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

by Stephanie Dalley

  Naqia was closely associated with Nineveh because her husband built two palaces there and made the city his capital. Many letters were written directly to her, or mention her, and we have a document recording the loyalty oaths that she imposed on members of her family, requiring them to support her two royal grandsons. Another text particularly relevant here is that which records the building work she undertook at Nineveh on behalf of her son Esarhaddon, who ruled vast territories including Babylonia. The introduction to the inscription puts her at the head of the text where the name of the king would normally be found.

  Naqia, the palace woman of Sennacherib king of the universe, king of Assyria, daughter-in-law of Sargon king of the universe king of Assyria, mother of Esarhaddon king of the world, king of Assyria … a palace befitting royalty for Esarhaddon my beloved son …48

  Here, then, we have a group of material that indicates attachment of Naqia’s deeds to the name ‘Semiramis’. As second wife of Sennacherib, she bears comparison with the historical Sammu-ramat for having her name on inscriptions written during her lifetime, and for supporting publicly first her husband and then her son, both as kings. There was every reason, therefore, to conflate the two great queens, two great builders. Naqia would be the wife of the later Assyrian king to whom Diodorus referred when he wrote: ‘… the Hanging Garden, as it is called, which was built, not by Semiramis, but by a later Syrian king …’ His account that ‘Semiramis’ alongside a Ninus founded ‘Babylon’ on the Euphrates gives details that are applicable to Nineveh: two palaces, technical details of water supply, walls adorned with hunting scenes.

  Another archetypal ‘Semiramis’ is Stratonice. Like the original Sammu-ramat and like Naqia, Stratonice was the wife of a king, Seleucus I, and continued her rise to fame when she was then transferred as wife to his son Antiochus I ‘Soter’. Her own name is publicly joined with that of Antiochus on the cylinder inscription from Borsippa, recording rebuilding work on the great temple Ezida dedicated to the god Nabu—Naqia had also been involved in refurbishment there, some four centuries earlier—and referring also to building work in Babylon (see Figure 36).49 She rebuilt the temple of Atargatis in Hierapolis (Membidj in North Syria) which had previously been built or restored by ‘Semiramis’.50 Whether Stratonice and Antiochus played a role in the revival of Nimrud and Nineveh is not known. But Roman citizens at Aphrodisias on the Meander had ‘Ninos and Semiramis’ sculpted in stone, labelled and displayed among the legendary founding fathers; and that city even took the name Nineveh for a while.51 Ninos and Semiramis were the first rulers in the World History written by the Roman writer Pompeius Trogus, so the original Nineveh and its namesake at Aphrodisias could lay claim to being the first great cities in the civilized world (see Figure 37).

  Fig. 36 Cylinder inscription of Antiochus and Stratonice recording the restoration of the temple of Nabu in Borsippa near Babylon. Length 19.1 cm.

  Fig. 37 (a) Panel showing Semiramis with Gordis, labelled as legendary founders of Aphrodisias–Nineveh-on-Meander, SW Turkey, from the Late Roman basilica. Ht. 99 cm, length 235 cm.

  Fig. 37 (b) Showing Ninos as a founding father of Aphrodisias–Nineveh. Ht. 98 cm, length 229 cm.

  Heroes and heroines of the past were positive or negative models for behaviour. The use of Semiramis’ name shows how particularly outstanding queens were transformed into heroines of the distant past. Traces of her fame were still visible in late antiquity.

  The evidence falls short of proving that Nineveh was called Babylon at the time when the Hanging Garden was built. But a strong case can be made for Sennacherib’s distinctive reforms to make Nineveh into a city that superseded the original Babylon, showing the traditions on which he drew in order to make the new regime acceptable. Taking each one of the confusions, it is possible to explain why Sennacherib was mistaken for Nebuchadnezzar, why Nineveh became known as a Babylon, why the Euphrates was mistaken for the Tigris, and why Semiramis was credited with building Babylon and the Hanging Garden.

  7

  The Unrivalled Palace, the Queen and the Garden

  And blest is he, who tir’d with his affairs

  Far from all noise, all vain applause, prepares

  To go, and underneath some silent shade,

  Which neither cares nor anxious thoughts invade,

  Do’s, for a while, himself alone possess

  René Rapin (1621–87), Of Gardens1

  Sargon’s wide-ranging interests extended beyond the chief preoccupations of Mesopotamian rulers in conquest and building, and he inspired his son Sennacherib with his enthusiasm (see Figure 38). Just to take one example, Sargon took a personal interest in the mining and smelting of minerals from a new source in the mountains of Syria. It was unusual for a king to record such a particular interest in his public inscriptions, but he was not restrained by lack of precedence, and wrote:

  At that time, during my reign, they brought to me hidden treasures of the mountains of northern Syria, and I heaped them up as possessions: refined minerals fit for a palace (from) Mt. Laris’u, Mt. Shuruman; the creation of the god Nudimmud, shining bronze,2 was created in Mt. Tushanira and Mt. Elikudurini; iron of Mt. Lammun (located) in between […], lead which brightens their dullness he revealed (to me); pure alabaster from Mt. Ammun … choice multicoloured stone, fit for royalty, … mountain of Ba‘al-Ṣapuna the great mountain,3 bronze together he created, and I mixed the heaped ores of those mountains, and I put them in the furnace and watched them heating.4

  Fig. 38 Sargon II with his son Sennacherib.

  In Sargon’s official letters too we find references to the energy he devoted to metalwork when planning his new palace at Khorsabad (which is the modern name of the site). Around 717 BC his treasurer wrote:

  As to what the king, my lord, wrote to me: ‘When are they going to cast the gateway column-bases for the portico of the hilāni-palace?’5 I have asked Ashur-shumu-ke’ in and the craftsmen, who told me: ‘We are going to cast four column-bases of bronze for two hilāni-palaces in the 8th month; the small lions for the hilānis will be cast together with the large lions in the Spring.’6

  Many grand rooms in that palace were lined with stone panels on which scenes of war and peace were sculpted with far more grace and beauty than those of his father Tiglath-pileser.7 Unlike earlier Assyrian monarchs, he used light-coloured limestone alongside black marble to great effect both internally and externally. This was one of several striking innovations in the architecture of Khorsabad, for which the inspiration came from palaces he had seen in Syria, where alternating black basalt and white stone panels had long been fashionable. But Sargon’s panels were much larger and better carved, and the rooms they enhanced were bigger. Owing to limitation in the length of roof-beams, rooms were characteristically quite narrow but long, providing plenty of wall-space for the creative artist. Colossal animals in stone were recovered in excavations, mainly from doorways, but none of his bronze-cast figures survived, so they are known only from texts.

  Sargon chose a virgin site for his new capital city, situated unusually far from the river Tigris. Built upon land which the king purchased legally at the market rate (as he took care to record for posterity),8 it lay to the north-east of Nineveh where water fresh from mountain springs could be channelled directly to the city. To display his mastery over nature in this respect, he built a garden with an artificial wooded hill and a lake for boating from a charming pavilion-like boat-house. It was his declared aim to imitate a beauty-spot in the Amanus mountains of northern Syria with shade, fragrance and flowing water.9 Where this delightful ‘high garden’ (kirimāhu) was located is still uncertain, but it was certainly visible from the great palace and easily accessible to the king. He named his new city Dur-Sharrukin, ‘Sargon’s Fort’, and called his new palace ‘Unrivalled Palace’, the epithet revealing his ambition to reach a pinnacle of fame as a brilliant builder. Although the palace is described in texts as an ideal building, and the garden is shown finished and mature, neither was l
ikely to have been completed before Sargon’s unexpected death in 704 BC, so we may envisage the king and his son sharing the excitement of planning and constructing a whole new city while standing amid the dust and noise of building works. On his sculptures Sargon showed scenes from the building of his city and its garden.

  Both enterprises would have had a formative influence upon the taste and interests of his son. Sargon was generous to his family, and built a great residence for his brother, Sin-ahu-uṣur. This man was the grand vizier who had accompanied him on his successful eighth campaign against Urartu, a triumph culminating in the sack of a wealthy city.10 Included in the loot were many large animals cast in bronze.

  Such was the father whose influence on Sennacherib was deep: a generous man, wide-ranging, fascinated by the challenges and innovations of technology, in particular in metallurgy, keen to promote fashion, and proud to express his enthusiasm in public inscriptions.

  Early in his own reign Sennacherib embarked on a huge project at Nineveh: to build a fabulous palace, which we now know as the South-West Palace, and, beside it, an extraordinary garden (see Figures 39, 41). We have many details of the work because he described the craftsmanship that went into it in his long prism inscriptions, and because quite a large part of his palace has been excavated. Even better, the description of the garden has its visual counterpart in the sculpture designed later for his grandson Ashurbanipal.11 Peacetime achievements were at least as important as conquests in demonstrating the power and wealth of the king, and Sennacherib manifested his power on a stupendous scale.

  Fig. 39 Plan of part of Sennacherib’s South-West Palace at Nineveh, as excavated by the end of the 19th century. Defensive main gates, internal courtyards and long rooms are characteristic.

  The palace was built high up on the northern citadel of Nineveh, in the south-west part of the citadel mound, and so was called the South-West Palace by the first European excavators (see Figure 40). The terrace on which it stood was built of brick, about 24 m high, so the palace looked down at the junction of the Khosr river with the Tigris. Inscriptions, written on clay prisms hidden within its walls, revealed that the Assyrians knew it as the Unrivalled Palace, named exactly as the new palace which Sennacherib’s father Sargon had built at Khorsabad. Together with its garden Sennacherib declared it ‘a wonder for all peoples’. Only a small proportion has been uncovered, but the original whole probably measured around 242 m wide and about twice as much in length, with an eastern extension adding perhaps another 100 m.12 On two sides the palace lay close to the massive walls of the citadel, and it is likely that there were upper storeys looking out over the walls. The building was raised up on a huge platform of solid brickwork, allowing spacious paved terraces outside. On the ground floor the walls were up to 7 m thick, so the potential exists for several upper storeys. From the roof, views would have stretched over to the Tigris to the west, across the Khosr river and adjacent second citadel to the south-east. One might look across to the Hanging Garden on the north-eastern side (if the suggestion for its exact location is correct), and northwards to the great temple and ziggurat of Ishtar of Nineveh rising above the roof-tops of other buildings on the citadel (see Figures 41, 34b).

  Fig. 40 Aerial photo of Nineveh taken in 1932, showing the citadel mound Kuyunjik and the bed of the river Khosr winding beside it.

  Sennacherib described how this palace replaced a smaller, much older one:

  At that time I enlarged the settlement of Nineveh greatly. I had renovation work carried out upon the outer and inner walls, … and made them mountain-high. As for the open land outside the city walls, which had become desolate for lack of water and were festooned with spiders’ webs—for the people there had no knowledge of irrigation and relied upon rain that fell by chance from the sky—I provided it with irrigation. The previous palace was 360 cubits long and 95 cubits wide, and so its accommodation was too meagre … I pulled it down in its entirety. I diverted the flood-prone river from the city centre, and directed its outflow into the land that surrounds the city at the back. On half an acre beside the water-course I bonded four layers of great limestone blocks with bitumen, and laid reeds from reed-beds and canes over them. I gained extra land from the Khosr river and the outskirts of the city, a stretch of ground 340 cubits long and 289 cubits wide. I added it to the bulk of the earlier terrace and raised the top to a level of 190 courses all over. To prevent the foundation of the terrace weakening due to the strength of the current as time went by, I surrounded its substructure with large blocks of limestone, and so I strengthened its earthwork.13

  Less than twelve years elapsed during which the building work was planned, and carried out, using thousands of foreign captives as the labour force, assembling clay and chopped straw for making the bricks and plaster, and laying them in position. Huge timbers were brought from mountain-sides far away for the construction of ceilings, roofs and doors. For threshold slabs and other ornamental masonry the king took a personal interest in stone-quarrying, first finding new sources of supply, and then transporting back to Nineveh the colossal slabs needed.

  Fig. 41 Sketch map of the citadel mound at Nineveh, to show possible location of the garden next to the palace.

  At that time Ashur and Ishtar who love my priesthood and named my name revealed to me the place where gigantic cedars grow, such as have been growing since ancient times and have become quite massive, standing in secret within the mountains of Sirara. They opened up to me access to alabaster, which was prized for dagger pommels in the days of the kings my forefathers … Near to Nineveh, in the region of Balatay, white limestone was revealed in large quantities in accordance with the gods’ will, and I created great winged bull-colossi and other limbed figures of alabaster, made out of a single block of stone, perfectly proportioned, standing tall on their own bases.14

  Erosion from weather and surface activity, and looting, whether for second-hand building materials or as works of art, have taken a devastating toll on the most magnificent palace of early antiquity. But marvellous sculptured stone panels survived in some of the rooms, great winged bull-colossi with human heads still stood at many of the doorways when the first excavators arrived, and carved stone thresholds gave extra magnificence to the entrances.15

  Entering through the grand main portal, the visitor passed between two colossi which reached to the imposing height of 7 m, and weighed between 40 and 50 tons. Those composite creatures marked a transition from the ordinary world to a place of reverence for divine authority, impressing upon the visitor that the royal residence was the home of no ordinary mortal. Huge double doors of fragrant timber were mounted on a pair of gigantic posts each of which pivoted in a well-oiled stone socket. They had elaborate bolts, and were decorated with bronze bands showing scenes of the king’s glories. The great thresholds, decorated with a geometric, floral pattern of lotus, palmette and rosette, imitating a carpet, would have been cast, or plated with silver or bronze (see Figure 42).

  Fig. 42 Pattern carved on a stone threshold slab from the South-West Palace. Compare the pebble mosaic shown on Plate 6.

  Passing through into the great throne-room, one viewed the magnificent sculptured panels lining the walls. They were originally painted in colours of which only faint traces of red and black remain. A few details of the design probably gleamed with gold leaf. Essentially the scenes shown in that room depicted the king’s main successes in extending areas under Assyrian control, presented on horizontal registers of low relief. But Sennacherib improved on the artistic conventions of his predecessors, showing details of landscape background so as to give a sense of perspective to subsidiary figures and to turn the bare narrative into fuller pictures of lifelike events. Often actions were shown almost in cartoon form, with, for example, the march towards an enemy city shown on the left of a long series of panels, the siege of the city shown at the centre, and the subsequent procession of tribute and prisoners shown on the right. The king, who in earlier times was usually depicted in the
heat of battle enacting a deed of bravery and triumph, was now shown in a more peaceful and benevolent role, receiving homage on the battlefield (see Figure 43). This change is so marked that it can be interpreted as showing a change of policy, persuading the dignitaries who viewed the scene that Assyrian power was not simply inevitable domination but also one of beneficial control. Another change of style is noticeable: whereas former kings had inscribed their deeds, engraved across the narrative scenes in cuneiform, Sennacherib initiated a new tradition of neat captions, briefly recording the place and event without reference to the gods or to his own heroism. The long accounts of his campaigns and building works he restricted to the stone bull-colossi, and to clay prisms and cylinders which were put inside the palace walls for the instruction of posterity.