Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, six have been accounted for. The Great Pyramid still stands. The ruins of the others have all been found. But the Hanging Gardens of Babylon — the only Wonder supposedly built not for a god or for glory, but for love — have never been found at all. No foundation. No root. Not a single brick. They are the most famous garden in human history, and they may never have existed.
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Love & Heartbreak·3/6·1′
The place
Babylon
The Gardens That Vanished
The only Wonder of the Ancient World built for love -- and the only one that may never have existed at all
c. 600 BCE (traditional date); first written accounts c. 290 BCE; archaeological debate ongoingBabylon
Moral of the Story
“The most beautiful garden in history may never have existed -- or it may have existed somewhere else entirely, built by a different king for reasons that had nothing to do with love. But the story endures because it answers something deeper than archaeology can reach: the belief that love, when it is great enough, can make the impossible bloom. Whether the terraces were in Babylon or Nineveh, whether the queen was Amytis or an invention of later centuries, the Hanging Gardens remain humanity's oldest monument to the idea that we build our greatest wonders not for ourselves, but for the people we cannot bear to see unhappy.”
Characters
N
Nebuchadnezzar II -- the king who allegedly built the gardens for loveA
Amytis of Media -- his homesick queen who longed for the green mountains of her homelandB
Berossus -- Babylonian priest whose lost account (c. 290 BCE) is the earliest sourceS
Stephanie Dalley -- Oxford Assyriologist who argued the gardens were actually in NinevehR
Robert Koldewey -- excavator who believed he found the garden foundations in 1899Source
Josephus, Contra Apionem I.19 (quoting Berossus, Babyloniaca c. 290 BCE); Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica II.10; Strabo, Geography XVI.1.5; Philo of Byzantium, De Septem Orbis Spectaculis; Dalley, Stephanie. The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, Oxford University Press, 2013; Koldewey, Robert. The Excavations at Babylon, 1914; Finkel, Irving. The Ark Before Noah, Hodder & Stoughton, 2014; Reade, Julian. 'Alexander the Great and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,' Iraq 62, 2000