#The Hanging Gardens of Babylon#
On the list of the seven wonders of the ancient worlds you have things like the Pyramids at Giza, which are still around, and the massive Lighthouse of Alexandria, which is long gone. But then you have the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which apparently never existed at all.
If you're not familiar with the Hanging Gardens or why they were a big deal, just imagine if a section of Central Park was 80 feet above ground. We're not just talking about the riding paths and urine-soaked vagrants, but every tree you can imagine, flower beds, and statues -- all of it up in the air, supported by stone columns.
The story goes that, deep in the deserts of what is now Iraq,King Nebuchadnezzar 2's wife was homesick for the lush foliage of her homeland, so Neb commissioned an elaborate terraced pleasure garden for her benefit. And while, say, the pyramids were just a one-time deal, the Hanging Gardens would have been a sprawling, ongoing project requiring engineering knowledge that surpassed everything else at the time -- you're trying to keep water flowing to all of these tiers of suspended foliage in the middle of the freaking desert.
It's hard to overstate how impressive an achievement it was. Or would have been, had it been true.
The Reality:
There are no records of the Hanging Gardens having existed at Babylon.Experts today believe that the myth of the Hanging Gardens was perpetuated by soldiers returning to Greece from Babylon. They told exaggerated tales of the things they saw -- Babylon did have some sweet buildings, and the land was more fertile back then -- and in turn the ancient historians made those descriptions even more fanciful, until we had a Wonder of the Ancient World on our hands.
But surely there must have been something there for the ancients to embellish, right? Well, a tablet was found in the Assyrian city of Nineveh that has a depiction of a garden, which has one assyriologist raising the possibility that Babylon's gardens were actually an exaggerated, overhyped version of something that existed elsewhere, maybe.
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