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

by Stephanie Dalley

  The pine trees that are so much in evidence on Ashurbanipal’s sculptured panel have a special role beyond shade and fragrance, for pine-cones and fir-cones, with their attractive shape and their shower of winged seeds, were a special symbol of fertility held by the genies who purified or pollinated the ‘tree of life’ in Assyrian palaces.33 Fir-cones were used, alongside tamarisk and date palm, in rituals to dispel evil.

  A fashion for collecting rare foreign plants is known from Egypt. The great Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut (c.1473–1458 BC) is famous for her expedition to Punt, modern Eritrea, from which she brought back the incense-bearing shrubs illustrated in bas-relief on the walls of her temple at Deir el-Bahri. The stone pictures can still be seen; some of the shrubs would barely have survived the immediate days of triumph, but were nevertheless at least as interesting, if not more so, than gold rings and elephant tusks, which are also depicted there. Rarity creates value and excites attention and admiration. Despite the lateral symmetry that is so marked a characteristic of Egyptian gardens, her design may have influenced the design of the Nineveh garden in other ways, for it is striking that the terraces are surrounded by cliffs in the shape of an amphitheatre, and that colonnades on each terrace look down over the garden.

  Fig. 56 A stone panel of bas-relief with plants, from the ‘botanical court’ of Tuthmosis III in the temple of Amun at Karnak.

  When the Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (c.1440 BC) marched from Egypt into the Levant and installed his governors in the main cities, he celebrated his conquests by commissioning a bas-relief for the temple of Amun at Karnak, illustrating foreign plants brought back and planted in Upper Egypt (see Figure 56). Some of them have been identified from the illustrations, but there is no accompanying text to give more context.34 They are depicted as samples with fruits detached from the main plant, although artistic conventions make modern botanical identifications difficult. Whether Sennacherib and his advisers were aware of those Egyptian collections is not certain, but the idea of separating the different parts of the plant prefigures the Assyrian botanical encyclopaedia mentioned above. The presence of Egyptian emissaries at his father’s court, known from the Nimrud Wine Lists, makes it likely that there was interaction with lively discussion of garden design. On reciprocal visits Assyrian emissaries may have viewed bas-reliefs at Karnak and Deir el-Bahri as well as existing Egyptian gardens.35

  Four centuries later, the soldiers of Alexander the Great would bring back botanical information collected by Theophrastus,36 inspiring the study of a wider range of material than was available at home. In every society people are inspired and excited to see whatever is rare and strange from far-distant lands, whether a platypus from Australia, nutmegs from the island of Rum, or rocks from the surface of the moon.

  Fig. 57 Detail of Original Drawing IV 77 showing sporting events taking place in the palace garden at Nineveh.

  The king of Assyria frequently led his soldiers on campaign. Horsemanship and charioteering, hunting, wrestling, running, throwing and swimming were all skills required in ancient armies. On other sculptures many of these activities are shown in the course of real campaigns abroad.37 On Original Drawing IV 77 they are sporting displays held in the royal garden at Nineveh. Naked men swim supported on inflated skins, other men ferry horses across water on boats (see Figure 57). The man who appears to swing on a rope above the water may be practising for scaling a high wall. Like a military tattoo, an exhibition of this kind had the serious purpose of demonstrating prowess useful in warfare. Athletic competitions were held: running races lismu were attached to the cults of various deities.38 An Assyrian road named ‘King’s Road of the Running Race’ allows the deduction that main roads were the venue, as in modern marathons. Such races took place on specific dates in the calendar, and were dedicated to gods; for instance at the city of Ashur a running race in honour of the god Nabu was held in the second month,39 and a race in honour of Ninurta in the ninth month.40 Wrestling was a popular sport—wrestlers ša abāri are sometimes shown in art, and the acrobat (or maybe juggler) mubabbilu contributed to royal entertainment. Other palace sculptures show scenes of hunting with dogs, nets and falcons, chariots and spears, presumably taking place within larger parks outside the city wall, but none of them was commissioned for Sennacherib, who seems to have eschewed hunting, in contrast to his father Sargon and his grandson Ashurbanipal.

  In Egypt from the fifth dynasty (2465–2323 BC) onwards sportsmen are known to have competed either nude or very lightly clad in a penis sheath or a short kilt. As a subject for bas-relief sculptures and for painting, their events were popular.41 Swimming is often shown. The best example of a text comes from the reign of Taharqa, the Pharaoh who ruled at the same time as Sennacherib. Written on a stela set up on the desert road near to the site of Dahshur, it is known as ‘the Running Stela of Taharqa’, proclaiming that the Pharaoh ordered it to be called ‘Running Practice of the Army of the Son of the Sun Taharqa, may he live forever’, and it commemorates a great race. He boasted:

  There is none among my army who is not toughened for battle … they come like the coming of the wind, like falcons who beat the air with their wings. … The king himself was in his chariot to inspire the running of his army. He ran with them at the back of the desert of Memphis in the hour ‘She has given Satisfaction’. They reached the Fayum in the hour ‘Sunrise’. They returned to the palace in the hour ‘She defends her Master’. He honoured the first among them to arrive and arranged for him to eat and drink with his bodyguard. He honoured those others who were just behind him and rewarded them with all manner of things.42

  This text, and its date in Sennacherib’s time, provides back-up for interpreting part of the scene in Original Drawing IV 77 as an exhibition of military sports carried out in the king’s palace garden.

  Some of those physical sports are often assumed to have begun in Greece, linked to the fame of Olympia and the Olympic Games, where recognizable civic architecture helps to show how popular sporting contests were. Around the 8th and 7th centuries BC competitive sports took place at Olympia, Delphi and then spread to Athens and Nemea. Particular gods were the patrons: Apollo, the equivalent to Mesopotamian Nabu, was honoured with the games at Delphi; and Heracles, who was equivalent to Mesopotamian Nergal (who in turn was sometimes equated with Ninurta), was honoured as founder of the Olympic games.43 Although in Assyria and Egypt there was no equivalent in architecture, there is now evidence that physical exercises were valued there.

  In a crowded city, and in homes filled with the busyness of family life, privacy is at a premium, and finding a quiet place for making love is a challenge. A love lyric takes the form of a dialogue between Nabu and his consort Tashmetu who pledge their love in a garden, describing their ecstasy with metaphors of fruit, birdsong and gemstones.

  ‘My lord, put a ring on me, let me give you pleasure in the garden!’ …

  ‘Tashmetu, whose thighs are gazelle in the plain,

  Tashmetu whose ankles are apple of Siman,

  Tashmetu whose heels are obsidian, …

  Why, O why are you adorned, my Tashmetu?’

  ‘So that I may go to the garden with you, my Nabu.

  Let me go to the garden, to the garden and to my Lord’ …

  ‘May my eyes see the plucking of your fruit,

  May my ears hear the twittering of your birds.’ …

  ‘Bind your days to the garden and to the lord.

  Bind your nights to the beautiful garden’.

  ‘Let my Tashmetu come with me to the garden. …

  May her eyes behold the plucking of my fruit!

  May her ears listen to the twittering of my birds!’44

  The pavilion, with its façade of columns topped by delicate proto-Ionic capitals, would have given an opportunity for privacy and dalliance within the garden, as well as solitude for reflection, and perhaps also for the king to escape among the butterflies from quarrelsome wives (like Solomon in Rudyard Kipling’s story The Butterfly that Sta
mped) and conspiratorial courtiers (like Ahasuerus in the Hebrew Book of Esther). Such a pavilion represented a tent providing comfort and seclusion in the desert, with an ivory couch and luxurious hangings, beautiful textiles, protected against sun, wind, dust, sand, and unwelcome interruptions.

  When the Hanging Garden was constructed at Nineveh, outdoor drinking parties in Assyria were occasions for conversation and entertainment with wine and music, presumably also dancers and acrobats, jesters and poets. Wherever courts convened for leisure, courtiers recited wisdom literature, exercising their wit and ingenuity for the king’s delight and amusement, and jesters told rude jokes. ‘Wisdom’ compositions included dialogues that probed the limits of piety and power. In such a setting the wisdom and learning of which Sennacherib boasts in his prism inscription would be associated with the royal garden on some occasions, just as it is in the text. The link suggests that the banquet al fresco was the royal equivalent in Assyria of a Greek symposium held in a garden. This linkage is most clearly seen on the sculpture that shows Ashurbanipal and his queen feasting in a garden—its location has not been securely identified—surrounded by the trophies of victory which include an Elamite bow, an Egyptian necklace, and the head of the decapitated Elamite king hanging from a tree (see Figure 58). The king reclines on a couch in the style generally associated with Greek drinking parties, holding his bowl of wine. Outdoor music enchants the air, played on stringed, percussion and wind instruments. From lists of the wine distributed at banquets to the royal family, high officials and foreign delegates as well as musicians, we know that there were several regional types of music: from Syria and Palestine, including specialists from Malatya on the Upper Euphrates, Arpad near Aleppo in Syria, from Jerusalem (sent as part of Hezekiah’s tribute); from Luristan, and local Assyrian musicians.45 Like the plants, the music was international, reflecting the king’s far-reaching influence and his appreciation of the skills of his subjects.

  Thus the association in Classical antiquity of the garden as a place for philosophers to stroll for relaxed dialogue is a tradition that would lead easily from the garden banquets of Assyrian kings. By the time a Seleucid governor was in control in Nineveh, there was a tradition of philosophers meeting and talking in a garden, sometimes as part of a more general educational environment. Plato, Theophrastus and Epicurus are all said to have used their own private gardens as meeting places for serious discussion and learning; and Theophrastus bequeathed his garden to the Peripetus school which had the Lyceum as its centre.46

  Fig. 58 Ashurbanipal and queen with trophies, celebrating with a drink in a garden. The faces and the king’s hand were chiselled out after the fall of Assyria. Ht. 56 cm.

  Only a few damaged and fragmentary bas-reliefs from the South-West and North palaces at Nineveh bear witness to the importance of the garden in Assyrian art. If Ashurnasirpal II in the 9th century commissioned a sculptured panel showing his garden at Nimrud, it is not extant; but Sargon, Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal in the late 8th and early 7th century certainly did. Three different styles can be identified: first a garden as a landscape without people as in Sargon’s garden at Khorsabad, and Ashurbanipal’s panel from the North Palace at Nineveh; second, a garden as a scene for activity, as in the Original Drawing IV 77 of Sennacherib’s panel showing sports and the pillared walkway; also as a place for leisure the panel showing Ashurbanipal drinking with his consort in celebration of his victories in Egypt and Elam; and third, a garden as a place for displaying particular plants and animals as shown on the fragment from Ashurbanipal’s North Palace. (See Figures 11, 13 and 14) These examples from three different reigns are all that survive from what may have been a very much larger number. Such a small proportion of the original number is due to incomplete excavation, to erosion, to accidental loss (many fine panels sank on a raft transporting them to Europe) and to the untraceable re-use of stone in later times.

  In the first style, a landscape without people implies a garden as a place for solitude where the beauties of nature are celebrated. Here the emphasis is on the design, the engineering and water flow, imitating a natural landscape, where the trees are of only two stereotypical kinds, probably deciduous and evergreen together. On both panels flowing water is emphasized, but shown in a naturalistic way, despite flowing into the sloping garden on an aqueduct. It is not marshalled into a pond or lake of geometric precision, by contrast with the later, rather rigid form of four channels and a central pond, a flat parterre typical of the Iranian chahar bagh. Both panels show the pavilion as a non-urban feature. On Sargon’s panel the artificial hill topped by an altar is a metaphor in miniature for the mountain on which the deities lived, as a place in near-contact with the sky, where heaven hovers above. This allows a certain intimacy between man and god, reminding one that the sun, moon, planets and constellations are directly linked to man and earth, where the transcendence of the divine is directly apparent to the mortal recipient. On the Nineveh panel, the king is visibly in control, not quite dominating the scene from his stela but incorporated into it, and his garden is an extension of his palace which is presented on the adjacent slab. Nature is simplified, divine worship is simplified, architecture is integrated into nature: nature and culture are reconciled.

  In the second style, the garden is a place for socializing in different ways: a place to recline, drink, carouse with the queen, listen to music, display trophies, and watch sporting events; as a venue for athletic display it serves as an outdoor theatre. This is a function that may have had a deliberate influence on the design, for Diodorus Siculus wrote that the Hanging Garden was like a theatre; and the pillared walkway could be understood as an elevated viewing point, prefiguring the pillars that rose up at the back of many a Hellenistic theatre. In general the encompassing shape of a theatre cocoons people from the intrusions and dangers of life outside, allowing the relaxation needed for contemplation and enjoyable socializing, as well as sheltering the trees from gusts of wind and driving rain.

  In the third style, represented only by a single fragment, great care has been taken to show the vine twining around a tree; the daisy-shaped flowers on long, straight stalks, and lilies, well known for their exotic perfume. The lion and lioness are idealized as tranquil and tame, implying that even the animal world is at peace in an environment controlled by the king (see Figure 59). The subject may have been taken from Egypt: a wall-painting beside a palace garden at Tell el-Amarna shows a lion lying under a vine.47

  Fig. 59 Idealized landscape on a stone panel fragment showing lions with flowers growing beneath a vine, from an internal wall in the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Ht. 98 cm, length 178 cm.

  All three styles show a tendency to idealize, whether trees, people or animals, showing them as perfect forms in a timeless environment. In sculpture it was possible to show ideal or perfect forms for a garden as well as for humankind. Storm damage, wilting, accidental trampling, were not shown, for perfection was the aspiration of the craftsman whose work would reflect the ideal of kingship and its close relationship to the gods. The ideal of perfection is clear in the way that men are shown on Assyrian sculpture, in the prime of life, distinguished only by garments, hairstyle, jewellery and accoutrements. Likewise the deities shown on the rock sculptures at Khinnis and Maltai are identifiable by the symbols they hold, and the animals on which they stand (see Figures 29, 30). Such models of perfection were later interpreted as dangerous because they imitated divine creation, leading to a periodic avoidance of human forms in art. Even during the late Assyrian period there was a tendency towards non-representational art, especially in showing divinities, but it existed alongside the depiction of ideal forms of gods and men, apparently without tension.48

  Anyone who plants trees in a garden is aware that future generations will have greater benefit from them than himself. If we accept that Ashurbanipal’s panel shows the garden at Nineveh planted by his grandfather,49 we see that the grandson acknowledged that debt, and linked himself to his famous ance
stor. The decision to commission the scene can be understood as paying homage to a great king whose reputation had been so tarnished by terrible deeds: the murder of Sennacherib by one of his own sons, and the damage done to Babylon when he sacked it. Ashurbanipal celebrated the genius of his grandfather in an allusive way.

  The World Wonder created by Sennacherib must have had imitators. On a small scale the water engineering of the so-called Siloam tunnel dug by Hezekiah, Sennacherib’s contemporary in Jerusalem, may be compared. The tunnel is thought to have been designed to fill the pool of Siloam so that water flowed over into the King’s Garden, located in the only part of Jerusalem where a garden could flourish all year round. The inscription carved in Hebrew on the wall of the tunnel shares with texts of Sennacherib a most unusual interest in the work of the labourers. In his prism inscription Sennacherib showed his interest in the plight of the workers where he wrote of his predecessors: ‘in their method of work they had exhausted all the craftsmen’, but also many panels of palace sculpture show men at work in the hard stages of labour to achieve his huge construction projects, especially the dragging of colossal bull slabs from quarries to Nineveh on sledges.50

  Hezekiah wrote:

  … [when the tunnel] was chipped through. And this is the story of the hacking through. While [the quarrymen were still wielding their] axes, each towards his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be chipped through, the voice of a man (was heard) calling to his fellow, for there was an overlap(?) on the right [and left]. And on the day of chipping through, the quarrymen struck through each to meet his fellow, axe against axe. Then the water flowed from the Spring towards the Pool for 1,200 cubits. And 100 cubits was the height of the rock above the heads of the quarrymen.