The Hanging Gardens of Semiramis in Babylon, present-day Iraq, was the second of the Seven Wonders of the World.
They are celebrated by Diodorus of Sicily, Flavius Josephus and Strabo, all of whom draw on older sources. Thus Flavius Josephus draws inspiration from the texts of a priest of the god Marduk, Berossus who lived in Babylon some thirty years after the conquest of the city by Alexander the Great (end of the 4th century BC). It is to this priest that we owe the probable legend of the construction of these gardens by Nebuchadnezzar II in order to remind his wife Amytis of Medes of the wooded mountains of his native country.
The historical reality of these gardens is nowadays seriously called into question. In the 19th century, archaeologist H. Rassam located the gardens to the north of the city near the outer palace. During the great German excavations, Robert Koldewey suggests that a vaulted construction of the southern palace could have supported a terraced roof and thus corresponded to the location of these famous gardens. In fact, no formal location has been found. What adds to the doubt of archaeologists and historians is that none of the cuneiform documents found on the site of Babylon allude to these gardens. It is indeed curious that a king like Nebuchadnezzar II who never ceases to congratulate himself on his achievements (walls, gates, palaces, etc.) remains silent on these hypothetical gardens.
During the 1990s, the English Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley put forward a hypothesis that seems more plausible, namely that ancient historians confused Nineveh with Babylon. Indeed, no Babylonian source mentions the gardens, no classical Greek author alludes to them (Herodotus, for example, is totally silent on the subject). The only authors referring to it are historians of the Hellenistic or Roman era, who frequently confuse the two capitals of the two empires preceding the Persian Empire. Finally, the Assyrian rulers, particularly in the 7th century BC. AD, have gardens built in Nineveh. A text by Sennacherib thus evokes those he had fitted out and describes the machines necessary for irrigation. A bas-relief from the palace of Ashurbanipal shows a hill covered with vegetation and supplied with water by an aqueduct and a system of canals. Furthermore, we know that, due to the entrenchment of watercourses, irrigation used a system of “endless screws” which, by turning, brought the water up to the level of the crops. The crops irrigated in this way therefore seemed to be suspended, or in any case clearly above the level of the water. Stéphanie Dalley concludes that the hanging gardens were therefore in Nineveh and not in Babylon. This explanation, although probable, remains however still in debate.