decoration.5 It has none of the characteristics described by any of the sources; laid out as an essentially flat, formal garden with a Persian-style pool at its centre, it does not resemble the forested mountains for which the queen had supposedly pined according to some of the later accounts, and lacks many other features described in ancient testimonies. Another idea, placing the World Wonder at Nineveh rather than Babylon, was for a ‘carpet garden’, sunken and flat, a style for which there was no evidence of any kind.6