OLD RECOVERED FILE
In 450 BC, Herodotus, the Greek historian, also known as “the Father of History” wrote that “Babylon surpasses in splendour any city in the known world”.
Certainly, Babylon must have been impressive but today the focus is not so much on the ancient city but rather the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
And while there may be some doubt over the actual existence of these gardens as some claim they only existed in the minds of Greek historians and poets, at http://www.unmuseum.org/hangg.htm, there is a great deal about them.
The site mentions that although accounts indicate King Nebuchadnezzar II built the gardens, “there is a less reliable, alternative story that the gardens were built by the Assyrian Queen Semiramis during her five-year reign starting in 810 BC”.
The portal also scales down some of the claims of the historians regarding the city in the lower Euphrates River area, what is now central Iraq.
Herodotus claimed that the outer walls of the city of Babylon (built during Nebuchadnezzar’s 43-year reign) were 90.16km in length, 73.15m thick and 292.59m high, according to the portal.
The walls were “wide enough to allow a four-horse chariot to turn” while the “inner walls were not so thick as the first, but hardly less strong”, said the historian.
“Inside the walls were fortresses and temples containing immense statues of solid gold. Rising above the city was the famous Tower of Babel, a temple to the god Marduk, that seemed to reach to the heavens.”
The site goes on to say that “while archaeological examination has disputed some of Herodotus’ claims (the outer walls seem to be only 16.1km long and not nearly as high) his narrative does give us a sense of how awesome the features of the city appeared to those that visited it”.
But strangely, “one of the city’s most spectacular sites is not even mentioned by Herodotus: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”.
The UnMuseum site says that apparently “the gardens were built to cheer up Nebuchadnezzar’s homesick wife, Amyitis”.
Amyitis, says the portal, was the daughter of the king of the Medes and was married to Nebuchadnezzar to create an alliance between the nations.
“The land she (Amyitis) came from, though, was green, rugged and mountainous, and she found the flat, sun-baked terrain of Mesopotamia depressing.”
The portal says “the king decided to recreate his homeland by building an artificial mountain with rooftop gardens”.
But if you vision the Hanging Gardens as being suspended, well that idea is incorrect it seems. The gardens “did not really hang in the sense of being suspended from cables or ropes”.
“The name comes from an inexact translation of the Greek word kremastos or the Latin word pensilis, which mean not just ‘hanging’, but ‘overhanging’ as in the case of a terrace or balcony.”
Another Greek, the geographer Strabo, described the gardens in first century BC as consisting “of vaulted terraces raised one above another, and resting upon cube-shaped pillars”.
“These are hollow and filled with earth to allow trees of the largest size to be planted. The pillars, the vaults, and terraces are constructed of baked brick and asphalt,” according to Strabo.
“The ascent to the highest story is by stairs, and at their side are water engines, by means of which persons, appointed expressly for the purpose, are continually employed in raising water from the Euphrates into the garden.”
What might seem peculiar to us is the fact that to the people at the time “the most amazing part of the garden” was the ferrying of water supposedly by a chain pump as “Babylon rarely received rain and for the garden to survive it would have had to been irrigated by water from the nearby Euphrates River”.
But what is a chain pump?
The site explains it as having “two large wheels, one above the other, connected by a chain”.
“On the chain are buckets. Below the bottom wheel is a pool with the water source. As the wheel is turned, the buckets dip into the pool and pick up water. The chain then lifts them to the upper wheel, where the buckets are tipped and dumped into an upper pool. The chain then carries the empty ones back down to be refilled.”
More details of the irrigation system are also provided.
“The pool at the top of the gardens could be released by gates into channels which acted as artificial streams to water the gardens. The pump wheel below was attached to a shaft and a handle.”
And what is the handle for?
Well, slaves turned the handle, “to provide the power to run the contraption”.
And what were the problems involved in ensuring the gardens had adequate moisture?
The portal says, “construction of the garden wasn’t only complicated by getting the water up to the top” but also in preventing the liquid from ruining the foundation once it was released.
“Since stone was difficult to get on the Mesopotamian plain, most of the architecture in Babel utilised bricks.”
However, as the “bricks were composed of clay mixed with chopped straw and baked in the sun” which were “then joined with bitumen (a slimy substance, which acted as a mortar” the bricks “quickly dissolved when soaked with water”.
“For most buildings... this wasn’t a problem because rain was so rare. However, the gardens were continually exposed to irrigation and the foundation had to be protected.”
The UnMuseum site also gives several other details of the gardens, but a major detraction is that the site is visually “spartan”. The sole visual is a 3D image, which although nice makes one wish there were others that one could feast one’s eyes upon.
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