MINIATURES

The Hanging gardens of Babylon

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the World whose exact location is unclear. There are no written sources, so there are three versions about their existence: the first claims that it is a mythical object described only in Greek and Roman sources, the second indicates that the gardens really existed and were most likely completely destroyed by an earthquake in the 1st century.
A third theory says that the legend confused the locations and actually referred to the well-documented gardens of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (745-681 BC) in Nineveh, where the king laid out gardens for his young wife, a princess who, in the dusty and arid land, longed for her homeland of green hills and forests. These Assyrian gardens consisted of four stories that resembled a pyramid, had artificial water bodies with gazebos and pavilions, and many kinds of trees, flowers, and other plants grew in them.
Rare fish swam in the ponds, and rare birds and animals were kept in cages in the garden. Nineveh or Nineveh is an ancient city in Upper Mesopotamia, on the left bank of the Tigris River, near the present-day city of Mosul in Iraq. In its time (~7th century BC), it was the largest city in the world, the capital of the Assyrian Empire.