Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the only one whose location has not been definitely established.
Traditionally they were said to have been built in the ancient city of Babylon, near present-day Hillah, Babil province, in Iraq.
Because of the lack of evidence it has been suggested that the Hanging Gardens are purely legendary, and the descriptions found in ancient Greek and Roman writers including Strabo, Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius Rufus represent a romantic ideal of an eastern garden.

The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in about 290BC and quoted later by Josephus, attributed the gardens to the Neo-Babylonianking Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled between 605 and 562 BC. Awkwardly, there are no extant Babylonian texts which mention the gardens, and no definitive archaeological evidence has been found in Babylon.
Alternatively, the original garden may have been a well-documented one that the Assyrian king Sennacherib (704-681BC) built in his capital city of Nineveh on the River Tigris near the modern city of Mosul.