Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Photo by WikiMedia

Mention the word Iraq, especially with an American drawl and likely the only image that comes to mind is Osama Bin Laden. Of course, many, many conflicts ago there was a town called Babylon, in what was then known as Mesopotamia, and not eye-rack. To get there today you will need to go to Al Hillah in Babil to be precise.

Geography and nomenclature aside, before it was reduced to a mound of ancient debris, Babylon was quite the happening city.

600 years before the first Christmas, a Babylonian king who went by the sporty name of Nebuchadnezzar II decided to do something nice for his wife. You see, she was apparently a bit down in the mouth. As Prozac had not yet been invented, he did the next best thing and built a great big garden. A garden so big and wonderful in fact, that it became known as one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Amytis, the wife in question, had a hankering for the fragrant plants from the land of her birth, Persia. Clearly, it is good to be the king. The rest of us can only afford freshly cut flowers on payday for the missus. Imagine how impressed the old ball and chain would be with a splendid display of flora, many cubits in size, stretching in every direction. A cubit, incidentally is what things were measured in back then and is roughly the length of a forearm or around 50cm.

The terraced garden was said to be 100 feet across and easily as wide, stretching 75 feet into the sky. Much cleverness was needed to construct the wonder. Written accounts suggest genius structural engineering and an elaborate water system, not to mention some fantastic building materials. Apparently it employed reinforcing beams, waterproofing compounds, water conduits and even pumps to get the water up to the higher sections from the river.

Then of course, maybe none of this is true. Digital photography and the internet had also not been invented back then and there is no clear proof; not of the exact construction, the motive, the location, the size or even whether in fact it was actually Nebby who had it built.

One thing is certain, there was a great, big garden, somewhere in Babylon give or take a hundred years around 600 B.C. Earthquakes and other forces of nature and time left little physical evidence. Various texts in a variety of ancient languages have been used to piece together what we romantically record as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Today virtually nothing remains of this wonder. The only tell tale sign that a city even existed is, the remains of the archaeological footprint of an ancient civilisation (incidentally called a “tell”). Unlike the Great Pyramid of Giza, this ancient super structure did not survive the test of time, not even close. However it offers a romantic link, an alternative way to file this dot on the map in our brains, instead of under the heading ‘there be terror.’