The
wonder is that we have a valid and convincing archaeological target
for something that likely rivaled the Great Pyramid.
What
is important however is that we have a seventh century reference to
the screw for hydraulic lifting. It appeared obvious that this would
be true, just as it appears obvious that all hydraulic engineering
was available for the duration of the Bronze Age or at least to 2500
BC. This is not something too difficult to invent over and over
again although the screw itself is hardly obvious while the walking
water wheel certainly is.
All
this was done centuries before we had the Roman Empire who took it
seriously.
Babylon's hanging
garden: ancient scripts give clue to missing wonder
A British academic has gathered evidence suggesting garden was
created at Nineveh, 300 miles from Babylon
Dalya Alberge
Sunday 5 May 2013
.
The whereabouts of one
of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the fabled Hanging
Garden of Babylon – has been one of the great mysteries from
antiquity. The inability of archaeologists to find traces of it among
Babylon's ancient remains led some even to doubt its existence.
Now a British academic
has amassed a wealth of textual evidence to show that the garden was
instead created at Nineveh, 300 miles from Babylon, in the early
7th century BC.
After 18 years of
study, Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University has concluded that the
garden was built by the Assyrians in the north of Mesopotamia – in
modern Iraq – rather than by their great enemies the Babylonians in
the south.
She believes her
research shows that the feat of engineering and artistry was achieved
by the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, rather than the Babylonian king,
Nebuchadnezzar.
The evidence presented
by Dalley, an expert in ancient Middle Eastern languages, emerged
from deciphering Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform scripts and
reinterpreting later Greek and Roman texts. They included a
7th-century BC Assyrian inscription that, she discovered, had been
mistranslated in the 1920s, reducing passages to "absolute
nonsense".
She was astonished to
find Sennacherib's own description of an "unrivalled palace"
and a "wonder for all peoples". He describes the marvel
of a water-raising screw made using a new method of casting bronze –
and predating the invention of Archimedes' screw by some four
centuries.
Dalley said this was
part of a complex system of canals, dams and aqueducts to bring
mountain water from streams 50 miles away to the citadel of Nineveh
and the hanging garden. The script records water being drawn up
"all day".
Recent excavations
have found traces of aqueducts. One near Nineveh was so vast that
Dalley said its remains looked like a stretch of motorway from the
air, and it bore a crucial inscription: "Sennacherib king of
the world … Over a great distance I had a watercourse directed to
the environs of Nineveh …"
Having first broached
her theory in 1992, Dalley is now presenting a mass of evidence in a
book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, which Oxford
University Press publishes on 23 May. She expects to divide academic
opinion, but the evidence convinces her that Sennacherib's garden
fulfils the criteria for a wonder of the world – "magnificent
in conception, spectacular in engineering, and brilliant in
artistry".
Dalley said: "That
the Hanging Garden was built in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar the Great
is a fact learned at school and … 'verified' in encyclopaedias …
To challenge such a universally accepted truth might seem the height
of arrogance, revisionist scholarship ... But Assyriology is a
relatively recent discipline … Facts that once seemed secure become
redundant."
Sennacherib's palace,
with steps of semi-precious stone and an entrance guarded by colossal
copper lions, was magnificent. Dalley pieced together ancient
texts to reveal a garden that recreated a mountain landscape. It
boasted terraces, pillared walkways, exotic plants and trees, and
rippling streams.
The seven wonders
appear in classical texts written centuries after the garden was
created, but the 1st-century historian Josephus was the only
author to name Nebuchadnezzar as creator of the Hanging Garden,
Dalley said. She found extensive confusion over names and places
in ancient texts, including the Book of Judith, muddling the two
kings.
Little of Nineveh –
near present-day Mosul – has so far been explored, because it has
been judged too dangerous until now to conduct excavations.
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