Hanging Gardens (of Babylon, or of Nineveh)

Assembled from 25 blocks · 3 evidence · 27 related

1. Story
2. The only ancient wonder whose existence and location are both genuinely in dispute. No Babylonian text yet found describes a terraced garden at Babylon, and excavation at Babylon has produced no structure that can be identified as one; the descriptions all come from Greek and Roman writers writing centuries later. Stephanie Dalley has argued at length that the gardens described in the classical accounts were in fact those of the Assyrian king Sennacherib at Nineveh, some 500 km to the north, and that the tradition transferred them to Babylon. This record does not resolve the question. Because both the existence and the site are contested, no coordinate is asserted here.
3. Knowledge
4. Hanging Gardens (of Babylon, or of Nineveh)
5. The canon of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
6. Connections
7. The canon of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
8. Antipater of Sidon writes the earliest surviving list of seven wonders
9. Great Pyramid of Giza (Pyramid of Khufu)
10. Hanging Gardens (of Babylon, or of Nineveh)
11. Lighthouse of Alexandria (the Pharos)
12. Colossus of Rhodes
13. Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (the Artemision)
14. Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
15. Statue of Zeus at Olympia
16. Philo of Byzantium (the Paradoxographer)
17. Antipater of Sidon
18. Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheatre), Rome
19. Antipater of Sidon writes the earliest surviving list of seven wonders
20. UNESCO publicly disowns the New7Wonders campaign
21. The New7Wonders of the World are declared in Lisbon
22. Evidence
23. The earliest surviving text assembling seven marvels into a single list, and evidence that the canon originally included the walls of Babylon rather than the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
24. The fullest ancient description of the wonders as a set, written centuries after most had been ruined, and by a later Paradoxographer rather than the 3rd-century BCE engineer Philo Mechanicus.
25. Sustained scholarly argument that the gardens of the classical accounts were Sennacherib's at Nineveh, not Nebuchadnezzar's at Babylon.