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

by Stephanie Dalley

  In some strata of Greek and Roman society the engineer was actually denigrated, higher esteem being accorded to poets, playwrights and sculptors. According to Plutarch, Archimedes was praised for refusing to contaminate his theoretical and mathematical science with practical applications, although under extreme pressure at the siege of Syracuse in Sicily he did design practical machinery.

  He had so great a spirit, so profound a soul, and such a wealth of theories which gave him a name and reputation for a sort of divine rather than human sagacity, that he did not wish to leave behind him any treatise on these matters, but, regarding mechanical occupations and every art that ministers to needs as ignoble or vulgar, he directed his own ambition solely to those studies the beauty and subtlety of which are unadulterated by necessity.19

  This passage might be thought to support the idea that Archimedes did not invent the screw, although Plutarch called him a ‘demiourgos’, a flattering term that was applied to gods as creators. One need not necessarily take Plutarch at face value, although it is hard to discount entirely his statement that Archimedes regarded practical engineering as an ignoble and vulgar activity.

  Two passages written by Diodorus Siculus which have often been understood to authenticate the connection between the machine and its named inventor Archimedes, are ambiguous.20 In the latter passage he described them as ‘Egyptian screws’ which Archimedes had ‘found’ when he travelled to Egypt:

  And what is the most surprising thing of all, they drain out the waters of the streams they meet by means of what are called Egyptian screws, which Archimedes the Syracusan found when he was going round in Egypt. And by the use of such devices they carry the water in successive lifts as far as the entrance … Since this machine is an exceptionally ingenious device, an enormous amount of water is thrown out, to one’s astonishment, with a trifling amount of labour.

  He was quoting Posidonius (c.135–50 BC) in the context of mines in Spain. By referring to them as Egyptian screws, he implies that the screws found in Egypt by Archimedes were there before the latter reached the Nile. In Egypt the screw is ideal for raising water over the banks of canals or branches of the Nile delta into the fields lying alongside, and they are still in common use there.

  Archimedes wrote in his introduction to Method of Mechanical Theorems that he often worked out his theorems by mechanical means, and only later developed the mathematical proofs that were the subject of his published works.21 Given that he was especially interested in spirals, one can easily imagine how his interest in calculation was triggered by seeing mechanical screws in operation in Egypt during his visit. He wrote his treatise On Spirals years after returning from Egypt, so it is unlikely that the practical application arose from his work on the theory and mathematical principles. ‘It is not impossible that the machine is of a much older date, and that Archimedes himself became acquainted with it in Egypt. It is also striking that neither Strabo nor Philo of Byzantium nor Vitruvius, who all three mention or describe it, associate with it the name of Archimedes.’22

  The idea that Archimedes did not invent the screw is nothing new. As long ago as 1684 Claude Perrault wrote that he thought the screw machine was older than the lifetime of Archimedes.23 The evidence of Archimedes’ own writings substantiates the view that his interests lay in the study of mathematics and its abstractions, not in workaday matters of hands-on construction. There are good reasons, therefore, to accept the judgement of those several scholars who suggested that Archimedes did not invent the screw.24

  Another way to approach the issue is to put Archimedes into the wider context of the Culture Hero. Later tradition, with its inexorable tendency to simplify, conflate, and invent ‘culture heroes’ from the past, may have considered Archimedes to be the sole inventor of the screw, but it is far from certain that people thought so during his lifetime. Many different cultures make their own claim to inventions by one of their own people which can be refuted on occasion by datable physical evidence, although independent invention by more than one person cannot be excluded. In general the phenomenon is part of the process of building identity in a more or less nationalistic way.

  In very early times, claims to invention were not made by individual men. In Mesopotamia as also in early Greek tradition inventions and authorship were understood to belong to a chain of tradition emanating from heaven rather than to single human genius. Human craftsmen attributed their skills to a patron deity or to demigods.25 Among the Babylonians and Assyrians the god Ea was primarily acknowledged in that role, but also, as part of an invented tradition supposedly of great antiquity from before the mythical Flood, the legendary Seven Sages were said to have brought knowledge of the arts, crafts and institutions of civilized urban life from the god Ea to Mesopotamia. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the man who built a boat and survived the Flood, Ut-napishtim, allowed craftsmen and scholars to board the boat when the Flood was imminent.26 Those men had no natural life-span and were responsible for continuing cultural life after the Flood. Presumably they had descendants. They are referred to as seven counsellors in the prologue to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and as seven sages in magical texts.

  Those types of knowledge were regarded as abstract ideals, known in Sumerian by the term me. They were the archetypes or ideal forms represented on earth by individual examples. After the legendary Flood, mortal sages were linked to famous historical kings, and were occasionally credited with authorship too.

  Similarly in Greek tradition there were the Telchines, seven sages, mythical inventors of metalworking skills, associated also with magic and waterworks. In a more individual but still legendary tradition, Prometheus was said to have invented architecture, astronomy and arithmetic, and the shadowy figure of Pythagoras was supposed to have formulated the theorem related to right-angle triangles that often bears his name. In fact the formula was already known in Mesopotamia since at least the Middle Bronze Age.27 The legendary musician Terpander was said to have invented the lyre, an attribution that can be put alongside the biblical claim that it was Jubal, descendant of Cain, who invented the harp. In biblical writings a special genealogy was reserved for inventors: they are all sons of Cain, among them Enoch who built the first city, and Tubal-Cain the ‘inventor’ of brass and iron.28

  A Hellenistic writer who gives Semitic demigods credit for some such inventions is Herennius Philo of Byblos, writing in the 1st century AD his Phoenician History, including a technogony in which the hero Chousor, together with another, unnamed hero, supposedly invented iron and iron-working as well as incantations, divination, fishing with hook, line and bait, rafts and sailing.29 After his death he was deified, and identified with Hephaistos and Zeus. His brothers, the appropriately named hero Technites and another hero, supposedly invented building with sun-dried bricks. These inventive heroes and others like them have names that are in some cases Greek, in others Phoenician.

  The Greeks were spectacular in attributing inventions to themselves. Some Athenians claimed that they had invented pottery; that Athena had planted the first olive and invented weaving. The people of the island of Samos in the Aegean claimed the invention of cast bronze statuary, a claim that is easily falsified by archaeological researches in Egypt and the Near East. Not much was left for anyone else, if we are to believe them. Of course, they are divine or legendary characters, unlike Archimedes; but one can understand how he could have been inserted into such a tradition after his lifetime. The expression ‘Hippodamian street plan’ for a very regular layout of streets is in general use, honouring the name of Hippodamus, a town-planner from Miletus around 500 BC, despite the fact that several much earlier examples have been uncovered by archaeologists.30

  A claim to independent introduction may sometimes appear to be a claim for primary invention. An introduction wrongly interpreted as an invention may explain why some instances are not to be understood literally even if they were believed to be true at the time, or soon afterwards. We can point to bee-keeping as a clear example: known from the
third millennium BC in Egypt on tomb paintings, attested on the site of Tel Rehov in Israel in the 10th or 9th centuries BC;31 yet claimed to be a first introduction by the ruler of Suhu near Mari on the Middle Euphrates, who wrote in the 8th century BC:

  I, Shamash-resh-uṣur, governor of the land of Suhu and the land of Mari, brought down from the mountain of the people of Habhu, bees that gather honey, which none among my ancestors had seen or brought down to the land of Suhu, and I established them in the gardens of the town Al-gabbari-bani. They now collect honey and wax there. I know how to separate honey and wax by melting, and the gardeners know how too. Anyone who comes forward in future should ask the elders of his land: ‘Is it true that Shamash-resh-uṣur, governor of the land of Suhu, introduced honey-bees into the land of Suhu?’32

  Such fame is attached to the person and to his country when he achieves an invention or a ‘first’ that false claims are sometimes made or implied.

  Bearing in mind the tendency to claim culture heroes in late antiquity, it is likely that the name of Archimedes was linked to the screw machine as its inventor because of his mathematical work On Spirals, and because of the well-established tendency in late antiquity to ascribe inventions to Greeks.

  We now turn to an Assyrian text which shows that the Assyrian king Sennacherib cast water-raising screws in bronze around 700 BC.

  4

  Sennacherib’s Great Invention

  Sennacherib the great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, unrivalled king, pious shepherd who serves the great gods, guardian of justice, lover of righteousness, doer of good deeds who goes to the help of the weak, who seeks for good fortune, ideal man, heroic male, leader of all rulers, bridle that curbs the insubmissive, who strikes the enemy like lightning: Ashur the great god perfected in me unrivalled kingship

  Rassam Cylinder inscription 1–4

  To make his new palace and its garden as wonderful as possible, Sennacherib made use of a new method of casting bronze,1 of which he was so proud that he describes it in detail. The casting was designed for two types of object: huge lions and other creatures as architectural elements, and machines to raise water ‘instead of a shaduf’. Two copies of the text, both written in cuneiform script on clay prisms, are extant, enabling scholars to check difficult details.2

  To compose his prism inscription Sennacherib’s scholars made brilliant use of a high literary dialect known as Standard Babylonian. With its regular lengths of line, its similes, its occasional archaic vocabulary and constructions, the text is poetry rather than prose. In such a context the technical vocabulary required to describe parts of machinery by metaphors based on natural forms fitted beautifully. Often for new machines and inventions, words are adopted from suitably well-known animals or plants such as the Roman testudo ‘tortoise/shield’, the ‘branch’ of a railway line, the world-wide ‘web’, the computer ‘mouse’. Just as Strabo used the word ‘snail’ to mean a screw (as well as for a spiral staircase, in another context3), so the Assyrians took words for a cylinder and for a spiral from the natural world most familiar to them. To recognize those words as metaphors has been crucial to understanding a technical passage in the inscription (see Figure 17 and Plate 3).

  Fig. 16 Sennacherib in his chariot. This is one of few sculptures of the king on which the royal face was not deliberately disfigured.

  Only gradually has the whole meaning become apparent, thanks largely to progress made by the great dictionary-writers in Germany and Chicago. Thus it has become possible to link the technical part of Sennacherib’s text with the descriptions of Strabo and Philo who gave the screw as the machine by which water was raised to the top of the Hanging Garden.

  As a result of understanding the crucial terms involved, and with the benefit of the duplicate prism, a new translation can now be offered:

  Whereas in former times the kings my forefathers had created bronze statues imitating real-life forms to put on display inside temples, but in their method of work they had exhausted all the craftsmen, for lack of skill and failure to understand the principles; they needed so much oil, wax (iškuru) and tallow (nalbaš ṣēni) for the work that they caused a shortage in their own countries—I, Sennacherib, leader of all princes, knowledgeable in all kinds of work, took much advice and deep thought over doing that kind of work … I created clay moulds as if by divine intelligence for ‘cylinders’ (gišmahhu—tall tree-trunks) and ‘screws’ (alamittu—palm-trees), tree of riches …4 In order to draw water up all day long, I had ropes, bronze wire and bronze chains made.5 And instead of a shaduf I set up the ‘cylinders’ and ‘screws’ of ‘copper’ over cisterns. I made those pavilions look just right.6 I raised the height of the surroundings of the palace, to be a Wonder for All Peoples. I gave it the name ‘Incomparable Palace’. A high garden (kirimāhu) imitating the Amanus mountains I laid out next to it, with all kinds of aromatic plants, orchard fruit trees, trees that enrich not only mountain country but also Chaldaea (Babylonia), as well as trees that bear wool, planted within it.

  Fig. 17 The Chicago prism of Sennacherib, giving a detailed account of how he created his palace garden. Ht. 38 cm, 500 lines, 689 BC.

  There were few ways of raising water in the 7th century BC, but one needs to distinguish between two types of action: lifting it up from far below ground through a well, and transferring it from one ground level to another. For the latter type, in specifying ‘instead of a shaduf’, Sennacherib mentions the commonest piece of machinery for transferring between ground levels. The shaduf consists of an upright pole planted in the ground, another pole attached to it as an arm that swings with a weight on one end, and a rope attached to the other end of the swinging arm, by which a man can lever a bucket up and down, as shown in Chapter 2, Figure 9. The mechanism makes a characteristic creaking noise, and is highly visible in the landscape; it is most efficiently used to transfer water over a bank of earth or a low wall, for example from a canal to a field. This method is not used to raise water from a well. Many ancient ration texts include an allocation to the shaduf-workers, who were numerous in the canal networks of southern Mesopotamia’s flat alluvium. As far as we know neither the water wheel nor any kind of chamber pump was yet in use.

  To understand why it has taken so long to recognize the importance of Sennacherib’s text, one must look back at the struggle of earlier scholars to make sense of it. The first translation was made, inevitably, without recourse to good dictionaries because none had yet been compiled. The translator simply had to guess the meaning of words according to his view of the context. Not surprisingly therefore, the technical passages did not make sense in translation, and the nonsense was a stimulus to subsequent attempts to understand what it meant. In 1924 the first attempt at a translation, made by Daniel Luckenbill in Chicago, was published:

  In times past, when the kings my forefathers fashioned a bronze image in the likeness of their members, to set up in their temples, the labor on them exhausted every workman; in their ignorance and lack of knowledge they drank (iškuru) oil and wore sheepskins (nalbaš ṣēni) to carry out the work they wanted to do in the midst of their mountains. … I fashioned a work of bronze and cunningly wrought it. Over great posts (gišmahhu) and crossbars of wood (alamittu), 12 fierce lion-colossi together with 12 mighty bull-colossi, complete in form, … at the command of the god I built a form of clay and poured bronze into it, as in making half-shekel pieces,7 and finished their construction. (Prism inscription VI.80–VII.19)

  That daily there might be abundant flow of water of the buckets, I had copper cables(?) and pails made, and in place of the (mud-brick) pedestals (pillars) I set up great posts and cross beams over the wells (būrtu). Those palaces, all around the (large) palace, I beautified; to the astonishment of all nations, I raised aloft its head. (Prism inscription VII.45–51)

  Thirty years later in a new attempt to translate certain difficult lines, the Danish scholar Jorgen Laessøe made some improvements, replacing ‘pails’ with chains, ‘pedest
als’ with shadufs, and ‘cross beams/bars’ with the date palm, but he followed Luckenbill in supposing that Sennacherib had reverted to well-drawn water, hardly an innovation to boast of, and, besides, inappropriate for replacing shadufs. He offered no explanation for why a date palm was set over the supposed wells, nor why the rare word alamittu was used rather than the common word gišimmaru.8 He translated a short extract from the prism inscription:

  In order that you might draw(?) (well-)drawn water every day, I had ropes, ‘cables’ of bronze and ‘chains’ of bronze made, and instead of shadufs I let … beams (gišmahhu) and the date palm (alamittu)9 stand over the wells (būrtu).10 (VII.45–9)

  In discarding Luckenbill’s incorrect reference to buckets and pails, it is notable that no word for ‘bucket’ is used to describe the mechanism. This eliminates the possibility that a saqia or cerd is described.11

  Laessøe’s translation of that extract was made just before a duplicate of the prism was published by Alexander Heidel, who realized that the word iškuru was not a verb meaning ‘they drank’, as Luckenbill had translated it, but a noun meaning ‘wax’—the form of the word is identical for both. Another ambiguity comes from the word būrtu to which both Luckenbill and Laessøe had given the meaning ‘well’: we now know that the meaning ‘cistern’ is also applicable—as well as ‘waterhole’, even ‘fish-pond’ too: the word has a much wider semantic range than might be expected, and of course the translator chooses according to the supposed context. ‘Cistern’ is a better choice than ‘wells’ because of the ground-level type of lifting implied by the phrase ‘instead of a shaduf’.