The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Little is known about this “Ancient Wonder”
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are the most enigmatic of all the original seven wonders of the world listed by Antipater of Sidon: not only has no trace of them survived, but we still cannot be sure exactly where or even what they were.
Gardens were a common feature in Assyria, Persia and especially Mesopotamia — the land around the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is today Iraq — where Babylon is situated. They usually took one of three forms. The first was the game reserve, not unlike the biblical descriptions of Eden, the second was a pleasure garden, planted with trees for shade and criss-crossed with cooling streams, and the third was the mysterious ‘hanging’ garden. From what the ancient sources say about this latter type of garden, it would appear that they were somehow arranged into a series of terraces, and that their somewhat baffling name may derive simply from a mistranslation of the Greek kremastos, which means ‘overhanging’ rather than ‘hanging’.
What Were the Hanging Gardens?
What hanging gardens actually looked like is a matter of conjecture, since we cannot be sure that any of the descriptions we have of the gardens are by people who had actually seen them at first hand. The Greek historian Diodorus…