CREDIT: Sergey Likhachev

Finding Babylons
Gardens at
Nineveh

Fanciful depictions of the legendary

Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the
Seven Wonders of the World, are based
more on imagination than evidence. Where
were they located? And how were they
achieved? Andrew Robinson looks for
answers in a new book by Stephanie Dalley.

IMAGE: The Trustees of the British Museum

hree or four decades ago, Stephanie Dalley, an Oxford-

based archaeologist, cuneiformist and gardener,
specialising in ancient Assyria since
the 1960s, gave a lecture on ancient
gardens to the Department of
Continuing Education in Oxford. She was
surprised to find that she had nothing intelligent
to say about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, so
she omitted them. At the end of the lecture, a
lady in the audience reproached her for this. She
was disappointed, I was embarrassed, writes
Dalley in her introduction to The Mystery of the
Hanging Garden of Babylon. That unsettling
experience led me to try at least to analyse the
problem, without at the time trying to solve it.
Now, after an extensive reinterpretation of the
archaeological and epigraphic evidence, with

58 CURRENTWORLDARCHAEOLOGY

contributions from others outside the immediate fieldincluding

those who joined her in a BBC programme on the subject in 1999,
Secrets of the Ancients, which attempted to recreate the enigmatic
water supply of the hanging gardens in a middle eastern location
Dalley offers her solution to the problem, which she describes in
forensic detail.
For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Hanging Gardens
of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the World, along
with the Pyramids of Giza, the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the
Colossus of Rhodes. Supposedly constructed by Nebuchadnezzar
II in the 6th century BC, the Hanging Gardens were fed by water
taken from the River Euphrates, which was somehow lifted onto
artificial terraces in Nebuchadnezzars palace.
Yet, no trace of the gardens was found when Babylon was
excavated in 1898-1917 by a German team led by Robert Koldewey.
Under public pressure, Koldewey was eventually forced
to speculate on the existence of a rooftop
garden built upon baked brick laid over
waterproof bitumen, without being able
to explain the gardens water supply, while
a British archaeologist successor, Leonard
Woolley, advocated plants dangling from the
terraces of a ziggurat drained by holes in the
brickwork at regular intervals, again without
any plausible explanation for how the plants
were watered.
Nor are the gardens ever mentioned in
Nebuchadnezzars cuneiform inscriptions;
the first references to them come from Roman
authors, writing five centuries after the time

Issue 60

CREDIT: courtesy of Stephanie Dalley

ABOVE A drawing by Terry Ball depicting the palace garden at Nineveh

of Nebuchadnezzar, such as Diodorus Siculus and Strabo. In
the 1st century BC, Strabo writes of the Hanging Gardens that:
The ascent to the uppermost terrace is made by a stairway, and
alongside these stairs there were screws, through which the water
was continually drawn up into the garden from the Euphrates
by those appointed for the purpose. For the river, a stadium in
width, flows through the middle of the city, and the garden
is on the bank of the river. But there is no archaeological or
epigraphical evidence that the Babylonians possessed such an
advanced hydraulic technology able to raise large quantities of
water through many metres. They relied, by and large, on the
ancient shadoofa hand-operated, balanced pole with a mud
counterweight on one end and a bucket on the otherfor raising
water used in agriculture.
If only there were the slightest evidence from cuneiform
inscriptions or archaeology that the Hanging Garden was built
in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, there would be no need to search
for a solution, for there would be no mystery, writes Dalley with
perfect justification. Her theory is that the Hanging Gardens did
exist, like the other six Wonders of the ancient world. But she
thinks they were located not in the flat plain of the Euphrates
at Babylon but close to the mountains and the region of higher
rainfall beside the Tigris at Nineveh, north of Babylon, in the
palace of the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib.
Sennacherib ruled around 700 BC and was renowned for his
water engineering; remains of his stone tunnels and aqueducts
can still be seen. Not only does Sennacheribs palace art
depict splendid raised gardens, a key cuneiform inscription by
Sennacherib appearsas read by Dalleyto refer to an amazing
helical water screw cast in bronze, centuries ahead of Archimedes
screw. (Although Archimedes is said to have invented the screw,
he probably borrowed it from ancient Egypt, Dalley convincingly
explains.) The Assyrians were also known for their bronze
casting from clay moulds, so it is certainly conceivable that their
craftsman could have designed a bronze water screw. A number
of such screws, one of which was recreated on a small scale by the
BBC programme in 1999 using furnace and casting technology
thought to be appropriate to the mid-1st millennium BC, would
have undoubtedly managed to lift sufficient water from the Tigris
to the terraces of the Sennacheribs palace to maintain a large
landscape garden.

www.world-archaeology.com

Nevertheless, like many of the links in Dalleys argument, there

is no overwhelming proof. Reading Assyrian and Babylonian
cuneiform is not like reading ancient Greek. Sennacheribs
inscription requires ingenious interpretation in order to yield
a bronze water screw. According to Dalley, the relevant passage
reads: I created clay moulds as if by divine intelligence for
[making] cylinders and screws In order to draw up water
all day long, I had ropes, bronze wire and bronze chains made.
And instead of a shadoof I set up the cylinders and screws of
copper over cisterns. The difficulty here is that the Akkadian
cuneiform words for cylinder (gimahhu) and screw (alamittu)
literally mean, respectively, tall tree trunk and palm tree. The
metaphorical derivation of cylinder, is fairly clear, that of screw
rather less so.
Dalley argues that the unfamiliar spiral concept of a screw
was made familiar by comparing it with a palm tree, because the
trunks of certain palm trees display a marked spiral pattern when
their fronds drop off as the tree grows taller - as shown in the
spiral pillars of Assyrian art, and as Dalley was pleased to confirm
in two mature palm trees at the Oxford Botanic Garden.
Easier to follow is her argument as to how Nineveh may have
been confused with Babylon by Greek and Roman writers. In
the cuneiform inscriptions, there is an indigenous tradition,
dating from the 12th century BC or earlier, that several cities in
southern Mesopotamia, such as Borsippa and Eridu, were known
as Babylon. The confusion is there in the opening words of the
biblical Book of Judith, which declares: It was the twelfth year of
Nebuchadnezzar who reigned over the Assyrians in the great city
of Nineveh. While the early Greek historian, Xenophon, writes of
Babylon, rather than Nineveh, as the capital of the Assyrians.
As the above examples show, The Mystery of the Hanging
Garden is an important, intriguing, and erudite book. But much
of it is seriously scholarly, requiring specialist knowledge to judge.
Several of the many helpful illustrations are also poorly presented,
for example a sketch plan of the citadel of Nineveh naming all
of its gates, except for the garden gate promised in the main
text. Although Dalleys case is not watertight, as she periodically
admits, it would seem that the ancient mystery is now basically
solved. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were in Nineveh, not
Babylon; they were built by Sennacherib, not Nebuchadnezzar;
and they were watered by a system using some kind of screw. But
sadly, we shall never really know what the wondrous gardens
themselves looked like. As the BBC programme nicely concluded:
One of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world is also one of
natures best-kept secrets.
Review by Andrew Robinson, author of Cracking the Egyptian
Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-Franois Champollion and
The Scientists: An Epic of Discovery (ed.)

DETAILS

The Mystery of the Hanging Garden

of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder
Traced
Stephanie Dalley,
Oxford University Press, 25.00
ISBN 978 0 19 966226 5

CURRENTWORLDA RCHAEOLOGY 59

CULTUREBOOK CHOICE

Turn of the screw