The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced
Page 12
Fig. 29 Drawing of a great rock sculpture at Maltai, showing Sennacherib in the assembly of gods.
Fig. 30 (a) Large panel of sculpture on a rock face at Khinnis, showing Sennacherib facing the great deities.
Fig. 30 (b) Reconstruction drawing of the panel.
The canal which led out from the sculptured area was 7 m wide, with parapets built out of stone blocks on each side, to channel the stream at its maximum. One large sculptured square block stood at this point with the canal flowing on one side of it and a weir at the other, so that the natural bed of the river continued to receive water, necessary for the villages and farms along its course. After running for about 300 m the water entered a dam with sluices, and at that point the canal altered its course and cut through a rock, so that the water flowed through a tunnel some 2 m high (allowing easy access for maintenance). The canal was named Sennacherib’s Canal.
This change from one river catchment to another involved the need to cross a shallow but nevertheless inconvenient wadi at Jerwan, a valley hyperbolically described in the rock inscription as a deep ravine. To overcome this difficulty, Sennacherib had an aqueduct constructed, so magnificent that much of it survives to this day (see Figure 31, Plate 12). From the air it looks like a stretch of motorway: using more than two million blocks of smooth limestone, it stood 9 m high at its maximum, and had buttresses to strengthen the sides at regular intervals. The gradient was finely managed, and the surface over which the water flowed consisted of a thick layer of concrete some 40 cm deep, laid over the courses of stone. Supporting arches were corbelled, with pointed tops, and the piers were boat-shaped to allow flood water to pass through with minimal resistance. The model for this was the pontoon bridge consisting of a row of boats linked together, with wooden planking on top forming a pathway.
So fine was this marvel of engineering that the transformed landscape gave rise to a local legend telling how it was built by one of two suitors for the hand of the king’s daughter. One suitor did the work most energetically, while the other bided his time until the work was finished, and then, while the exhausted man rested, the idle one tricked the king and his daughter into believing it was his own work, by laying linen sheets along the surface of the aqueduct to make it appear, from a distance, as if water was flowing. He won the princess.31
At certain intervals stone blocks in the aqueduct bore a nine-line inscription which reads:
Fig. 31 (a) Aerial view of the Jerwan aqueduct.
Fig. 31 (b) Perspective restoration drawing of the Jerwan aqueduct.
Sennacherib king of the world king of Assyria. Over a great distance I had a watercourse directed to the environs of Nineveh, joining together the waters of two streams of the Khosr river,—flood-prone waters—and the waters of Hanusa town and Gammagara town, and the waters of springs of the mountains to right and left. Over steep-sided valleys I spanned an aqueduct (bridge)32 of white limestone blocks, I made those waters flow over it.33
This left no doubt that the aqueduct was built in the 7th century and was not a later construction.
As we saw in the Introduction, the group of seven World Wonders by Greek authors can be traced back at the latest to the time of Alexander the Great through his historians whose works were used by Roman writers. It is highly significant that the battle of Gaugamela, where Alexander defeated Darius III to win the world, took place only a few kilometres from Jerwan. The great aqueduct spanned a main road known from Assyrian times.34 Although the battlefield itself has not been identified, it takes its name from the river Gomel and from the modern village Tell Gomel which lies just south of Bavian on that river. In the words of Layard, one of the earliest European travellers to describe the area:
The rock-sculptures of Bavian are the most important that have yet been discovered in Assyria … on the right bank of the Gomel, a brawling mountain torrent. The Gomel or Gomela may, perhaps, be traced in the ancient name of Gaugamela, celebrated for that great victory which gave to the Macedonian conqueror the dominion of the Eastern world. Although the battlefield was called after Arbela, a neighbouring city,35 we know that the river Zab intervened between them, and that the battle was fought near the village of Gaugamela, on the banks of the Bumadus or Ghazir, the Gomela of the Kurds.36
As Alexander’s 47,000 men marched from the north-west along the road past Jerwan to face the Persian army at Gaugamela, he and his scouts cannot have failed to notice the great aqueduct. They would have marvelled at the scale and detail of its construction, and would have discovered from local knowledge that this was part of the grand design for the gardens and orchards of Nineveh. By direct experience of an element so crucial for the Hanging Garden, and from reports gathered in the vicinity, they would have become aware that the royal garden at Nineveh (whether or not it still flourished) was linked to a very impressive feat of engineering, greater than anything known at home in Macedonia. The location of Gaugamela, therefore, is a key to understanding how the garden became known to Greeks long after the fall of Assyria. Knowledge of the garden, and of the water management linked to it, was associated with Alexander’s most triumphant victory. His historians found it a worthy subject for their accounts, which were taken up in turn by Roman writers.
Later, when Roman troops marched into northern Mesopotamia, they would have taken the same road. The aqueducts both at Jerwan and at Nineveh would still have featured prominently in the landscape. Soldiers and travellers would have seen the aqueduct, the rock-cut canals and tunnels, and the rock carvings of Sennacherib, for which the relevance to the Hanging Garden would still have been understood locally.
There are other reasons why Greeks and Romans would have admired the building work that they saw in Assyria. It is a common preconception that the true arch (with a key-stone) was invented by the Romans, because early Greek architects did not build with arches. In fact, pre-Roman arches, both corbelled and with key-stones, are attested both in Egypt and in Mesopotamia from the time of the very earliest rulers. When Sir Leonard Woolley found evidence in Sumerian architecture at Ur for all kinds of arches built in mud brick, he suggested that the technique remained restricted to brickwork until the Hellenistic period, when the construction was transferred from brick to stone.37 The aqueduct at Jerwan shows that the Assyrians around 700 BC had already made the transfer to stone.
It is often thought that concrete was not developed until the Roman period. As recently expressed, ‘One of the most renowned of the Roman contributions to building technology was the development of concrete.’38 It is lucky for our understanding of Assyrian technology that the archaeologist Seton Lloyd, who explored the Assyrian ruins at Jerwan, was an architect by training. On finding what he thought was Assyrian concrete at Jerwan, he submitted samples for analysis to the British Building Research Station’s department of scientific and industrial research, who reported that the samples ‘consisted of a mix made up of a magnesian limestone aggregate and muddy river sand, cemented by a magnesian lime made by burning a magnesian limestone’. He included the full analysis in his detailed report of 1935.39
More can be said about the passage mentioned above in which Herodotus referred to the network of canals that brought water down from the mountains on the approach to Assyria and the border with Media.40 While describing Babylon, Herodotus digresses with a description of installations that cannot refer to the real Babylon because the topography in Babylonia and the lower Euphrates valley is not suited for the works as he describes them; and besides, he mentions Semiramis, Nineveh, and Assyria in the passage. Having made it clear that there were two queens, ‘the earlier, Semiramis, preceding the later by five generations’, he goes on to separate their two contributions (I have added inverted commas to highlight confusion in names, and italics to highlight names that indicate the relevance to Assyria rather than Babylon):
It was ‘Semiramis’ who was responsible for certain remarkable embankments in the plain outside the city, built to control the river which until then used to flood the
whole countryside. The later of the two queens, ‘Nitocris’, … having her eye on the great and expanding power of the Medes and the many cities, including Nineveh itself, which had fallen before them, … changed the course of the ‘Euphrates’, which flows through ‘Babylon’. Its course was originally straight, but by cutting channels higher upstream she made it wind about with so many twists and turns that now it actually passes a certain Assyrian village called Ardericca three separate times … The purpose … of the diversion of the river was to cause the frequent bends to reduce the speed of the current … Moreover, these works lay in the neighbourhood of the approaches to Assyria and on the direct route to Media.
Note that the text has ‘cutting channels’ rather than ‘digging canals’, and that the purpose expressed, to reduce the speed of the current, is reminiscent of Sennacherib’s own words in his rock inscription at Bavian:
Above the towns Dur-Ishtar, Shibaniba and Sulu I saw streams and enlarged their narrow sources … I cut through difficult places with pickaxes and directed their outflow … I strengthened their channels, heaping up their banks … to arrest the flow of those waters I made a swamp and set out a canebrake within it …
The name of the village called Ardericca by Herodotus has not been identified in the Bavian inscription or any other Assyrian source.
Exactly how the water came into Nineveh at a level high enough to reach the aqueduct in the royal garden may be deduced from another of Sennacherib’s inscriptions:
In order to bring the outflow of the river Khosr within the city and a course of water above and below, I built twin(?) bridges with kiln-baked bricks. Below it, facing the city gate of the citadel, I had a bridge made of baked brick and white limestone for my royal chariot to pass along.41
This description allows the interpretation that an aqueduct, whose course cannot now be traced, brought mountain water into the city at a higher level than a lower bridge on which the king entered the citadel on his chariot.
To inaugurate the installations that brought water to Nineveh, yet prevented damage from uncontrolled flow, a ceremony was derived from traditional rituals performed for beginning a new building. It was carried out at the source of the water. Not only was there a great panel of sculpture carved into the high rock face overlooking the headwaters both at Bavian and at Maltai (and perhaps elsewhere), but also offerings were cast into the water, equivalent to foundation deposits laid in a new building.
For the opening ceremony of that canal I instructed an incantation priest (āšipu) and a kalû-priest, and I presented as gifts carnelian, lapis lazuli, mušgarru-stone, hulālu-agate stone, alabaster, choice gemstones, a turtle, a carp figurine in the likeness of [a sage?] made of gold, aromatics, perfumed oil for Ea the lord of sources, springs and the meadows of Enkimdu the divine canal-overseer, lord of channels and ditches. I prayed to the great gods and they heard my prayers, and prospered the work of my hands. The sluice-gate of that canal opens without a spade or a shovel and lets the waters of abundance flow: its sluice gate is not opened by the labour of man’s hands, but by the will of the gods.42
Here Sennacherib shows his enthusiasm for a new, automatic mechanism for opening and closing sluice-gates. We do not have any detailed information about the invention, but it is interesting to note that one of the transmitters of Berossus attributed to ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ an echo of the same idea:
sluices which on being opened irrigated the plain (around ‘Babylon’). They called these sluices echetognōmones, just as if they have the will or the ability to comply on their own.43
Nearly two centuries earlier, the 9th-century king Ashurnasirpal II (or a later improver) had put sluice-gates into the rock-cut Negoub tunnel, but they were almost certainly operated manually.
Sennacherib’s inscription continues:
When I looked upon the canal and directed its work I made offerings of fat cows and plump sheep and pure libations to the great gods who go at my side and make my reign secure. I clothed those men who had dug that canal with multi-coloured garments, and I put gold rings and pectorals on them.
This is an unusual passage for declaring publicly that the king rewarded the men responsible for the successful completion of the work. It is comparable with his expression of concern for the exhausting conditions under which huge castings were made in the time of his predecessors, before a new, less exhausting technique was introduced, to the benefit of his workforce.
Sennacherib’s offerings presented at the opening ceremony would have been tossed into the water in an act of sacrifice that is widely known in other cultures. The outlet of a water course marks a cosmological boundary that requires protection by the gods. In England, at the site of Roman bridges and Saxon causeways, votive offerings have been recovered, both accidentally and by excavation, some of them representing fish and other aquatic creatures especially appropriate to the setting. Similar offerings were cast into water during Sennacherib’s campaign to the marshes of southern Iraq, when a sudden flood endangered the king and his encamped army:
A surge of high water from the sea rose and entered my tent, and it completely surrounded me while in my camp, causing all of my men to camp in strong boats as in cages for five days and nights … To Ea, king of the Apsu,44 I offered pure sacrifices, and together with a gold boat, I cast into the sea a golden fish and a golden crab.45
Sennacherib claimed to have constructed his canal works from Bavian to Nineveh with a mere seventy men. That number cannot represent the entire workforce—the Jerwan aqueduct alone required two million smoothed, close-fitting stones—but may refer to the management team, perhaps for only one of the four phases; or it may be a schematic number.
Several centuries later it was a matter of some astonishment to Greeks to learn what a personal interest Near Eastern kings took in basic work, even to the extent of getting their hands dirty and raising a sweat. Their stereotype of the foreign tyrant, secluded and effete, conflicted with reality. In a fictional conversation Xenophon composed this dialogue:
Critobulus: Do you really believe, Socrates, that the king of the Persians is concerned at all about farming?
Socrates: If we look at it in the following way, Critobulus, perhaps we may learn whether he is concerned at all about it. We agree that he is seriously concerned about military matters, because he gives orders to each man who is in charge of the countries from which he receives tribute to supply provisions … Furthermore, he himself examines all of the land that he sees as he rides through it … When Lysander came to him (Cyrus) … Cyrus had personally shown him the paradeisos at Sardis. When Lysander had expressed amazement at the beauty of the trees in it (for they were planted at equal intervals in straight rows and all at regular angles), and many sweet fragrances wafted about them as they strolled around, he exclaimed, in amazement, ‘Cyrus, I certainly am amazed at all these things for their beauty, but I admire even more the man who measured out each of the trees for you and arranged each one of them in order.’ When Cyrus heard this, he was pleased and replied, ‘Lysander, I myself measured and arranged everything and I even planted some of the trees myself.’46
Two titles taken by the Assyrian king in his official inscriptions reflect his responsibility for cultivating land: ikkaru ‘ploughman’ and iššakku ‘steward, farmer’. Just as the title ‘shepherd of his people’ represents the duty of the king in promoting the pastoral side of the economy, so ‘ploughman’ and ‘farmer’ represent his promotion of agriculture, in which horticulture plays its part. Symbolizing the king’s engagement with down-to-earth activities, a plough, a plant, and a sheep, goat or cow in Assyrian art are sometimes used to mark the ideology of royalty. But not only in pictures. Ceremonially the king in person must perform actions appropriate to the titles he claimed. When kings claimed to have formed the first brick, it was no idle boast but a genuine ritual act that linked the king to the gods as primeval builders.47 Just as Sennacherib’s grandson showed himself as builder carrying a hod of bricks on his royal head,48 s
o Sennacherib’s role as a cultivator is demonstrated in the garden beside his palace. His claim that people made cloth from the cotton plants he had introduced,49 and used olive oil from the olive trees he had planted, shows that his horticulture was not simply an extravagant prestige project, but benefited the people whom the gods, by choosing him for kingship, had entrusted with their welfare.
The royal wonder-garden at Nineveh was the show-piece of an extensive scheme which brought great benefits to other parts of the city. The copious supply of water allowed all kinds of orchards to be planted around the city, improving the supply of fresh food to its inhabitants. Good drinking water reached north, south and east of the city walls. Fresh mountain water would have flowed into the palace as well as watering its garden, and then flushed through the drainage systems of the South-West Palace.
Nineveh was now the finest city in the world,
the exalted metropolis, the city beloved of Ishtar, in which all the ceremonies of gods and goddesses take place, the eternal base, the everlasting foundation whose plan was drawn in the writing of the firmament at the beginning of time, whose structure was then made known; a clever place where hidden knowledge resides for every kind of skilful work.50
Sennacherib transformed Nineveh together with its surrounding orchards, irrigated all year round by the network of canals, into a garden city. Whether quite such an elaborate work was required for the city’s practical needs has been doubted, giving rise to the suggestion that the projects were intended to demonstrate the skill of Assyrian engineers and the king’s power, and to give the city the image of the canal-entwined landscape of Babylonia. Against the background of early competence in water management, we can set the extraordinary accomplishment of Sennacherib in bringing mountain water to irrigate his wonderful garden, set high up on the citadel of Nineveh beside his palace.