Pictured: the 'real site' of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
It is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for which
the location has for centuries remained elusive.
Now, though, an academic from Oxford University believes she has solved one
of the world’s last great archaeological mysteries by identifying the precise
spot on which the Hanging Gardens of Babylon once stood.
Dr Stephanie Dalley focused her search hundreds of miles north of the site of the
ancient city of Babylon, now near Hillah, in central Iraq, to support her theory that
the lush, elevated marvel was in fact built near the city of Ninevah, in the north of
the country.
Sennacherib’s capital, Ninevah, is now near to Mosul, an area of Iraq still wracked by
religious and ethnic violence, and although Dr Dalley travelled to the region earlier in
the autumn, her team considered it too dangerous to visit the exact spot.
However, using maps, she was able to direct a local film crew, with an armed escort, to the
area, next to the ruins of the king’s palace, to survey it on her behalf.
Their footage showed a heavily a vast mound of dirt and rubble, which slopes down to an area
of greenery and looks out onto modern housing and open countryside beyond.
Dr Dalley said: “That’s the best place for it to be. It looks like a good place for a garden.
“More research is now required at the site, but sadly I don’t think that will be gpossible in my
lifetime.
“My conviction that the gardens were in Ninevah remains unshaken.”
The footage is the culmination of more than 20 years of research by Dr Dalley, from Oxford
University’s Oriental Institute, to prove the correct location of the gardens.
With no archaeological evidence ever found for them, many have dismissed the gardens as a myth.
Knowledge of them is based on a few accounts, written hundreds of years after it was said to have been
built by people who never saw it.
One of these accounts claims that it was created by King Nebuchadnezzar, 600 years before the birth of
Christ, at Babylon as a paradise in the desert for his wife who missed the green mountains of her home.
However, in the writings of the time - including Nebuchadnezzar’s own texts - there is not one single
mention of any garden and more than a century of digging has turned up nothing.
Dr Dalley directed her own research further north after decoding an ancient “cuneiform” text - a script
from the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires - that led her to believe the gardens had been attributed to the
wrong location, the wrong man and wrong period.
The researcher - one of a handful of people in the world who can read cuneiform - came across a prism at the
British Museum with cuneiform text which describes the life of Sennacherib; who lived 100 years before
Nebuchadnezzar and reigned over an empire stretching from southern Turkey to modern day Israel, which describes a
palace that he built and a garden that he built alongside calling them a “Wonder for all people”.
Further support for the theory comes from a bas-relief, removed from Nineveh and brought to the British Museum,
showing his palace complex and a garden featuring trees hanging in the air on terraces and plants suspended on
arches.
Because Ninevah is so far from Babylon, this evidence has previously been overlooked. However, Dr Dalley has
found that the Assyrians conquered Babylon and their capital became known as “New Babylon”, possibly accounting
for the confusion over the names.
Her research, which features in a Channel 4 documentary tonight, Finding Babylon’s Hanging Garden, has led her
to establish that the gardens were built in a series of terraces, buit up like an amphitheatre, with a lake at
the bottom.
Water was bought to the city and surrounding areas via a 60 mile long canal.
Evidence of this structure, 300ft wide and 60ft deep at some points, remains on the landscape and can be seen on now de-classified photographs taken by US spy satellites and analysed by Dr Dalley.
The greenery would have required around 300 tonnes of water a day.
An inscription found by the academic describes how this was achieved, with water from the lake was raised up onto the terraces by device using the same principles as the Archimedes’ screw - some four centuries before it was thought to have been invented.
Ninevah features in the Old Testament as the city to which Jonah was sent by God to preach against its sinfulness.
The list of wonders was originally drawn up, however, as a guide to “must—see” sights for ancient Greek travellers in the eastern Mediterranean around the third century BC.
Most were destroyed by earthquakes and only the Pyramid of Giza survives.
