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

by Stephanie Dalley

  We have reached the point when there is so much negative evidence that the absence is significant. If only there were the slightest evidence from cuneiform inscriptions or archaeology that the Hanging Garden was built in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, there would be no need to search for a solution, for there would be no mystery.

  2

  Classical Writers and their Testimony

  What more agreeable entertainment to the mind, than to be transported into the remotest ages of the world, and to observe human society, in its infancy, making the first faint essays towards the arts and sciences?

  David Hume (1711–76), Of the Study of History

  Past attempts to identify and reconstruct the famous Hanging Garden dismissed wholesale the explicit evidence given in Greek and Latin texts. Proponents of the ziggurat theory disregarded the clear connection with the royal palace and a total lack of any mention of a temple or temple tower. The proponent of a reconstruction with water wheels cast aside references to water-raising screws. Almost all have turned a blind eye to the persistent theme that the garden was built to resemble a hilly or semi-mountainous landscape, shaped like a theatre: it was a landscape garden.

  How should each of the Classical sources be evaluated? Do they give literal descriptions of a real garden, or imaginative fiction? Are they based on serious historical records, on eye-witness accounts, or on rhetorical stereotypes and the tall tales of travellers? A thorough training in rhetoric allowed Hellenistic authors, like barristers making a case against the odds, to embellish or alter facts to support their argument when they wrote of great men from the past, for their primary interest lay in the character of leaders whether arrogant and dissolute or admirable and effective. Within that essential framework they would insert, for variety, passages on geography, zoology, foreign customs: marvels of various kinds. One type of insertion was the ecphrasis, a painting in words often depicting a particular building or monument, allowing the audience to respond according to each individual’s imagination. According to ancient handbooks on rhetoric, there were four elements in the ecphrasis: a focus on event and characters, physical appearance of the object, the method of construction, and the reaction of the viewer.1 World Wonders were ideal subjects for that purpose. Owing to the suspected but imponderable influence of rhetoric and satire, the reliability of any of the Hellenistic sources is seldom agreed by scholars, but one can detect a trend in recent times towards a more critical, even sceptical understanding of supposedly historical detail as relayed by some of the authors.

  Without a clear idea of what is being described, translators have done their best with some of the more difficult passages, but in some cases translations differ in important respects. In the hope of representing fairly the problems involved, and to highlight different interpretations, I have given more than one translation for certain passages.

  Two of the earliest Roman authors to describe the garden of ‘Babylon’ as a World Wonder, in texts that have survived through time to our own generation, are Diodorus Siculus and Strabo. They lived when the Seleucid empire in Mesopotamia had given way to Parthian domination, around the time when Babylonian texts written in cuneiform were in the final years of use, when Rome’s Parthian wars would have stimulated popular interest as soldiers returned from the field with tales to tell. They took much of their material from earlier Greek writers such as Callisthenes, who accompanied Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC but died before him, leaving an account no longer extant but presumably free of hindsight. Strabo extracted material from one Onesicritus who had also campaigned with Alexander. Diodorus Siculus described the walls of Babylon quoting from a lost account written by the Greek Ctesias who had supposedly served as a doctor at the Persian court, long before the conquests of Alexander. But for his account of the Hanging Garden Diodorus is now generally reckoned to have relied mainly on the writings of Cleitarchus who wrote a history, no longer extant, of Alexander the Great.2 Another possible influence on Diodorus’ writing was that of his contemporary Pompeius Trogus, whose universal history is known, from a surviving prologue, to have begun with Ninos and Semiramis, legendary characters whose part in this story is described in later chapters.3

  Diodorus Siculus, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, wrote his description of the garden in the second book of his great Library of History between about 60 and 30 BC, five centuries after the time of Nebuchadnezzar II. He depended uncritically, many scholars suppose, on earlier sources available in Rome.

  There was also, beside the acropolis, the Hanging Garden, as it is called, which was built, not by Semiramis, but by a later Syrian king to please one of his concubines; for she, they say, being a Persian by race and longing for the meadows of her mountains, asked the king to imitate, through the artifice of a planted garden, the distinctive landscape of Persia. The park extended 4 plethra on each side, and since the approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from one another tier on tier, the appearance of the whole resembled that of a theatre. When the ascending terraces had been built, there had been constructed beneath them galleries4 which carried the entire weight of the planted garden and rose little by little one above the other along the approach; and the uppermost gallery, which was 50 cubits high, bore the highest surface of the park, which was made level with the circuit wall of the battlements of the city. Furthermore, the walls, which had been constructed at great expense, were 22 feet thick, while the passage-way between each two walls was 10 feet wide. The roofs of the galleries were covered over with beams of stone 16 feet long, inclusive of the overlap, and 4 feet wide. The roof above these beams had first a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of bitumen, over this two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and as a third layer a covering of lead, to the end that the moisture from the soil might not penetrate beneath. On all this again earth had been piled to a depth sufficient for the roots of the largest trees; and the ground, when levelled off, was thickly planted with trees of every kind that, by their great size or any other charm, could give pleasure to the beholder. And since the galleries, each projecting beyond another, all received the light, they contained many royal lodgings of every description; and there was one gallery which contained openings leading from the topmost surface and machines for supplying the garden with water, the machines raising the water in great abundance from the river, although no-one outside could see it being done.5

  From the beginning of Diodorus’ account it is clear that a version of legend existed in which the Hanging Garden was built by Semiramis, a variant which he felt obliged to deny, putting forward his own version of how the Wonder originated. Some reasons for attributing the garden to her, not as a wilting, homesick queen but as a robust builder, are described in Chapter 8, among the historical and legendary sources for Semiramis.

  Diodorus’ description is especially significant for stating that the water-raising mechanism was not visible. This eliminates the possibility of a water wheel or any type of shaduf, both of which are highly visible (see Figure 9).6 An Assyrian sculpture shows shadufs, but no water wheel is ever depicted or mentioned in Assyrian texts, and there is no reason to think that the situation was different in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. Diodorus’ description of the topmost gallery, roofed, with trees planted on top, matches well the depiction in a palace sculpture from Nineveh (discussed in detail in the next chapter) although he does not mention pillars. Some of the details are different from those of Philo who does not mention lead, bitumen, or reed mats, but rather tells of the trunks of palm trees. Reed mats were often used between layers of mud brick to help bond a structure. Diodorus’ comparison of the whole garden with a theatre supplies the overall visual effect that we have used for the reconstruction drawing (Frontispiece).

  As for deciding whether the term ‘Syrian’ meant the same as ‘Assyrian’, this has long been a cause for doubt among scholars, but it has been resolved recently by the discovery of a bilingual inscription which came to light in Cili
cia. One version has ‘Syrian’ and the other ‘Assyrian’, proving that the two terms were variants of a single word in the 8th century BC, a time when the Assyrian empire was expanding into that area.7 Therefore the earlier supposition, that Syria and Assyria meant two different regions in Greek texts at that time, must be abandoned, and the ‘Syrian king’ of Diodorus Siculus can safely be understood as ‘Assyrian king’.8

  Fig. 9 Drawing showing a man raising water by shaduf, from a bas-relief found in Sennacherib’s South-West Palace.

  Strabo was an Anatolian from Pontus, a region bordering on the Black Sea, close to Armenia, although he spent much of his adult life in Rome. His great seventeen-volume Geography was completed by 7 BC, so during his lifetime he would have been stimulated by the Armenian withdrawal from Syria in 69 BC, the shocking defeat of Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC, and Parthian invasions of Roman Syria in 51 and 41 BC. Great voyager though he was, he may have exaggerated the extent of his travels, and he used some earlier work by the great writer Eratosthenes, who had become head of the Library at Alexandria. Although Strabo referred specifically to seven Wonders, he described only five of them. According to his account Babylon boasted two World Wonders: its walls, and its palace garden.

  The circuit of the walls (of Babylon) is 385 stadia.9 The width of its wall is 32 feet. The height of it between the towers is 50 cubits, that of the towers is 60 cubits. And the path on top of the wall is so wide that 4-horse chariots can easily pass each other. And for that reason this as well as the Hanging Garden are called one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It (the garden) is quadrangular in shape, and each side is 4 plethra in length. It consists of arched vaults which are set, one over the next, on a chequer-board of cube-like foundations. The hollow chequerboard foundations are covered with earth so deep that they sustain the largest of trees, for they were constructed of baked brick and bitumen—they (the foundations) and the vaults and the arches. The ascent to the uppermost terrace is made by a stairway, and alongside these stairs there were screws, through which the water was continually drawn up into the garden from the Euphrates by those appointed for the purpose.10 For the river, a stadium in width, flows through the middle of the city, and the garden is on the bank of the river.11

  Strabo is not the only author to refer directly to screws for watering, for Philo, much later, says the same, and gives an account that does not resemble that of Strabo, so was presumably independent of it. As for Archimedes (c.287–212 BC), who is often credited with inventing the water-raising screw, Strabo would certainly have known that he had lived long after the time when the Hanging Garden was built, because the two men were only a couple of centuries apart (see Figure 10).

  Fig. 10 Sketch to show a water-raising (Archimedean) screw.

  An epigram written in Greek by Antipater of Thessalonica, probably soon after 11 BC, is of particular interest.12

  I have seen the walls of rock-like Babylon that chariots can run upon, and the Zeus on the Alpheus; and the Hanging Gardens, and the great statue (Colossus) of the Sun, and the huge labour of the steep pyramids, and the mighty tomb of Mausolus.

  He goes on to praise the statue of Artemis at Ephesus. If the right man is identified,13 he would indeed have had occasion to visit Rhodes, Ephesus, and Mausolus’ monument at Halicarnassus, so taking in three World Wonders on his way to visit his patron, L. Calpurnius Piso, whose successful campaign of 13–11 BC he was authorized to commemorate in verse. That man, whether before or after his triumph, served as Roman governor of Galatia–Pamphylia.14 Antipater wrote another epigram beseeching Phoebus Apollo to grant him a safe journey to ‘Asian land’,15 so he is possibly the first writer to list wonders as a traveller who had first-hand knowledge of at least some of the places in his list. Although he might have gone on to visit Mesopotamia, describing its impressively high citadels by comparison with the rocky prominence of Greek citadels, more likely he claimed to have seen Babylon by poetic licence. The Colossus at Rhodes which he also says he saw, existed for only sixty-six years, until 225 BC, so he could only have seen the base for it, and any shattered pieces that were still visible.

  Josephus, who was born in AD 37/8, exactly contemporary with the Roman emperor Nero, wrote a brief passage about the Hanging Garden of Babylon, and inserted the same text into two different compositions: Jewish Antiquities X.11 and Contra Apionem I.19—a good example of how a section could be pasted into more than one narrative.16 He is the only author, whether Greek, Hebrew or Mesopotamian, who specifically connected the garden with Nebuchadnezzar, and he claimed to be quoting Berossus, the priest of Marduk who lived in Babylon under the early Seleucid kings. Berossus was contemporary with Callimachus of Cyrene, who, as we saw in the Introduction, is the earliest writer known to have listed seven World Wonders.

  Josephus lived in Jerusalem, so his main readership was Jews or those who were interested in the history of the Jews. For them Nebuchadnezzar’s name and fame mainly derived from two biblical texts: as the conqueror who sacked the temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 24 and 2 Chron. 36), and as the cruel tyrant who subjected the pious Daniel to the terrors of a lion’s den (Book of Daniel). His account has been given priority by several scholars.17 Two different translations are given for the same passage, to show how two different translators have interpreted the description:

  At his (Nebuchadnezzar’s) palace (in Babylon) he had mounds made of stone which he made to look like hills, and planted with all kinds of trees, and he built the ‘Hanging Gardens’; because his wife, who came from Media, longed for her mountain homeland.18

  In this (Nebuchadnezzar’s) palace he built and arranged the so-called Hanging Garden by setting up high stone terraces which he made appear very similar to mountains planted with all kinds of trees. He did this because his wife, who had been raised in Media, longed for mountainous surroundings.19

  What Josephus wrote needs to be evaluated in the light of recent research on the writings attributed to Berossus. Berossus himself may not have mentioned Nebuchadnezzar in connection with the garden, but rather that passage was probably added to his original text by one of the authors who quoted from him in the two centuries that separate Berossus from Josephus; and it is that secondary author from whom Josephus quotes.20 The possibility arises because Greek texts have no way of showing when a quotation begins and ends, so authors insert extracts from other writers seamlessly into their own prose.

  Had Josephus himself inserted Nebuchadnezzar’s name, his motive would be hard to fathom, since Nebuchadnezzar was a notorious king whose name, among Josephus’ readers in Jerusalem, stood as the wicked destroyer of the First Temple. The evil reputation that Josephus wished to attribute to Babylon can be seen in a passage in which he re-interpreted the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Whereas in the biblical text21 God introduced confusion of speech to hinder the power of mankind because the building of the tower by men who spoke a single language showed excessive achievement, Josephus changed the motive, to show that God punished Babylon for its arrogance.22 Since the passage in Josephus concerning the Hanging Garden does nothing to tarnish the reputation of Nebuchadnezzar, but rather enhances it as an example of his brilliance as an imaginative builder, it is possible that an earlier transmitter of Berossus’ text inserted that passage. But Josephus’ audience in Jerusalem would have been interested to read of the famous garden because Herod’s Winter Palace and garden in Judaea, and Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome, were probably both inspired by the Hanging Garden, as discussed in Chapter 8.

  The theme of homesickness to which Josephus’ text refers is emphatically not one that is known, nor likely, from Babylonian and Assyrian literature, nor is it compatible with what we know of Berossus’ style. However, it is typical of some heroines of Greek novels, and notably occurs in Chaereas and Callirhoe, a tale of true love triumphing over a series of frightful adversities, written by Chariton who came from Aphrodisias, a fine city on the Meander river in south-western Turkey. Since Chariton’s lifetime is now dated between the 1s
t century BC and AD 50,23 his novel would have been available to Josephus, and it contains the theme of a woman abroad, crossing the Euphrates from the West, homesick for her native land.

  As far as Syria and Cilicia, Callirhoe readily put up with the journey, for she still heard Greek spoken and could look upon the sea … But when she arrived at the River Euphrates, … beyond which lies the vast continent, then she was filled with longing for her home and family.24

  Thus that novel, or a similar one, is a possible source of inspiration for the passage included by Josephus.

  Berossus was a temple official of the highest rank who wrote in Greek for the newly established dynasty of Seleucid kings, successors of Alexander the Great in the Near East. The importance of Babylon to the Seleucids is apparent not least from their keeping the name of the city, and their honouring the fame of Nebuchadnezzar. We now recognize that Berossus faithfully used cuneiform texts in composing the historical parts of his text; parts of his account correspond directly to a series of Babylonian chronicles which dealt with the main events, including problems of succession, during the reigns of the great Neo-Babylonian kings.25 Where Berossus described the building works of Nebuchadnezzar, he paraphrased that king’s great and complete East India House Inscription (see Figure 2). It was not a rare text: several versions, written on clay, are extant. The Babylonian original and Berossus’ Greek text can be matched, side by side, for episodes and their sequence, but the Greek passage about the Hanging Garden has nothing to match it.26 This makes it virtually certain that a later writer added it, providing readers with a bit of extra marvel at a time when marvels were especially popular with Greek readers.