Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one has never been located. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon show up in Greek and Roman texts as a leafy artificial mountain of terraces, exotic trees and manmade waterfalls — yet archaeologists digging through the ancient city of Babylon, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, have come up empty. What they did find there, the Ishtar Gate and the foundations of the Tower of Babel, offers no trace of any garden.
The classic story credits King Nebuchadnezzar II with building the gardens around 600 BC for his wife Amytis of Media, who missed the mountains of her homeland. Writers like Diodorus Siculus and Strabo described stone vaults, waterproofing made of reeds and tar, and chain pumps lifting water from the Euphrates to the top terraces. But there's a problem: Nebuchadnezzar documented his building projects on hundreds of clay tablets, and not one mentions a garden.
Oxford scholar Dr Stephanie Dalley has a compelling alternative: the gardens were actually in Nineveh, near modern-day Mosul, built around 700 BC by the Assyrian king Sennacherib. This theory has receipts — literally. Sennacherib's cuneiform inscriptions brag about a "wonder for all peoples," a palace garden of mountain flora and fruit trees, plus a 50-kilometre stone aqueduct at Jerwan and a bronze water-raising screw that predates Archimedes by centuries. Even better, a bas-relief from Nineveh's North Palace shows a terraced garden atop stone arches, fed by an aqueduct. Dalley suggests that when the Assyrian Empire fell and Babylon rose, Greek writers started using "Babylon" loosely for any great Mesopotamian city — and the credit stuck in the wrong place.
The third possibility? The gardens never existed at all. Herodotus toured Babylon around 450 BC and wrote at length about the city without mentioning gardens, and among tens of thousands of unearthed Babylonian tablets — some logging onion receipts — not a single one refers to a terraced wonder. The myth may have been stitched together by later writers from second-hand tales told by Alexander the Great's soldiers, blending ziggurats, royal parks and irrigation systems into one legendary fantasy.
For travellers, this mystery is part of the appeal of modern Iraq, which is slowly reappearing on the tourism map. The ruins of Babylon are visitable as a day trip from Baghdad, Nineveh's remains lie near Mosul, and Iraqi Kurdistan offers a different side of the country again. Whether the gardens stood in one of those places or only in the imagination, the civilization that built them left plenty you can still walk through.
