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

by Stephanie Dalley

  Unfortunately a comparison with biblical Eden stubbornly persists. The Sumerian myth Enki and Ninhursag was once described as ‘the Paradise myth’, but the old association has long been abandoned. The condition of Dilmun (identified as the island of Bahrein in the Arabian Gulf) before the god of fresh water Enki transformed it into a fertile and prosperous place for the island’s goddess Nin-sikila caused her to complain that she had been granted a barren, unproductive, ‘pure’ land. Its primeval state is described in those lines as follows:

  In Dilmun no raven yet cawed, no partridge cackled, no lion yet killed, no wolf carried off lambs, no dog knew how to guard goats, no pig had yet learned that grain was for eating, birds did not yet eat the malt that a widow would spread out on her roof, no pigeon tucked its head under its wing, no eye-disease was there to say ‘I am Eye-disease’, no headache was there to say ‘I am Headache’, no old woman was there to say ‘I am an old woman’, no old man was there to say ‘I am an old man’, no unwashed girl was there to be treated with disrespect in the city, no man dredging a canal was there to say: ‘It is getting dark’, no herald yet made his rounds in his district, no singer yet sang ‘elulam’ there, no wailing yet resounded in the outskirts of the city.8

  This interpretation has replaced the understanding that Dilmun was a paradise for mortals, a tendentious claim heavily influenced by the desire to show a connection between biblical Genesis and ancient Sumerian mythology.9 Nevertheless, the idea that Dilmun was a kind of heavenly location is implied by the Sumerian Flood Story in which the survivor of the Flood was set down by the god Enki in Dilmun, to live forever, apart from mortals. Both in the Genesis story, 2: 5–10, and in the Sumerian tale, the term ‘to the East’ is used; and the condition of the world before the garden was created by Yahweh is expressed similarly to the myth of Enki and Ninhursag in this passage: ‘At the time when God Yahweh made the earth and the heavens, when no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and the plants of the field had not yet sprung up—for God Yahweh had not caused it to rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the ground …’10

  The supposed connection was exacerbated by more recent use of the word ‘paradise’, which in its original Persian usage simply meant a garden, and in Greek (by Xenophon among others) could be applied to various royal parks and gardens in the Near East. Later it acquired a meaning as the Garden of Eden, where the first humans lived in contact with God, and, by extension, as the abode of the blessed. The word ‘eden’ in its earliest usage was formed from a common Aramaic root meaning ‘abundance’.11 It was understood in that sense by the Septuagint translators of Genesis 3: 23, whose paradeisos tēs tryphēs means simply ‘garden of delights’.12 The expression soon took on a new interpretation as a mythological place, which led to the traditional, conservative understanding of the Garden of Eden as a heavenly paradise,13 and which literally minded interpreters of Genesis sought to locate on earth.

  On the other hand Ezekiel must have had Sennacherib’s palace garden in mind when he described Assyria as a cedar of Lebanon, with rivers made to flow around the planting and canals sent forth to all the other trees of the field, with roots in abundant water, ‘nor any tree in the garden of God was like unto him in his beauty … so that all the trees of Eden that were in the garden of God envied him’. Ezekiel began to prophesy nineteen years after the fall of Nineveh, when the fame of the Hanging Garden was widespread. His words show that Sennacherib’s creation was regarded as an illustration of excess power, outdoing heaven so as to arouse divine jealousy.

  As a celestial paradise inhabited by the blessed, the Garden of Eden was famously promoted by John Milton. Writing Paradise Lost, he sought inspiration, turning to Diodorus’ description of the Hanging Garden. As a young man ‘he read, it is said, all the Greek and Latin authors’, so it is hardly surprising that he chose that passage and modelled the entrance to Paradise after the World Wonder, in a part of the poem that has been recognized as owing a debt to Diodorus for other parts of the description.14 He envisaged the edge of Paradise as a steep-sided, terraced slope topped by a wall, and even higher, a row of trees:

  … And overhead up grew

  Insuperable highth of loftiest shade,

  Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,

  A sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend

  Shade above shade, a woody theatre

  Of stateliest view; yet higher than their tops

  The verdurous wall of Paradise up sprung;

  Which to our general sire gave prospect large

  Into his nether empire neighbouring round:

  And higher than that wall a circling row

  Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit …15

  This description calls to the mind’s eye an image of Sennacherib, the great king like ‘our general sire’ looking down upon a microcosm of his empire, viewing his domain from a wall crowned with a curving row of trees (see Figure 52). The height of a steep, wooded slope, giving access to Paradise, set the scene for Satan, who journeyed on at first ‘pensive and slow’, then leaped up and perched ‘like a cormorant’ to view the wondrous landscape stretching out beneath him. By using the Greek text, Milton forged a new link between the Hanging Garden and the biblical Garden of Eden.

  Sennacherib’s palace garden sits firmly within an Assyrian tradition that can be traced back at least to the 9th century BC, so we may doubt that inspiration for it as a World Wonder in the 7th century BC was taken from the biblical idea of the Garden of Eden. However, if the story in Genesis was composed before Sennacherib designed his garden (which is a most contentious issue!),16 one could imagine that the one river flowing out from Eden to branch into four rivers as the biblical account describes: ‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads’, was deliberately depicted as a specific reference to cosmic geography in Ashurbanipal’s sculptured panel, for it shows a single stream of water flowing down from the aqueduct and then dividing into several streams (see Figure 14). Any such link might derive from a common source rather than being a direct influence.

  Fig. 52 Milton adapted Diodorus Siculus’ description of the Hanging Garden for his poetic depiction of the Garden of Eden, but illustrators did not follow his text.

  Certain beliefs current in ancient Assyria would eventually contribute to the transition in understanding from an earthly pleasure garden to a heavenly paradise. One of a pair of divine gate-keepers controlling access to heaven was Nin-gish-zida, whose name can be translated ‘Lord Steadfast Tree’, and as we have seen in Chapter 3, some temples were designed to represent a sacred grove. The god Nergal had the epithet ‘King Poplar’ (Lugal-asal); there was also a god ‘King date palm’ (Lugal-gishimmar); and as we described, the dioecious date palm was pollinated as a recognized act of copulation. The idea that some trees and plants enjoyed sexual pleasure in gardens may have influenced the later image of a paradise in which delectable girls would be available to males as a reward for a virtuous life. In English tradition we refer to ‘the birds and the bees’ with the implication of sexual activity outdoors amid the beauties of nature.

  One of the marvellous features of the Nineveh garden was its greenness throughout the year, so it appeared almost miraculous at times of the year when the rest of the landscape was parched. Eventually the ability to resist seasonal change became an attribute of the heavenly paradise-garden, which, as described in a Manichaean hymn,

  adorned graceful hills wholly covered with flowers, grown in much excellence; green fruit-bearing trees whose fruits never drop, never rot, and never become wormed; springs flowing with ambrosia that fill the whole Paradise, its groves and plains; countless mansions and palaces, thrones and benches that exist in perpetuity, for ever and ever. Thus arranged is the Paradise.17

  Mani, who founded the Manichaean religion and inspired much of its sacred literature, was born in Babylon in AD 216, at a time when the legendary Hanging Garden was still a subject o
f interest to Greek and Roman authors.

  For perfuming temples and the statues of gods, scent was made from the resin of trees, especially cedars and pines, and the exudation of resin was itself referred to as the blood of the tree, as if the tree were an animal. To be in the presence of a deity, to be favoured by him, was to catch the scent of his sweet breath, as we can tell from expressions such as ‘the fruit tree on which a god’s breath has blown thrives’, and, in a prayer addressed to a god, ‘your speech is a sweet breath, the life of the lands’. Large quantities of perfumed oil were used in the cults, and emanated from cult statues. Likewise the king was perfumed, so that to catch the scent of his presence was to breathe in royal authority emanating from the gods: ‘Let the breath of the Pharaoh not leave us: we are keeping the gate locked until the breath of the king reaches us’, wrote the beleaguered ruler of a Canaanite town.18

  The gods themselves were imagined as making love in a garden full of fragrant resins, fruit, herbs and flowers, which could be related to the understanding that the gods had aromatic breath—no halitosis in heaven!

  As a symbol of the king’s personal authority the royal stela set up in the garden, as seen on Ashurbanipal’s sculptured wall-panel, stands in a commanding position on a path leading to the pavilion (see Figure 14). From there it proclaims that Sennacherib was the king who had created the surrounding wonders, his image a constant reminder of royalty, representing the king when he was absent. It would have been visible from the walls of the citadel. The king would also have been visible when he promenaded along the pillared walkway at the top of the garden, allowing that architectural feature to act like an Egyptian Window of Appearances19 from which the king was impressively visible both to his subjects below and to the guards patrolling the walls at the far end of the garden—‘the Assyrian equivalent of a political poster’. Some such stelae state explicitly that they were set up as a memorial for eternity, for one of the purposes of reproducing in stone the image of a king was to ensure that the image would outlast him.20

  Through his buildings and other works of art, the king promoted his own fame. Like modern leaders, he was acutely aware of the legacy that he must try to manipulate for future generations, and his enduring monuments and sculptures played a key role. The king’s fine royal inscriptions, whether publicly displayed or hidden away for future discovery, served the same essential purpose.

  The rare foreign plants in his garden demonstrated the breadth of his conquests abroad, representing the countries through which his armies marched. Thus the plants in the garden symbolized the extent of the king’s power.21 As an empire-builder whose campaigns and trading networks extended to far-flung lands, the king was a pioneer whose travels brought him into contact with exotic plants of which samples were collected and brought back to Assyria for the admiration of local people.

  On the surviving bas-reliefs from Assyrian palaces of the late 8th and 7th centuries, trees are generally shown as a few stereotypical types that defy botanical identification, apart from date palms. Trees are always shown at the same height, as if a canon of proportions, already proven to exist on those sculptures for the human form, was used also for trees. The two types of tree shown on Ashurbanipal’s garden panel may simply be stereotypes for deciduous and evergreen trees. But two scenes suggest a more interesting approach. One is the fenced-off square of trees on Original Drawing IV 77 (see Figure 13), which resembles a tree-nursery within the palace garden at Nineveh. The other is the fragment showing a lion recumbent beneath a vine whose leaves and stems are artistically arranged and naturalistically carved. This fragment leads us to believe that there was once a panel showing rare plants, for the vine does not flourish in the vicinity of Nineveh. By juxtaposing a lion with a vine, the sculptor suggests a rustic idyll in which wild animals and foreign plants have yielded happily to the control of the monarch. On Original Drawing IV 69, made from another bas-relief found in Sennacherib’s palace but now lost, men walk in a file, each bringing a large jar containing a big bunch of flowers (see Figure 53).

  Fig. 53 Attendants bringing vases of flowers into the South-West Palace.

  Botanical knowledge in Assyria is encapsulated in a specialized list, an encyclopaedic compilation which was well known in the time of Sargon and Sennacherib. It describes the features of individual plants in detail: root, fruit, blossom, seed, sprout, stalk, tendril, sap, resin etc.—depending on particular qualities for each plant.22

  Sennacherib names some of the foreign plants which he cultivated at Nineveh—the world of plants in microcosm. Some of the planting was experimental, and may not have been successful in the long term. Cotton was planted, and traces of cotton textile have been analysed in the tomb of Sargon’s queen Atalya, confirming Sennacherib’s claim to have made cloth from it.23 The plant was probably a tree-like form Gossypium arboreum which is indigenous to India and Pakistan and was cultivated at a very early date in the Indus valley (see Figure 54 and Plate 16). Dalbergia sissoo, also known as Indian rosewood, was introduced into Assyria likewise from lands east of Mesopotamia including modern Oman (see Figure 55).24 Even though northern Iraq is not an environment suitable for growing olive trees, Sennacherib claimed to have grown them, presumably having brought saplings back from the Levant, and he boasts that he harvested oil for use in a foundation deposit when he began a new building. Similarly date palms from the south of Babylonia were planted at Nineveh, although they would not have produced good fruit at such a northern latitude. But the importance of that tree far outweighed any disadvantages of ecology, for religious connotations of the date palm linked to the cult of Ishtar ran very deep in Mesopotamian society: the significance of the tree is reflected in Sennacherib’s extraordinary use for himself of the title ‘Date palm of Assyria’ instead of the normal ‘king of Assyria’;25 and Ashurbanipal addressed Ishtar of Nineveh in a hymn as ‘O palm-tree’.26 An ‘indian tree’ sindû was also introduced, possibly sandalwood. Little detail is available for fruits, but we know from texts on the Middle Euphrates a thousand years earlier that cuttings were routinely taken for planting vines,27 so we can deduce that Assyrian horticulturalists searched at home and abroad for better stock to improve their produce. These enterprises suggest that Sennacherib, like his predecessors, enriched his country with long-term benefits. Botanical analysis and detailed plantsmanship evidently flourished in 7th-century Assyria.

  Fig. 54 Gossypium arboreum, and Gossypium herbaceum, the cotton-bearing tree and its shrub form.

  Fig. 55 Dalbergia sissoo Roxburgh, a fine hardwood native to Oman, S. India and Pakistan.

  In two letters which a top Assyrian official resident in northern Syria wrote to Sargon, he assures the king that he has collected 2,800 bundles of cuttings from fruit trees from one town, and 1,000 from another, and that they are on their way to Khorsabad, for planting around his new capital city; another group of people ‘are collecting saplings of almond, quince and plum trees, and transporting them to Dur-Sharrukin’.28 Another letter from the same man mentions plans to prepare saplings of cedar and cypress ‘when the time is right’.29 Not all of them were intended for gardens; panels of sculpture show lines of trees planted alongside Assyrian roads, to give shade to travellers, just as they are in modern times in the Middle East.

  In this respect Sargon and Sennacherib stood within an early and long-lasting tradition of introducing new plants into their country. More than two millennia later, when British explorers took a lead in extending their country’s influence to new lands they took with them a botanist or biologist, intending to bring back specimens, alive or dead, of hitherto unknown plants, animals and insects. Joseph Banks was one such, travelling with Captain Cook on board the Endeavour to bring back plants that were given a Linnaean name celebrating the discoverer—Banksia. Charles Darwin was another, accompanying Captain Fitzroy to bring back on board the Beagle plants, some of which were named after him, such as Calceolaria darwinii. When the plants survived, they were propagated in national gardens such as
Kew, or in the gardens of rich men such as at Chatsworth and Heligon. Dutch plantsmen were famous too for searching abroad: Philipp Franz von Siebold, a doctor who lived in Japan for many years, brought back to Leiden, among many other plants, one which was named Magnolia sieboldii after him. In the USA the inventor Thomas Edison collected tropical trees from around the world, using his international network of contacts, for his Tropic Gardens in Florida. These examples illustrate how foreign plants introduced into the home country are trophies which may bring glory to their discoverers and are displayed with pride in the great gardens of the homeland. So it was with the conquering kings of Assyria.

  The tradition did not begin with Sennacherib. When Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076 BC) campaigned victoriously to the north-west of Assyria, he brought home foreign trees including rare and exotic fruit trees, as already quoted. Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) had set another precedent in his palace garden at Nimrud, by naming more than 39 types of tree in his new garden,30 to which the Assyrian public was invited to come for the feast of inauguration—47,074 guests, a palindromic number in which 4 (the corners of a square) and 7 (the number of planets that influence human affairs) both symbolize totality.31 Incidentally this symbolic use of numbers shows how tricky it is to interpret such ancient texts, when our own literature usually lacks such symbolism, and a literal translation is served up plain. Cedars, cypresses, junipers and the incense-bearing kanaktu tree afforded shade and aroma; almond, quince, fig, pear, vines and pomegranate contributed blossom in spring and fruit in late summer.32