The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE), the Alexandrian scholar Callimachus (ca. 305-240 BCE) and other classical writers list the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the great accomplishments and tourist attractions of known civilization at the time. All are within a 1000 x 1300 square-mile-area in the Eastern Mediterranean.

• The Great Pyramid of Giza
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
• The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
• The Colossus of Rhodes
• The Lighthouse of Alexandria

Although the pyramid of Giza is the only wonder still in existence today, we know the locations of all the wonders except the hanging gardens of Babylon. (I discuss the pyramid of Giza in two posts from August 2014.)

Dr. Stephanie Dalley, Research Fellow (retired) in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, published the Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (Oxford: Oxford University Press) in 2013 and wrote and hosted the TV show for the series, Secrets of the Dead, "The Lost Gardens of Babylon," in 2014. She has uncovered evidence that would place the hanging gardens not in Babylon, present-day Hillah in central Iraq, but a little over three hundred miles to the north in war-ravaged Mosul.

Ever one for the figurative properties of language, I learned that her deduction is based in part on the metaphorical use of a word in the Assyrian cuneiform writings of Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BCE). The word refers to the distinctive spiral markings of the date palm to describe Sennacherib's feat of engineering, the so-called Archimedean screw.

Along with a sophisticated system of canals and aqueducts, the screw, turned by men or animals, raised an estimated 300 tons of water a day from the Euphrates to the hanging gardens, which, like the city walls, were about forty feet above river level.

Until now, we had thought that Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287-212 BCE) discovered the screw, which makes it possible to lift water, grain, and the like mechanically and in quantity from lower to higher ground. Now, thanks to Dr. Dalley, we are thinking that a king from 400 years earlier dreamed up this machine by musing on the spiral pattern on the date trees growing in his garden.