One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World might not have existed.

Depiction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

According to the 2,000-year-old writings of Greek historians such as Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, the ancient city of Babylon (in modern-day Iraq) boasted tiered terraces of exotic plants of all types that towered several stories above onlookers from the ground. Said to have been created in the sixth century BCE by King Nebuchadnezzar II for one of his wives, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were considered an awe-inspiring sight and a triumph of engineering, and as such have been accorded a spot among the celebrated Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

However, there are a couple of glaring problems with that story. One is that there is no conclusive evidence among the ruins of Babylon that such a garden ever existed, nor the irrigation system needed to maintain it amid the desert landscape. Also, the breathtaking accounts of the foliage were all composed well after the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE; there are no contemporary descriptions of the Hanging Gardens, even though other achievements of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign were recorded at the time. As such, one popular argument holds that the legendary Hanging Gardens were merely a product of the overactive collective imagination of ancient thinkers.

There is a plausible alternative to that theory: An extensive tiered system of vegetation did exist, but was built a century earlier by the Assyrian King Sennacherib in the city of Nineveh, some 300 miles to the north. Unlike in Babylon, there is evidence of an aqueduct system through the mountainous terrain around Nineveh that delivered water to the site, while surviving relief panels from the city’s royal palace feature displays of a lavish garden. As to how the renowned Greek academics could have gotten the locale wrong, they simply may have conflated the two older kingdoms from a similar region with overlapping cultures. It’s possible that yet-to-be uncovered evidence will provide more conclusive proof of Nebuchadnezzar’s green thumb, but in the meantime, it may be more accurate to refer to this ancient wonder as the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Historians didn't agree on the list of the ancient wonders.

Today, it’s well accepted which historic marvels are listed among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But the ancient historians who initially inspired this who’s who of monuments were not in unanimous agreement as to which ones belonged.

The Greek poet Antipater of Sidon was among those who celebrated the walls of Babylon, while the Roman poet Martial championed the inclusion of the Roman Colosseum. The spread of Christianity influenced later writers who waded into the debate, with the sixth-century Gallo-Roman bishop Gregory of Tours naming Noah's Ark and Solomon's Temple among his seven choices. According to the authors of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it took another millennium before the various preferences crystallized into one cohesive group, with the great minds of the Renaissance helping to permanently establish the select seven for successive generations to marvel over.