Wonder

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and like five of the other Wonders it is lost to us. The Pyramids of Giza, in fact, is the only one of the Wonders that can be seen in our time. Confused accounts of classical era writers have made it difficult to pinpoint an exact location for the Hanging Gardens and describe its exact appearance. Nevertheless, there are some very interesting theories about how the garden was constructed and what it’s location may have been. 

One theory, posited by Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley, suggests that the gardens may not have been in ancient Babylon at all and that the writers who associated them with the city may have been referring to some gardens in Nineveh built by a king called Sennacherib. Sennacherib conquered Babylon and famously destroyed it, but he is also noted for commissioning several groundbreaking building projects in Ninevah. The story about Nebuchadnezzar building the gardens for his wife because she was homesick was perhaps a poetic fabrication because Nebuchadnezzar left no records of commissioning such a project.

Theories that locate the garden in ancient Babylon suggest that it may have simply been left to go to rack and ruin and that valuable materials that went into the building of the palace may have been repurposed and used in other building projects. There does seem to be agreement between the Ninevah and Babylon camps about what one of the methods of irrigation used in the garden may have been. A screw type system like Archimedes Screw might have been used to push water up to the gardens. But which river the water came from we cannot know.