The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of Hellenic culture's Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. They were regarded as a stunning engineering marvel, with a rising succession of tiered gardens featuring a broad variety of trees, shrubs, and vines, like a vast green mountain made of mud bricks. It was supposed to have been built near present-day Hillah, Babil province, Iraq, in the ancient metropolis of Babylon.

According to mythology, the Neo-Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II (who ruled between 605 and 562 BC) created the Hanging Gardens alongside the enormous palace known as The Marvel of Mankind for his Median bride, Queen Amytis, who missed the verdant hills and valleys of her homeland. This was confirmed by the Babylonian priest Berossus, who wrote circa 290 BC and whose description was later cited by Josephus. The Hanging Gardens were also built by the fabled queen Semiramis, and they were known as the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis as an alternative name.

The Hanging Gardens are the only one of the Seven Wonders whose location has yet to be determined. No extant Babylonian texts mention the gardens, and no clear archaeological evidence has been discovered in Babylon. Three theories have been proposed to explain this: first, that they were purely mythical, and the descriptions found in ancient Greek and Roman writings (including those of Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Quintus Curtius Rufus) represented a romantic ideal of an eastern garden; second, that they existed in Babylon but were destroyed sometime around the first century AD; and third, that the legend refers to a well-documented garden that Assyrian King Sennach built in his capital city of Nineveh on the River Tigris, near the modern city of Mosul.

Location: near present-day Hillah, Babil province, in Iraq

Built: in the sixth century B.C