Scholar believes she has located Babylon's Hanging Gardens - in Nineveh

[Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University] 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.

She makes a great case and backs it up with a preponderance of evidence in the form of a large number of cuneiform texts from Nineveh, that the 'Hanging Gardens of Babylon' should really have been known as the 'Hanging Gardens of Nineveh'.

sources:
Scholar: Ancient Babylon’s hanging garden was in northern Iraq
rawstory.com

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon at Ninevah
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution - brlsi.org

The author, Stephanie Dalley, wrote the following treatise;
Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens; Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled - PDF file
It includes illustrations such as the bronze water screw, etc.

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


Absolutely awesome find.

There are still sceptics that think the place never existed. This is a great day and she deserves an award for all her hard work.

Now my research into her research begins. Thanks Blackmarketeer for giving me yet another excuse not to partake in reality outside my PC.../sarcasm.

Very interesting stuff we'll see how the Assyrialogists take to it

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


thanks for posting, i'm just tucking into the last source with my tea and toast SnF

Yes she did good work and this is likely the real deal.

What's pathetic and hilarious at the same time are all of these scientists who could not find the Hanging Gardens in Babylon, so they simply decided they were legendary and didn't exist. Many archaeologists will not be able to accept the Gardens in their narrow-minded world-view, so they will attack the author and the research.

What if they built more than one over a long period and we just ignorantly lumped them all into one category?
Just a thought.

They did build ziggurats in most of the cities, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was also a tradition of building palaces ala hanging gardens style.

That's just speculation trying to bridge the gap between what we think we know and what we think we just found out.

Originally posted by Nicorette
Yes she did good work and this is likely the real deal.

What's pathetic and hilarious at the same time are all of these scientists who could not find the Hanging Gardens in Babylon, so they simply decided they were legendary and didn't exist. Many archaeologists will not be able to accept the Gardens in their narrow-minded world-view, so they will attack the author and the research.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and ad hominems for good measure.
Yes these tactics are quite commonplace, and easy to see through.

Originally posted by Nicorette
Yes she did good work and this is likely the real deal.

What's pathetic and hilarious at the same time are all of these scientists who could not find the Hanging Gardens in Babylon, so they simply decided they were legendary and didn't exist. Many archaeologists will not be able to accept the Gardens in their narrow-minded world-view, so they will attack the author and the research.

They will do that because that is what science is suppose to due - the idea will be tested for the strength of it's argument and data - very rigorously.

ALL published papers/ideas go through this process. If rejected the original scientist will search for more data and refine the argument, then others will confirm or reject all this. This happens before concensus......

The hanging gardens have not been accepted before because of ......lack of evidence....why would scientist accept the existence of a building they have no evidence for?

Originally posted by Nicorette
Yes she did good work and this is likely the real deal.

What's pathetic and hilarious at the same time are all of these scientists who could not find the Hanging Gardens in Babylon, so they simply decided they were legendary and didn't exist. Many archaeologists will not be able to accept the Gardens in their narrow-minded world-view, so they will attack the author and the research.

They must have taken Bible Scrutinizing 101

According to scholars, the 'Hanging Gardens' are based on these following references in ancient literary sources - and some of these sources are only known by later comments writers/philosophers made upon them, since the original written texts were destroyed or lost to history long ago.

From the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh, by Karen Polinger Foster

Briefly and in approximate chronological order, the principal sources are as follows:

first, the Babyloniaca of Berossus, written about 280 BC, which does not survive save in quotations and condensations from it in other sources, among them two works by the first-century AD Josephus, who twice quotes the short note about the gardens;

second, the listing in "On the Seven Wonders", a text preserved solely in a ninth-century Byzantine codex whose Hellenistic source, often doubted, may be Philo of Byzantium, Alexandrian author of engineering treatises of 250 BC;

third, a long description by Diodorus Siculus in the mid-first century BC, which he apparently based on the undoubtedly second-hand accounts in the now lost History of Alexander by Cleitarchus of Alexandria and on the fanciful description of Babylon by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court around 400 BC;

fourth, a passage in Strabo's Geography of the early first century AD, which he may have based on a lost text of Onesicritus, a contemporary of Alexander the Great;

and fifth, a passage in the mid-first century AD History of Alexander written by Quintus Curtius Rufus, probably also based on Cleitarchus and Ctesias.


Between Cleitarchus, Ctesias, and Onesicritus, Greeks of Alexander's era (or close to it), it's possible they were attributing 'wonders' to the city of Babylon which were borrowed from nearby cities, since we know Alexander was fascinated with Babylon and had been set upon conquering it from his youth.

The rest of the ancient literary sources appear to be a classic case of "telephone", written histories based solely on the written accounts of previous philosophers - of course we have to recognize their contribution and preservation of ancient literary sources that we would otherwise know nothing about, but we have to recognize that their treatises did not independently verify the factual existence of such wonders (how could they?). But now, we have information that the ancient scholars mentioned above didn't have, the science of archeology, and numerous clay tablets from perhaps the original source, Sennacherib of Nineveh.

Anyhoo, not to get long-winded here - just pointing out we may have to recognize, based on new evidence, the possibility that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may in fact be the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh.

ETA: forgot to attribute a source:
IRAQ; Vol. 66, 2004 (journal)
Nineveh. Papers of the 49th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part One
Published by: British Institute for the Study of Iraq

Not sure why this is being widely reported now, here's a documentary on this posted 2008, featuring Stephanie Dalley.


videopediaworld.com...

And on Youtube,




It is the most likely explanation, just strange it's suggested as a new one

reply to post by Kantzveldt


Howdy Kantzveldt

One odd thing I wonder why they show the image of the tower of Babel instead of the HGB? Just an oddity

reply to post by Hanslune



Sort of traditional i guess as everyone always seems to confuse the two, but of course the garden was an aspect of a Palace not a ziggurat.

interesting idea,i guess it could explain why they have had problems finding it. i wonder tho why all the surviving source material would have the location wrong tho?

i have always like the "hanging gardens" idea, proposed pictures of what it may have looked like i have seen are rather cool. but i just never got what all the hype about it was. after all whats a piddly little garden of a few terraces when compared to whole MOUNTAINSIDES being terraced?



meet the Banaue (Ifugao) Rice Terraces. got to admit that's one hell of a wonder to build on a pacific island.
yet how many people have even heard of these ENTIRE MOUNTAINSIDES being terraced for growing food? got to admit much more amazing than some piddly little garden project eh.

Does this mean that we can't call the Archimedes screw the archimedes screw anymore? Now we have to change it to the ninevah screw?

reply to post by generik


It had more to do with the fact it was an engineering marvel, involving an aqueduct transporting water over 50 miles and using an Archimedes screw to elevate said water, 500 years before Rome built its first aqueduct and 500 years before Archimedes lived. Terraced farming is amazing in it's own right, but it's used to trap surface water running down the slope and doesn't involve elevating water from a much lower plain (and much further away) the way the Hanging Gardens allegedly did.

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


Gosh, I can't even imagine how amazing that would have been to see.

Too often people think of people back then and think they must have had it 'rough.' Not at all. Seeing the hanging gardens would have been absolutely wonderous. Let alone just the aqueduct used to transport the water. Engineering, surveying, excavating, building on a grand scale. Far more impressive than anything on Earth today, in my opinion.

Great find! I love it when dates are pushed backwards!

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


Interesting but one big floor. The clue is in the title. "The hanging gardens of Babylon" Not Nineveh! It's a bit like saying scientists have discovered Greenland in France. Makes no sense at all. One thing is certain. Nineveh is detailed quite clearly in the bible and its what the book of Jonah is all about. It was a town of simple minded people who didn't know their left hand from their right. In other words the people of Nineveh were too dumb to conceive the idea of hanging gardens let alone build them. They did repent though and got forgiven. So in a nutshell, the "Scientist" who claims Babylon was Nineveh is unlikely to be telling the truth. I shall have to delve a bit deeper. Might change my mind if there's hard evidence. But it sounds way too kooky at first glance.

reply to post by DanUKphd


The claim wasn't that Nineveh was Babylon. The claim is mistranslation has led people to believe the gardens werein Babylon and they weren't.

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


Hey Blackmarketeer the third link you have, the PDF is missing pages 46-49 might you have a complete copy hidden away somewhere?