The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Location

On the east bank of the River Euphrates, about 50 km south of Baghdad, Iraq.

The Hanging Gardens were built by King Nebuchadnezzar to please his wife, Amytis, who was longing for the gardens of her Persian homeland.

The Gardens were built of a series of tiers, each smaller than the last, with the top tier some 75ft high. The majority of the structure was made of stone slabs and bricks, but the bottom of each tier was also sealed with a layer of lead to prevent moisture from seeping into the stone that supported the soil and plant-life.

How exactly the Gardens lifted water is not entirely clear, but the most likely method was the use of an Archimedes’ screw. This large metal screw would have been tightly sealed in a pipe that connected to the Euphrates River. Workers would then rotate the screw, forcing water up through the pipe. All accounts of the Gardens describe some system of raising water that is concealed from view, so the pipes, and workers, would have operated from the interior of the structure.

The real controversy about the Hanging Gardens is that is may never have existed at all; it isn’t mentioned in the chronicles of Babylonian history, and the Greek accounts seem to be derivative from only one or two original sources. There were other famous gardens in the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and it has been speculated that the Gardens in Nineveh, on the banks of the Tigris, may have been mistakenly attributed to Babylon. Some archeologists claimed to have found the foundations of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but the discoveries remain vague enough to be widely contested.

If the Hanging Gardens of Babylon did exist they were short lived; an earthquake sometime after the 2nd century B.C destroyed this Wonder of the World, if it ever existed at all.

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