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The Hanging Gardens of Nineveh*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Karen Polinger Foster
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Extract

Though for over two millennia much has been written and said about the Hanging Gardens, they remain elusive. Neither the extensive excavations at the city of Babylon nor the abundant contemporaneous cuneiform records have yielded convincing evidence for these gardens and their associated structures. Herodotus says not a word about them. Instead, we have the descriptions of five later writers, who were themselves quoted and paraphrased by others and whose accounts of the gardens are often opaque, contradictory, and technologically baffling at best.

Briefly and in approximate chronological order, the principal sources are as follows: first, the Babyloniaca of Berossus, written about 280 BC, which does not survive save in quotations and condensations from it in other sources, among them two works by the first-century AD Josephus, who twice quotes the short note about the gardens; second, the listing in “On the Seven Wonders”, a text preserved solely in a ninth-century Byzantine codex whose Hellenistic source, often doubted, may be Philo of Byzantium, Alexandrian author of engineering treatises about 250 BC; third, a long description by Diodorus Siculus in the mid-first century BC, which he apparently based on the undoubtedly second-hand accounts in the now lost History of Alexander by Cleitarchus of Alexandria and on the fanciful description of Babylon by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court around 400 BC; fourth, a passage in Strabo's Geography of the early first century AD, which he may have based on a lost text of Onesicritus, a contemporary of Alexander the Great; and fifth, a passage in the mid-first century AD History of Alexander written by Quintus Curtius Rufus, probably also based on Cleitarchus and Ctesias.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 66: Nineveh. Papers of the XLIXe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part One , 2004 , pp. 207 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2004 

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Footnotes

*

For numerous references and wise counsel, I am grateful to Pauline Albenda, Leigh-Ann Bedal, Stephanie Dalley, John Darnell, Benjamin Foster, Eckart Frahm, Dimitri Gutas, and David Stronach, as well as to audience members at the London RAI and the Oriental Club of New Haven, where preliminary versions of this paper were presented.

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