subtitled "Blame it on a bad translation. This ancient wonder may not have been in Babylon."
A man stands near the massive walls of Nineveh.
Posted on 06/01/2013 1:05:55 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon are exactly that: legendary. And they may not have been located in Babylon.
The gardens, famous as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, were, according to Stephanie Dalley, an Oxford University Assyriologist, located some 340 miles north of ancient Babylon in Nineveh, on the Tigris River by Mosul in modern Iraq.
Dalley, whose book The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon will be published later this summer, writes that earlier sources were translated incorrectly, leading to the confusion. The misinterpretation also explains why years of excavations never yielded any credible evidence of the fabled gardens in Babylon, the capital city of Babylonia on the Euphrates River. Historians have questioned their existence for some time...
Dalley credits the hanging gardens to Sennacherib (704-681 B.C.), the Assyrian king who made Nineveh his capital and created a massive system of waterworks, including an aqueduct that carried water to the city from hills 40 miles away. Sennacherib also left a number of inscriptions trumpeting his irrigation and garden-building prowess...
On the other hand, Nebuchadrezzar -- the ruler traditionally associated with Babylon's hanging gardens -- never mentions gardens, despite many extant inscriptions boasting of his accomplishments in Babylon...
McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, says that there is a location in Babylon that would have been suitable for raised gardens -- the Southern Citadel, "a massive group of walls that are right on the river. This is the only place that would have made it easy to gain access to the water."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
A man stands near the massive walls of Nineveh.
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Cool, thanks.
Those walls are fantastic!
Yep. Nothing makes my afternoon like good Ninevehn masonry.
The End of Nineveh
http://www.varchive.org/tac/end.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/theses.htm (particularly 235, but also 203-205, 214-240)
It’s a nice reconstruction, suggests how remarkable it must have been in its heyday.
There was a dam on the river which made it possible to feed both the drinking water and irrigation needs and fill the large moat which protected the city. In extremis, the dam was breached, the water ran out, and the Babylonians, Medes, and Scythians sacked and ruined the city.
I’ll continue to go with Richard Haliburton, Book 2, The Orient, Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar built the hanging gardens for his princess wife who longed for the greenness of Media, her home
A tank at the top held water from the river. It trickled down the terraces to keep the plants lush.
Seems the Babylonians were a little rough on Jews.
Thanks!
“Seems the Babylonians were a little rough on Jews.”
Including, notably for a spell, Daniel the Seer and companion of lions.
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Couldn’t both cities have had gardens?
Nineveh’s a bad place to have a flat.
Heh, and they weren’t the only ones. Still aren’t.
My pleasure.
I loved the Halliburton books when I was 11.
So far, of the two, only ancient Nineveh is known from inscriptions to have had gardens. I included the quote from another academic — that nothing has been found at Babylon, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there — to show how weak that is. If the translation was indeed wrong, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon lose their sole evidence of existence, iow, they’ll prove to have been a modern invention.
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