![gardens of babylon gardens of babylon](https://bigfishgames-a.akamaihd.net/en_the-hanging-gardens-of-babylon/screen1.jpg)
Now this park, as I have said, was a later construction.
![gardens of babylon gardens of babylon](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7f/fe/f4/7ffef4f85443023565b6fe19f93a9b26.jpg)
On all this again earth had been piled to a depth sufficient for the roots of the largest trees and the ground, when leveled off, was thickly planted with trees of every kind that, by their great size or other charm, could give pleasure to the beholder.Īnd since the galleries, each projecting beyond another, all received the light, they contained many royal lodgings of every description and there was one gallery which contained openings leading from the topmost surface and machines for supplying the gardens with water, the machines raising the water in great abundance from the river, although no one outside could see it being done. The roof above these beams had first a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of bitumen, over this two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and as a third layer of covering of lead, to the end that the moisture from the soil might not penetrate beneath. When the ascending terraces had been built, there had been constructed beneath them galleries which carried the entire weight of the planted garden and rose little by little one above the other along the approach and the uppermost gallery, which was fifty cubits high, bore the highest surface of the park, which was made level with the circuit wall of the battlements of the city.įurthermore, the walls, which had been constructed at great expense, were twenty-two feet thick, while the passageway between each two walls was ten feet wide. The park extended four plethra on each side, and since the approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from one another tier on tier, the appearance of the whole resembled that of a theater. There was also, beside the acropolis, the Hanging Garden, as it is called, which was built, not by Semiramis, but by a later Syrian king to please one of his concubines for she, they say, being a Persian by race and longing for the meadows of her mountains, asked the king to imitate, through the artifice of a planted garden, the distinctive landscape of Persia. For example, Diodorus Siculus (the author of the famed Bibliotheca Historica) possibly consulted the 4th century BC texts of Ctesias of Cnidus, and then made this description in 1st century BC – Subsequently, many ancient Greek authors also went on to provide written descriptions of this ancient wonder sometimes quoting Berossus’ work and at other times paraphrasing other ancient sources. Now from the historical angle, some of these legends were first described by Berossus (apparently in his book Babyloniaca), a Chaldaean priest who lived in the late 4th century BC. The king thus came up with the solution of creating a blooming ‘wonder’ for his wife in the very heartland of Mesopotamia – Babylon. Beyond the gargantuan nature of this ‘gift, it was the thought that counted – since Amytis came from Media, the area roughly corresponding to the northwestern part of present-day Iran, and she was apparently homesick for the verdant valleys and multifarious fauna of her native land. Given the nigh-mythical status of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, we hark back to one particular legend that talks about how Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar I may have constructed the gardens in 6th century BC, as a gift to his queen Amytis.