Oxford University : The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are in NINEVAH and not Babylon
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New Book Places Hanging Garden of Babylon in Nineveh
By yesterday
at 07:38
The only later writer to name the
builder of the garden as Nebuchadnezzar was Josephus in the 1st century. But he
had a reputation for embellishing his stories for readers in Jerusalem.
By Sharmila Devi
LONDON - Popular imagination propped up by historians has long
held the Hanging Garden
to be in Babylon.
But a new book by British author Stephanie Dalley places one of the ancient
world’s Seven Wonders firmly in the city of Nineveh
in northern Iraq.
The Mystery of the
Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced, published earlier this year, is a provocative blast into
an academic world in which the translation and interpretation of cuneiform
texts can take years and is usually viewed as fusty and arcane by outsiders.
The book is the
culmination of work carried out intermittently over 18 years as new research
and evidence came to light - Dalley can read Assyrian and Babylonian tablets -
and while she continued her work as an Assyriologist at Oxford University.
Dalley, whose academic
career spans five decades, is still unsure how many of her colleagues she has
convinced of her new theory.
“People
don’t tell you flat out because these things are very slow-moving,”
she told Rudaw
in an interview in the study of her Oxford
home surrounded by dictionaries and texts on Assyrian and Babylonian history.
“People don’t say anything to you unless they think it’s
really stupid.”
She first went to Nimrud to work on an archeological excavation in 1962 and
last visited Kurdistan in the summer to film a documentary for British
television outlining the evidence for Nineveh
as the location of the hanging garden.
When she was an
undergraduate studying Assyriology at the University
of Cambridge in 1962-1966, the Hanging Garden was not mentioned in her studies.
Many years later after giving a lecture on ancient gardens, she was asked by a
woman why she did not mention the world wonder. “She was disappointed, I
was embarrassed,” Dalley writes in the introduction to her book.
Reviewers of her book
seem to be intrigued -- while not yet completely convinced -- by her theory.
“I admire her
clarity and audacity and her brilliant engagement with evidence that looks,
when first cited, only too likely to rule her new theory out of court,”
wrote Robin Lane Fox, the distinguished historian of antiquity in the Financial
Times.
Dalley hopes her book,
which methodically dismantles the evidence in favor of Babylon
and carefully builds up the case for Nineveh,
will spur fresh research by other academics.
Austen Henry Layard,
an Englishman, excavated at Nineveh
in the 19th century and was guided by the Old Testament and Xenophon’s
ancient book, “March of the Ten Thousand.”
He tunneled into the
palace of the 8th-7th century BC Assyrian King Sennacherib and found great
stone panels of bas-relief sculpture. One of them is now lost but an
“Original Drawing” of it is in the British
Museum and it shows some of the
features of the Hanging
Garden as described by
later Greek writers.
The only later writer
to name the builder of the garden as Nebuchadnezzar was Josephus in the 1st
century. But he had a reputation for embellishing his stories for readers in Jerusalem.
Several decades after
Layard’s discoveries, a clay prism inscribed by Sennacherib came to light
and Dalley’s translations of it show references to the technologies
needed to raise water to the high citadel garden over a distance of 50 miles,
including a kind of large screw that was most likely used, a technology
developed long before that and attributed to the Greek Archimedes.
In her book, she
describes Sennacherib’s inscriptions at the great stone aqueduct at
Jerwan, about 30 miles northeast of Mosul
that remain clear to this day. She also explains how ancient sources might have
mixed up Babylon and Nineveh
and how after 612 BC, when Nineveh
supposedly fell, the city continued to be inhabited for many years.
If she were given an
unlimited budget and complete freedom, she would love to explore the site of Nineveh with
ground-penetrating radar. “You could see what’s underneath without
digging and do a trawl to see how the water came from Jerwan to the
citadel,” she said. “It would be non-invasive and wouldn’t
spoil the site for future generations.”
Assyriology remains
under-funded and with too few fully-trained people, she said. Conflict in Syria and Iraq, where most cuneiform texts
are to be found, had also deterred academics.
She said she was looking forward to learning
about discoveries from the excavations of the citadel of Erbil
where colleagues of hers are currently working.
“My
understanding is that the great temple
of Ishtar of Erbil
is under the mound. She was regarded as the same goddess as Ishtar of Nineveh
and she was especially famous for oracles and for supporting the kings of Assyria in battle, to bring them victory,” Dalley
said.
She was happy to find
Jerwan was still a “magical” site when she visited earlier this
year compared with Babylon, which was a “mess” after the
depredations wreaked by Saddam Hussein and war.
But she was
disappointed by the amount of litter and advised Kurdistan
to take care of its heritage and ancient sites.
“If I were in
charge, I would make sure there are signposts and a good track, not necessarily
a road, to get there. You could have panels to show people what was there but
that’s all. People should be encouraged to think and use their
imaginations,” she said.
“These sites should be for local
people as well as foreign tourists and school parties should be taken there. I
know my Iraqi friends like reconstructions but scholars like original stuff and
to some extent the public can be educated about their heritage.”
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Author: Stephanie Dalley
Author: Stephanie Dalley
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