What is and is not established
The Hanging Gardens are one of the best-known wonders of the ancient world, but no one has yet shown that the Babylonians built them. No cuneiform text from Babylon describes such a garden, and no remains have been confirmed as its structure. What survives are descriptions by Greek and Roman writers, written long after the period they describe, and a modern debate about whether the gardens were real, where they stood and who made them. The location remains unproven.
The classical accounts
The tradition rests mainly on a handful of authors. Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing in Greek in the early third century BCE, is known to us through the later writer Josephus. He is quoted as saying that Nebuchadnezzar II built raised walks to please his wife, who came from Media and missed her mountainous homeland. Later Greek and Roman writers such as Diodorus Siculus, Strabo and Quintus Curtius Rufus describe terraces rising one above another, planted with trees and watered from the Euphrates. They disagree on details, and none of them is known to have seen the gardens in person.
Lists of the “Seven Wonders” compiled by Hellenistic and later writers include the gardens alongside monuments such as the Giza pyramid complex, the Temple of Artemis and the Pharos lighthouse. These lists were tourist-style summaries and not firsthand reports, so a place on the list is not strong evidence in itself.
The silence of Babylonian sources
The most serious objection is the absence of any mention in Babylon’s own records. Nebuchadnezzar left many inscriptions about his building works, including palaces, temples, walls and canals, yet none describes a garden of this kind. The Greek historian Herodotus, who describes Babylon in some detail, also says nothing about it, although whether he actually visited the city is itself disputed.
This silence does not prove that the gardens never existed. Royal inscriptions are formulaic and do not list everything, and many cuneiform texts remain unread or lost. But it makes the usual story weaker than it is often presented.
Koldewey’s proposal
When Robert Koldewey excavated Babylon, he identified a building in the palace area with unusual vaulted rooms and suggested it might have supported the gardens. Later scholars have been unconvinced: the vaulted structure is now more commonly interpreted as a storehouse or administrative building, and there is no sign of the planting layers or water system the ancient writers describe. The idea is mostly treated as a historical curiosity today.
The Nineveh theory
The Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has argued that the gardens were actually in Nineveh and were built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in the early seventh century BCE. Her case rests on several points:
- Sennacherib’s own inscriptions describe an extensive garden and a water supply brought by aqueducts and canals, which is the kind of record missing for Babylon.
- A relief from the later Assyrian palace at Nineveh shows a lush garden watered by an aqueduct, and surviving Assyrian palace reliefs show how much importance Assyrian kings gave to landscaped parks.
- Sennacherib’s texts mention bronze water-raising devices, which she connects with the screw-like machines later associated with Archimedes.
- Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BCE, while Babylon stayed a famous and inhabited city, so she suggests that a tradition about a garden at Nineveh could later have been attached to Babylon by mistake.
This theory has attracted attention but is not accepted by all. Critics note that the later writers name Babylon explicitly, that the texts on bronze devices do not clearly describe a garden machine, and that a mix-up of this kind is hard to prove. So it is a serious hypothesis, not a settled answer.
Other possibilities
Some scholars suggest the gardens may have been real but short-lived, or modest compared to the stories. Others suggest that the tradition grew from the ordinary use of palace gardens and parks across Mesopotamia and was embellished by Greek storytellers, who liked tales of eastern luxury. Flooding of the Euphrates and the water table at Babylon also mean that any structure near the river could have been lost or buried.
Where that leaves the question
Three positions remain open: the gardens existed at Babylon and left no certain trace; they existed at Nineveh and were misplaced; or they were largely a literary creation. All three are argued by serious scholars. Until an excavation or a newly read inscription settles the matter, the safest statement is that the Babylonians are credited with the gardens by ancient authors, but that credit has not been confirmed.