Long-lost Gardens of Babylon found?
A BRITISH academic believes she has pieced together clues from ancient texts to reveal the actual site of the elusive Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
It is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the World whose location has remained undiscovered for centuries.
Dr Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University focused her search on an area hundreds of kilometres north of the site of ancient Babylon to support her theory that the lush marvel was actually built near the city of Nineveh, in the north of what is now Iraq.
From researching early writings, she has uncovered evidence that the gardens were built not by the Babylonians and their King Nebuchadnezzar, as previously thought. Rather, they were constructed by their neighbours and foes, the Assyrians under their monarch, Sennacherib, about 2 700 years ago.
King Sennacherib’s capital, Nineveh, is near modern-day Mosul, a part of Iraq still racked by religious and ethnic violence. Although Dalley went to the region this year, it was too dangerous to visit the exact spot.
However, using maps, she directed a local film crew, under armed escort, to the area to survey it on her behalf. Their footage showed a vast mound of rubble looking out on to modern housing.
“That’s the best place for it to be,” said Dalley. “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 possible in my lifetime. My conviction that the gardens were in Nineveh remains unshaken.”
The film is the culmination of more than 20 years’ research by Dalley. With no archaeological evidence ever found, many have dismissed the gardens as a myth.
Knowledge of the gardens is based on a few accounts, written hundreds of years after they were said to have been built. One account claims it was created by Nebuchadnezzar 600 years before the birth of Christ 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 no mention of a garden and more than a century of digging has turned up nothing.
Dalley directed her own research further north after decoding an ancient cuneiform text.
Her research led her to believe that the gardens were built in a series of terraces, like those of an amphitheatre, with a lake at the bottom. Water was brought to the city through a 96km-long canal.
Evidence of this structure — 90m wide and 18m deep at some points — remains on the landscape and can be seen on now declassified photographs taken by US spy satellites.
About 300 tons of water a day would have been needed to maintain the greenery.
An inscription, found by the academic, describes how this was achieved. Water from the lake was sent up to the terraces by a device using the same principles as Archimedes’ screw — four centuries before it was thought to have been invented. — © The Sunday Telegraph, London