Hanging Gardens (of Babylon, or of Nineveh)

node · earth · Mesopotamia — contested between Babylon (Babil Governorate) and Nineveh (Nineveh Governorate)

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.