The Ancients - Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

A legendary, ancient architectural wonder, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are one of the most famed wonders of the Ancient world. Described as being a luscious green space - likened to distant mountains, and fed by the Euphrates river, it's hard to know what was fact and what was fiction. So were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon actually real? And is there any archaeological evidence proving so?In the next episode of our Babylon miniseries, Tristan is joined by Professor Grant Frame, and welcomes back Dr Stephanie Dalley, to delve into this mysterious ancient creation. Looking at the archaeology of ancient-Iraq, the geographic landscape on which the Gardens were built, and examining the socio-political history of ancient Babylon - is it possible that these gardens might have actually existed? And if not, what is this fantastical myth based on?If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, well, we're continuing our special Babylon miniseries by talking about the most enigmatic wonder of the ancient world, the Hanging Garden or Gardens of Babylon. To this day, we still do not know where these gardens were located. Many theories have been proposed, but the jury is still out. And in this special episode, we're going to be highlighting these proposed theories,

these arguments for where these gardens might have been. We're going to be highlighting these proposed theories, these arguments for where these gardens might have been. We're going to be interviewing not one but two esteemed academics on the matter. First up, we've got an interview with Professor Grant Frame, the curator of the Babylonian section of the Penn Museum, which will be followed by a wonderful chat with the lovely friend of the podcast, Dr. Stephanie Dally, who has her own theory as to where the Hanging Gardens might have been. And it's not in Babylon. Now, I really do hope you enjoy this very special episode, all about one of the most enigmatic, legendary buildings that's associated with ancient Babylon.

So without further ado, here's Grant to kick off all things The Hanging Gardens. Grant, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. It's my pleasure to be here and to talk to you. I mean, good luck. This is quite a topic. This is quite an enigmatic topic too, isn't it? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. There is so much mystery, so many theories surrounding this particular ancient wonder. Yes, it's a real problem because we haven't located it. All the information on it comes from basically two millennia ago. A number of years ago, I gave a talk on the Hanging Gardens, and I basically started by saying that I wish I hadn't been asked to talk on it for the Penn

Museum, because there are so many problems with talking about it. Well, I'm very sorry then, first of all. But I mean, to kick it all off then, Grant, before we delve into these sources and some of the proposed theories if we take a step back and I'd like to ask about the topography of Babylon this topographical context it seems really important for understanding one of these great gardens so what did Babylon look like well at the time in the neo-Babylonian period which is when the hanging gardens were supposedly built it was perhaps the largest city in the world atBabylonian period, which is when the Hanging Gardens were supposedly built, it was perhaps the largest city in the world at the time. It was a vast city made of mud brick,

so it wasn't particularly attractive for the most part, I would say. I mean, mud brick is rather blah. It would have been pretty much a flat city. I mean, very rarely would things been above two stories. And the main one of that would have been the ziggurat, the Tower of Babel, which was a massive sort of stage tower of mud brick. We often describe it as sort of looking like a wedding cake, really. There would not have been a lot of trees. There would have been date palms. But beyond that, Iraq is a rather dry, barren area. But there would have been gardens within the outer city walls.

It would have been a hive of activity with a lot of people speaking different languages there. languages there. It would be interesting in the sense that the Euphrates River ran through basically the center of the city, going right next to the royal palace. And there was at least one bridge going across from one side to the other. I mean, bridges were a bit unusual, at least for a river the size of the Euphrates. It would have been a fascinating city. Some bits of it have been restored in Iraq today, but large parts of it have not been excavated at all, and large parts of it, the top, has been eroded just by the weather over the years.

So it's fascinating to go to and see for someone who knows about it. But, you know, for the regular tourist, I cannot say that it's the most fascinating thing to see. But there are interesting things, without doubt. But it was really interesting what you were saying there, Grant, that there would have been gardens there in this Neo-Babylonian period. Yes, we certainly know that within parts of Babylon, particularly there was sort of an inner city and an outer city. And particularly in the outer city, but also I believe within the inner city,

we do know that there were small date palm orchards there. And it was quite typical in antiquity that the date palms, well, the tree trunks would only take a small part of the thing, but you have vegetable gardens below them as well. I mean, the soil of Iraq is extraordinarily fertile. So if you can irrigate it, you can have an abundance of crops. Really, southern Iraq was really sort of a return as part of the Fertile Crescent. It really had a great wealth in the productivity of the soil. Ancient Iraq has very few natural resources, very little stone, very little minerals, little stone, very little minerals, metals. What it does have is its fertile soil. And based upon the surplus crops that it could grow, that's how it could afford to bring in by a trade the metals,

the stones, and create what is, was probably the largest city in the world. One can argue about that. I admit there may have been some vast cities and probably were in India or China, but certainly in the Middle East, Babylon was phenomenal for its size. Well, certainly the jewel in the crown of the Middle East, wasn't it? Well, let's therefore focus in on the sources for the Hanging Gardens. I know for yourself as a cuneiformist, this is where we almost have to go a bit further afield, don't we? I mean, what types of sources do we have that mention the Hanging Gardens? For the most part, there's about five or six major sources, and they are classical sources. So they do tend to begin, depending on how you count, shall we say around 300 BC,

so about 200 years or so, well, no, 300 years or so after the time the gardens presumably were built, assuming they existed. And then they go on for about 600, 700 years, these sort of five or six sources, Berossus, Strabo, Antipater, Diodorus Siculus, for example, mention it. The earliest one who left information on it was a man called Berossus, who was from Babylon. He was a priest of the main god, the god Marduk, or as he was often called, Baal.

And he was born in the time of Alexander the Great and wrote a little bit after he died. He wrote what was called the Babyloniaca. It's sort of a history of Babylon, and he was writing it for the Greek overlords, the Seleucid king at that time, to show the importance of Babylon, that it had a long history and glorious history. So he wrote this book. Now, unfortunately, it is not preserved for us in its entirety, it's only preserved by being quoted by these a number of later classical writers, the most important of which was Josephus, who was a Jewish historian in the first century of the Common Era. And so it's Berossus' comments that via Josephus, which provide sort of the earliest real information on it. Some of the later colonist writers may mention Berossus as well,

or there could be based upon their own visits to Babylon as well, or stories from it. But Josephus' account of Berossus is what, to my mind, is the most authoritative one that we have, really. Josephus was no historian of the ancient world, can be totally believed upon, I admit, but a sort of geographical description, I think, is we can rely on him for the most part. And basically, what he said was that the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, had constructed and prepared what are called the hanging gardens for his wife, who had a love of the mountains since she grew up in Media. And he

says that he built this next to a new palace, which he had created next to a palace that had been built by his forefathers at Babylon. And interestingly, he says that it only took him 15 days to build this palace, not the hanging gardens, but the palace, and the massive walls that go around Babylon, which at least in one of the sort of lists of the wonders of the ancient world is also said to have been one of the great wonders, the walls of Babylon. And one of the reasons why Cuneiformists give credit particularly to this is because we know from contemporary sources of Nebuchadnezzar that he built a new palace at Babylon, that it was next to the older palace. We call his sort of the North Palace or the Hauptburg in German, which is north of the South Palace or Sudburg. They're just sort of right next to one another. So he's left great descriptions about that. That is Nebuchadnezzar. And interestingly,

in his text, he says he built it in 15 days. Now, none of us believe it was built in 15 days, but it's clear that Josephus quoting Berossus, 15 days as well. Berossus clearly must have had access to these ancient cuneiform texts. I mean, he was a priest at Babylon, so there's no reason why he wouldn't. And so, because of this, and there's other reasons, people who work on the stories left for Berossus, why they think he could read cuneiform and actually did know what was going on there. He says that it was at Babylon. It was connected to the palace, which is also right next to the Euphrates River. And numerous, a number of the other later sources, again, refer to it as being the Hanging Gardens as being in the citadel or Acropolis, which would have been the palace area, and they also put it next to the river as well. So that is, I mean, there are a few more details about some later saying it was built parts with stone,

but that's essentially the main description we have. And as I say, what Josephus says, Berossus says about the palace and so on, and the walls fits extraordinarily well with what we know from contemporary sources and archaeological sources about the palace and walls. Now, archaeologically, yes, where is the hanging gardens is the multi-million dollar question. But the other million dollar question is, even though we have some of these details mentioned in sources like Berossus and the other classical sources that you mentioned, is what did the gardens have looked like with the particular characteristics? Well, the translation hanging gardens of the Greek,

my understanding is perhaps a little bit loose. I mean, we're not thinking of hanging pots, if that's what any idea is. One of the later writers describes it as sort of like a theater. So basically the idea, it's sort of terraces going up the side of something. And this is indicated by a number of the later classical writers as well. So if you say a series of terraces, upon these terraces would have been gardens. And of course, they would have had to have had some method to get the water up to the top to water them all. But do remember, we are in the time of a absolute monarch. He could set the people to work to bring water up and down without any problems for doing that. There are some descriptions of using pots and chains, so there may have been a sort of a conveyor lifting up buckets of water,

possibly. That's later than Berossus, and I wouldn't want to try and argue myself exactly how it was watered, in part simply because they would have had the workforce to be able to do it. They're right next to the river, so I don't particularly see a real problem with the watering of this garden. Well, okay, then we'll move away from talking in detail about the Archimedes screw, and as you say, absolute monarch, so the workforce is there to do it if the king wished for his wife or whoever. Well, let's delve into these fun proposed theories for where in Babylon they might be the hanging gardens. If we go first of all back to the 19th century,

I've got in my notes here Grant-Rassam theory. What is this theory to kick it all off? This feels like the one to start it all off with. There are more than one palace at Babylon. So at the northern end of the outer wall, there's a hill, which we think was a summer palace. And it's right next to the water. It has had a little bit of excavation on it by the Germans beginning around 1899, 1900. Again, it's really just a mound, to be honest. It's possible, but it's not the main palace, which is what Berossus says. This is the problem.

A more recent scholar, Stevenson, I believe, wants to put it south of the palace complex, outside it, because, again, there's sort of a small, a little mound there that's unexcavated. So people are trying to find basically a mound so you could look as though it's the side of a hill or something to build it up there. Within the palace itself, there's about four different locations that people have thought it might be. The most influential one, however, was done by the German archaeologist Kolderwey in Hisburg. The Germans are the ones who have done the most extensive excavation at Babylon. I think it's 1899 to 1916, something along those lines. And they've left a lot of records about it. And in the, shall we say, the northeast corner of the South Palace,

so the one of the ancestors, pretty much next to the Ishtar gateway into the city, there's an unusual, the archaeologists found an unusual structure, which involves some stone, and some of the classical writers did say there was some stone involved. And it's sort of hard to describe the layout of the rooms, because they're not really rooms. It's sort of a series of connected triple chambers. And various people have suggested that these may have been tied into sort of a system for getting water up to the top level sort of like a chain going down one of the three chambers along the bottom to the bottom I guess where you put the water in and then going up the

other one and that has been the most influential of all the suggestions over time. The problem is, one, it's not next to the river, which is what most descriptions indicate. So it would be a little harder to get the water there. Also, in that building were found, shall we say, administrative records, in particular records mentioning rations given to the exiled king of the Judeans there, as well as other exiled rulers that had been taken in captivity by the Babylonian rulers. So this doesn't seem a logical place. And also, if a king wants a garden for the privacy with his wife, is he going to put it right next to the main processional entry into the city? And also to get it sort of in the corner of the palace,

away from sort of the private royal quarters. It's in a more administrative part of it. So the location is a little bit iffy, shall we say. There's a couple of other locations just outside the northern palace, right next to the river, which one scholar, Professor Wiseman, I believe suggested it was located. And he just thinks there was some earthen terraces up against, in sort of a triangular area, up against the palace with the river on sort of the long side of it, which, again, is possible.

Certainly, it's close to the water. However, I have no 100% view of where it was. However, my general view is that it was located in the northern palace itself, right next to, as close to the river as you can get. This makes, to my mind, the closest sense with the textual materials. A German scholar, Michael Streck, a number of years ago, went through them in great detail and argued for the North Palace in this location as well. I mean, it's not a totally new idea, but he went through a very systematic study of them. but he went through a very systematic study of them.

And more importantly, to my mind, a Swedish scholar, Professor Olaf Pedersen, has the newest book out on Babylon, a very detailed study of the topography of Babylon and the building of the walls. And in creating, doing this book, he was able to access unpublished materials in Berlin from the German excavations. And he locates it in that same area with drawings. And to my mind, that makes the best sense of all the suggestions that have been put forward. And just to clarify, so the North Palace, as you say, that theory put forward first by Streck and now by Olaf Pedersen. Streck

built on it, but it goes back to earlier people who thought it was in the palace, yes. Right, okay, so and that North Palace, just so we all know, that is the one constructed by Nebuchadnezzar, is it? By Nebuchadnezzar, yes. It's just to the north of the south palace. The south palace had been right up against the northern wall of the city. Now, Nebuchadnezzar created a massive outer wall, including a whole other area on the eastern side of the Euphrates. And so he filled in the moat, which had been just outside the inner city wall, and built the palace there and extending it and built a new moat beyond that. So this new palace is sort of adjoining the old inner city. Now, unfortunately, the excavations of that area have not been complete. And due to erosion and so on, most of it has not been

excavated or can be excavated. I cannot say that we have found any archaeological remains that prove that location, but then again, what are you going to look for? These terraces would probably just have been of mud brick, of dirt. There may have been some stone, but very little. There's very little stone in Iraq, so to bring it in. So I'm afraid dirt terraces are just going to over time erode away. So I think it would be very difficult to find them. The real problem is, as many people have said, none of Nebuchadnezzar's inscriptions describe building a fantastic garden. They provide great details of building the city walls, the temple, the palace, but there's no mention of gardens, I'm afraid. But, you know,

that may be an accident of archaeological discovery. Maybe we will suddenly find them. Or maybe they thought these were so common that they didn't need to say much about them. I don't know. It is one of those great mysteries, Grant. And thank you for highlighting all of those different theories and ending with that more recent one on the North Palace. But what you also mentioned there about trying to find them archaeologically today and the great difficulties trying to find a wonder. This is very different to finding, let's say, the remains of the Pharos of Alexandria

beneath the waves today. It almost feels like actually maybe the odds are stacked against finding physical remains of the Hanging Garden in future archaeological excavations because the material was involved, even if it was actually in that northern palace, you know, more than two millennia ago. Yes, that's exactly the case. Because

basically everything in Iraq, ancient Iraq was built with mud brick. Now, sometimes they would fire it to bake it even harder. But that was rare because they didn't have the wood actually to put in a kiln to bake mud bricks. And considering the millions of mud bricks that were needed to build by Nebuchadnezzar, Peterson has actually attempted to come up with the number of bricks it would have taken with the vast outer walls and everything. And it's phenomenal. I think it would be almost impossible to visit. It's one of the problems.

I find Iraq, the history of Iraq, absolutely fascinating, a cradle of civilization. But because they did not have the stone, the physical monuments that are left are perhaps, they simply cannot compare to the pyramids of Egypt where there was stone or the temples there at Komumbo and Esna. In Mesopotamia, they were built in mud brick and returned basically to mud and dirt over time. But as I say, cuneiform documents are being found every day by archaeological excavations or often illegal excavations. And maybe I will be surprised and future work, Babylon or elsewhere, will suddenly find something that indicates there were gardens in the palace there in text. It could well be. It might be a simple economic

document describing rations for workers who were working on the gardens in the palace. That's possible. It may turn up one day. And that's one of the things I love about Assyriology. You don't know what's going to come up. Yes, you Assyriologists do study, as I mentioned, such an extraordinary part of ancient history. And let's see, while our eyes peel to see what comes out of the ground next, Grant, this has been absolutely fantastic. And it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

My pleasure. So there was Professor Grant Frame highlighting the sources we have for the Hanging Garden and the theories that have been proposed for where this wonder might have been in Babylon. Now, many, if not all of these theories they have credible strengths but they also have problems too and ultimately where the hanging gardens or the hanging garden where this wonder was well it's still the million dollar

question we just do not know. But there is another theory, a theory that the Hanging Garden was in fact based elsewhere, not in Babylon but further north, at the Assyrian city of Nineveh. It's a theory that is championed by Dr Stephanie Daly, a very good friend of the podcast and just a lovely individual. Now I had the pleasure of interviewing Stephanie a few weeks back all about why she believes the Hanging Garden of Babylon was in fact the Hanging Garden of Nineveh. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions

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I'm very glad to be back talking about one of my favourite subjects. Well, this is an amazing story. It's a great detective story, The Hanging Garden, because uncovering the reality behind the legend of this wonder of the ancient world. Well, at one point, I gave a lecture to a garden society in Edinburgh, and I collected quite a lot about gardens in ancient Mesopotamia, and that was going fine. And the problem was I couldn't find anything to say about the Hanging Garden. I thought, this is ridiculous. Here we've got a world wonder, and I'm talking to garden society people, and I don't know what to say. So I thought, there's something wrong here.

And when I had finished my lecture, one woman got up and she said in the questions time, I came here hoping to hear about the Hanging Garden of Babylon, and you haven't even mentioned it. And I thought, oh dear, I've let myself down and I've let her down. But what is it in these Hanging Garden that there isn't anything to be said? And I looked around and found nothing particular. There are quite a few classical sources that just refer to it, but the main ones give us the most extraordinary amount of detail. And I thought that was very interesting. Now, everybody said, well, there's so much later than Babylon, because at the time, everybody thought Babylon ended with Cyrus or ended with

Alexander the Great. So, with these sources being so much later, what was that all about? So, I thought it would be very well worth looking at the whole business of the water, particularly because every gardener knows that you need water. And I had luckily been to Babylon and I had been to Nineveh. So I had a pretty good idea of the ecology of the two different places. And that's quite an important part to start off with, whether you could provide the water for Babylon and what had people suggested for getting water up from the Euphrates, supposedly, into the palace of Nebuchadnezzar or the bit of land beside it with a garden. How could they have done that?

There's such a difference in the level of the river at different seasons because the rivers, of course, the Tigris and the Euphrates take the melt water from the mountains, comes down through these river valleys, and there's an enormous difference between the lowest and the highest level. Now that means that if you want to put in a shadouf, for instance, that's a weighted pole with a bucket on the end, that's a fixture which is hard to adapt to changes of level. So it's mainly used just for flattish land to get a bucket over a bund where you've dug out the canal and you've put the debris on the bank and you raise the bank a bit. So that didn't work. And there wasn't an alternative suggestion for how the

water could have been provided. Well, let's keep on those sources, though, a bit longer first, Stephanie. So you mentioned that they're writing several centuries later. I mean, is that a problem when trying to look at these sources, when trying to understand the descriptions of this hanging garden? It was a problem if you thought that cuneiform ended soon after Alexander and that there was no record written about them. Of course, Nebuchadnezzar had written lots of inscriptions and they were well preserved and there was nothing about the garden in them. Now, it seemed to me that Nebuchadnezzar wasn't likely to be shy about saying he had created a world wonder. He wasn't that sort of man. So, that did seem to me to be shy about saying he had created a world wonder. He wasn't that sort of man. So that did

seem to me to be important. But when you looked at the later Greek sources, they had such specific descriptions as Diodorus, Siculus, and Strabo, and Josephus. And then I discovered to my astonishment that Josephus was the only one who said the garden was in Babylon. Now, Josephus was talking to Greeks in Jerusalem, and I think that he was also talking to Jews in Jerusalem. And for the Jews, of course, Nebuchadnezzar is the big name. So he may have deliberately or by mistake changed the name of the maker of the gardens in order to please them or to link the narrative he was giving into something that was very familiar. So he, oh, Nebuchadnezzar, yes, we know about him. He was the one who took Jerusalem. Well, if we take this traditional account that Nebuchadnezzar is the king who orders the

construction of this garden, why does he build this wonder? I think that every king of any note from at least the 8th century BC, would have built a garden near his palace. It seems to have been a bit of a fashion. I think before that, a palace would be, and still was, a very well-defended area because it accumulates a lot of the wealth from campaigns. And, of course, the temples mainly do that. But there's a great deal of storage in the palace and you've got to protect it. So you're going to have your gardens very delightfully inside internal courtyards. And you've got to have wells to

provide the water if you're under siege. But with this garden that is described by those Greek authors, you're providing water with a long run from a tributary of the river. And of course, at Babylon, the Euphrates has branches, but it doesn't have tributaries. So you can't bring in an aqueduct from higher up. You can at Nidhavi because it's relatively close to the mountains. And we do know of the very extensive irrigation works. They built orchards all around. The canals that came from the mountains were prolific and they could water all sorts of things on the way down. And they could also bring stone for their buildings if they wanted to build in stone.

Nebuchadnezzar didn't have that opportunity in Babylon. So Nineveh, that's located much further north, is it? It's much further north and it's on the Tigris, which has many tributaries. The mountains are in the north and then come around on the eastern side so that the tributaries. The mountains are in the north and then come around on the eastern side, so that the tributaries come in all around the place and take the snowmelt down all the way to the Arabian Gulf. Well, therefore, let's go north to Nineveh in Assyria. And we do know that the Assyrians, bit of context, they were big into creating large, elaborate, beautiful gardens up there, weren't they? There was already a good tradition of gardens before Sennacherib

built his at Nineveh. His grandfather, Sargon II, had built a fine one at his particular capital at Khorsabad. And we know that it had water in it. It has a little pavilion or boathouse or something like that. And it has the same sort of trees, mountain trees, and what looks like a little artificial hill with an altar on the top. So clearly it's aiming to give you shade, fragrance, running water, and a mountain atmosphere at Khorsabad. So that's what Sennacherib was in the tradition of by the time he was building his garden. And so who was Sennacherib? When is he ruling the Assyrians? Sennacherib was ruling after Sargon died suddenly, and he was amazingly energetic. I think he must have had on his staff some extraordinarily good architects and engineers

and probably inherited them from his father, who had he lived longer, we would have an even better idea than we do of what he had. But I think there is a father-son relationship here that's quite important. So when Sennacherib decided he would build his own palace at Nineveh, he built the whole system with a garden built on a mound right beside the palace and watered from an extensive group of canals going back into the mountains. And that kind of once again reinforces the point, doesn't it? The geographic, topographic location of Nineveh compared to someone like Babylon further south on the Euphrates. Nineveh

further up near the highlands of the Tigris, it is much better suited for collecting lots of water and from a higher level of water too. Yes. And I think that if Nebuchadnezzar had built in Babylon, it would have had to be more or less on the flat because the place beside his palace is very constricted by great walls and great processional way, great gates. There's not space there. And I think the king needed to be able to just walk out of the French walls and look at his own place. So Sennacherib did build it. He gave a very detailed account of it. He said that he put in certain kinds of trees, not date palms. But date palms are such attractive things to see visually that it seems that people who think, oh, well, I'll touch up this design of the hanging garden and they sprinkle it with a few date palms because they look so good, but that's not right. In Babylon, the gardens are flat and

they have lovely little channels of water running between these palm trees and they pick dates which you can live off. It's an entirely different way of doing things. And you would plant your lettuces, your radishes, your delicious vegetables underneath the palm tree which doesn't take away the sunlight in the way that say a pine tree tends to do. And what is this detailed account that we have of Sennacherib's garden at Nineveh? With Sennacherib, his own account was always difficult to understand because he introduces into his account of it how he raised the water. He's brought in the water along an aqueduct. Okay, anybody can build an aqueduct if they've got the right topography. But when the water came into the garden, and you can

see this from the relief sculpture done by his grandson, Ashurbanipal, you can see that it's only coming in halfway up the garden, which is exactly what two of the Greek authors say. Bringing the water in and then being raised up with Archimedean, well, they don't say Archimedean, of course, because it's pre-Archimedes. They say that the water is being raised with a screw, and the Greeks use the word for a snail because it's quite difficult to invent a new word, but it's clear when you look at the spiral of an Archimedean screw that that's the link with the snail. And we know from Egypt, for example, that they had screws which they called snails in Hellenistic times.

And this screw is something that is described as being a key integral part of the garden's architecture, its engineering in those classical sources. So you then also see it in Sennacherib's garden in Nineveh. It's almost starting to add up there if the location of it near the palace also aligns with the accounts of these classical sources too. Yes, there's one of the Greek sources that the water was raised through the screws without anyone outside seeing it happen. Now, you know that if you have a bank of chadoufs, for instance, it's going to have a lot of sweaty chaps groaning away and creaking the machinery to get the water up. And it's not going to be terribly peaceful because it's a very ineffective way of putting enough water to water

these mountain trees. We have a drawing of part of the garden which shows what is very clearly described by the Greek authors and I think is one of the things that makes it a real world wonder. There's so many people who've tried to find the hanging garden somewhere else, have given something so lame that you can't imagine why it was ever categorized as a world wonder. It's got to be something very special. So here you've got a pillared walkway on this drawing, and there's layers of matting or soil or a combination of things. And then it does have mountain trees growing on top of it. So the amazing thing is that you had to get enough water up the steps to get to that walkway. And I think that that's what the Greek source meant when it spoke of you couldn't see the water being raised because it's inside the casing of the screw beside the steps.

And it comes up and then it waters these trees at the very top. And of course, the trees can only get their roots down into this matting and soil, which is said to be like a plowed field up on top of the pillared walkway. So I didn't make any of this up. It's all there in the Greek sources. And it has long been my feeling, and I have found good evidence for it, that Nineveh was not totally leveled in 612 BC. It was a myth. There's no doubt about that. But people lived in parts of the palace afterwards. They wrote little inscriptions here and there. They altered a doorway, for instance, and there's a Parthian-style lintel above it. And there are two records of much later kings conquering the city. But they wouldn't have gone there to conquer it if it was

just a pile of rubble, would they? So if that's the case, it was perfectly possible for some Greeks to visit it. Now, we don't know exactly where it was. We don't know what was left of it. We can't do anything but speculate after that, which was not my aim in any case. But I did just want to say that it's not impossible that this world wonder was something you could walk around and see some of it surviving. And of course, now there is nothing there because it's been robbed and robbed and robbed. So it could almost have become like the Colossus of Rhodes did after it fell down. The remains of it were still a tourist attraction. People went and saw it. And in the Hanging Garden,

even if it was largely destroyed, people, because they knew the legacy of it as this great wonder, they could still go and see it for centuries after its golden age during the Caesarian period. I think so. And Alexander the Great, when he was in the area, he was waiting for an awfully long time before he met up with Darius for the final battle at Gaugamela. And he was very near the canal works that brought the water into Nineveh. And if he didn't go himself, but I bet he did, the scholars who were with him, the people who were interested, would have gone to see what they could find there. I think that that is almost certain. And it is an absolute tragedy that all these scholars who went with him, their accounts are all lost, except that the other day, it was reported that one of his companions who went to Mesopotamia, they found in Pompeii a great scroll from somebody who actually went because

the trouble really is the lateness of all our sources. It is a problem. And even though we can see that Nineveh was not abandoned in 612, it is still a problem that all the sources are much later. But they, of course, could read some of the things that Alexander brought back that are now lost. It is interesting when you look at Alexander historians, particularly when Alexander is in Babylon and the whole chaos that grips Babylon after his death. Someone like Curtis Rufus, who's probably using Hieronymus, who is an eyewitness and he's there, he does not mention any hanging garden whatsoever right next to that palace.

So it's further evidence, isn't it? That absence of evidence of mentioning it, even a source like that, like Hieronymus, when he's putting in detail an account of that chaos, he doesn't mention it at all, which is fascinating. No. And there's Alexander there dying for a while, and you might think that they'd carry him into the Hanging Garden, at least in a sort of legendary way, because they can associate the great man with the great construction, the great garden. So it is extraordinary that neither Nebuchadnezzar nor Alexander mention it. The screw, which you mentioned, is right at the heart of the creation of this hanging garden. If it seems to have been in

existence at this time, at the time of Sennacherib and probably before, why today do we call it Archimedes' screw? There were people who attributed anything to a famous name in late antiquity. And there are plenty of people who have studied the rise of engineering in the Greek and Roman periods who have thought that probably Archimedes didn't invent the screw. He wasn't a very practical man, apparently. Things went rather wrong if you tried to get them right. And the thing that he was really good at was the mathematics and, I suppose, the geometry, the theoretical side of mathematics. So I'm quite sure that he was able to tell you how much water you'd raise if you had a screw this size,

the sort of thing I could never do at school because I always got stuck on the numbers. But I think there's some people who have a natural ability in mathematics and they work on that natural ability to work it out. So I think that's why his name gets attached to the screw. But the point about Sennacherib is he's describing a new method of casting. And when we were making a documentary, we were making a screw. And we had this wonderful man, Andrew Lacey, who when I read Sennacherib's description, and I said, I think we've got a metaphor here. And I think this is how I've been trying to understand it. He leapt up and he said, no, no, no, it's not like that.

I can see exactly what he was doing. And it is much more of a Chinese method. It's interesting that Sennacherib explicitly says they were trying to do it with so much wax, there was a shortage. And the word for wax was not understood in the early translations of this text. They had mistaken one word for another. I mean, it is very easy to get that sort of thing wrong in cuneiform. And at the date when they were working, I'm not surprised at all that they couldn't understand it.

We've now got wonderful dictionaries, wonderful grammars. We can sort out some of the problems. So the accounts, the context of Sennacherib's account of his garden, this isn't a Greek work like our other sources. This is a cuneiform inscription. Is this a cuneiform tablet? So that's the context of Sennacherib's account of it. Exactly. It's written on clay in the time of Sennacherib and it's a well-known text. It's just that he's very excited about his new technique. He's doing it in bronze because that's high status material and it works. And it's exactly what is described centuries later by these Greek and Roman writers. Is this why it's so important when looking at ancient Mesopotamia that we don't just look at the Greco-Roman accounts for something, and that we look at the cuneiform, that we look at these

inscriptions as well? Because this seems a fascinating example where by actually looking at this evidence, you're able to corroborate it with the Greco-Roman sources. I think that it's very difficult for people to get rid of their preconceptions. And one of the preconceptions was that the Greeks had such a long gap between the endocuniform and their own writing of texts that they invented stuff. Well, that doesn't seem to me to make sense. There's attitudes that they certainly invent, like all Greeks were paedophiles or all Babylonians got terribly drunk at festivals. You read these stereotypes in Greek texts, and you know that that's a part of the rhetoric, really, of keeping your audience interested in what you do. And I think that you

find that in the sort of thing that you read in the books on rhetoric in the Roman period. So that's a different matter. When it comes to very specific things, like saying, there was a garden in the time of not named or named as Nebuchadnezzar in the case of Josephus. At that time, there was a garden and it had these features and they are very distinctive. They're not fairy tale. It wasn't that the great giants strayed out of the forest and plonked down a watering system. It's just not like that. It's people who are actually interested in how it's done. I must therefore ask, because this seems to be one of the big questions surrounding this, why does this confusion emerge?

People got very confused in Mesopotamia, especially as they came from the West. They found rivers linked by canals. There are descriptions of medieval merchants who couldn't find their way because they never knew which river they were on. And actually, the Babylonians got a bit mixed up. And there's a branch of the Euphrates that's sometimes called by this and sometimes called by something else that we thought was another branch. sometimes called by something else that we thought was another branch. It's really complicated. It's a real network of canals because that was their means of transport.

In the flat land of Babylonia, people went by boat almost everywhere. And as we know from our British canal system, in the time of Josiah Wedgwood, for instance, he could transport his pottery without breaking it on all the ruts in the road. That's the advantage. And you get people towing things along, or you can use poles and paddles. It's a very efficient way of getting around. And it's so different from a Greek environment, so different from an Italian environment. You can imagine somebody from Greece going to Babylonia and being a bit like going to a delta where there's a stream across every other minute. So I think they didn't know which was the Tigris and which

was the Euphrates half the time. And what's also this description of Nineveh as being another Babylon that we sometimes get, which might also explain why this confusion emerged? Well, both Babylon and Nineveh had fantastic walls, and the walls were one of the wonders of the world. And so that was a cause, I think, for confusion. But we know that because of the connection of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar with Jerusalem, and of course, the Jews being more literate or having a higher level of literacy than much of the rest of the population in the Levant, it would have been very easy for them to transfer them. And we know from several things, including the Book of Judas, that Sennacherib was said to be the king of Babylon.

He took away their gods, the statues, their gods, and that was bad enough. And I think some of the damage he did was symbolic. And he certainly put the backs up of the people in Babylon, but it wasn't possible for the son of Sennacherib to ever take the title King of Babylon. So if therefore the names of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar have been confused, last thing I promise, but that overarching, you sometimes see almost a romantic reason for why it's built, Nebuchadnezzar building it for his wife, could actually be a context of truth in that, and that's Sennacherib may well have built this great garden for his wife. Well, he doesn't say so. He does say that he has a wife and he names her,

he builds a wing of the palace for her, and she's clearly very fond of her. But then along comes the wicked witch Nakia, who gets her son as a hand on the throne. And that's another story. Well, that's another story indeed. Well, Stephanie, this has been absolutely brilliant. It is fascinating when you look at the Greco-Roman accounts and you look at the cuneiform, you look at that relief you've got in Assyria, so an actual visual depiction of one of these great gardens. You explain it all so well in your book, which last but not least, your book on all of this is called? I wrote a book, which I didn't know what to call it. And then because we're all Agatha Christie

fans in our way, I thought maybe to use the word mystery, I tried just, you know, The Hanging Garden of Babylon. And actually the principal of my college said, oh, you can't do that. That's terribly boring. You'll never sell it like that. Better be The Mystery of the Hanging Garden. Oh, yeah, okay. But then, of course, it doesn't look such a serious book. And it is a serious book. Well, there we go. Stephanie, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. It's a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Professor Grant Frame and Dr. Stephanie Daly talking all about the Hanging Garden or Gardens of Babylon. They have laid out several theories for where this enigmatic ancient wonder

might have been and now it's over to you to decide which theory you believe is the most plausible. It is still the million dollar question, where are the hanging gardens? What did they look like? Hopefully you might find out more about this through archaeology, through cuneiform texts in the near future, so fingers crossed. Now last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have enjoyed today's episode and you want to help us out, we're going to be getting bigger and better. Our Babylon mini-series is continuing. Well you know what you can do in the meantime, you can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It greatly helps us as we continue

to share these remarkable stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.