Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The Hanging Gardens of Semiramis in Babylon, the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon ( Ancient Greek oἱ [ τῆς Σεμιράμιδος ] Κῆποι Κρεμαστοὶ Βαβυλώνιοι ( hoi TES Semirámidos Kêpoi Kremastoí Babylônioi ), Latin Semiramidis Horti Pensiles or Horti Pensiles Babylonis, Arabic الحدائق المعلقة, DMG al - Hada ʾ iq al -mu ʿ allaqa ) called, were the reports of Greek authors after an elaborate gardens in Babylon on the Euphrates ( Mesopotamia, located in today's Iraq ) and one of the Seven wonders of the World. The Greek mythical figure of Semiramis is sometimes equated with the Assyrian Queen Schammuramat.
History
According to the general tradition, the gardens of Queen Semiramis said to have been built, whose fame today extends even to the distant Armenia, where a large irrigation canal for the city Wan on Lake Van "stream of Semiramis " and the highest part of Kastels the city " Semiramisburg " is called. Against the circulating in antiquity opinion that the gardens were built by Semiramis, but already raised protest Diodorus (II, 10, I): Rather, they have built a Babylonian king. Upon closer notice of Borosos it was Nebuchadnezzar II: His wife is said to have longed for the lowlands of Babylonia and the forests and mountains, so the king had built for her: the Hanging Gardens.
Other important ancient authors, who were staying in the area or to report on the area, the gardens call not so, as Herodotus ( Histories I, 181), Xenophon ( Kyropaedia ) and Pliny ( Natural History VI. 123).
The descriptions to which we owe our conception of these gardens, go to the following authors back:
- Antipater of Sidon ( beginning of the 2nd century BC), in his poem on the Seven Wonders of the World in the Anthologia Palatine does not set a place ( " ... even the Hanging Gardens and the colossus of Helios, ...").
- The Chaldean Berosus (* about 350 BC), from their lost work Babyloniaka the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus extensively quoted.
- The Greek physician Ctesias of Cnidus, the BC fell to 400 in Persian prisoner of war and worked as a physician to the king Artaxerxes II. He left behind an extensive and at times imaginative work entitled Persika. What he wrote in Babylon, is largely lost, except for quotations in the works of Diodorus and Quintus Curtius Rufus.
- Diodorus Sikulos that his description ( Histories II 10.1-6 ) approximately in the middle of the 1st century BC, wrote and quoted from a now lost works of the Greek Ctesias of Cnidus. Ctesias was probably long before the conquest by Alexander the Great at the Persian court. His report is probably based in turn on a report by the ancient Greek historian Kleitarchos. Diodorus Sikulos ' report is especially significant because it holds clearly that no mechanism was visible, which transported the water upwards.
- Strabo, a Greek scholar who wrote his geography in BC 1st century.
- Flavius Josephus, who refers to Berossus.
- Philo of Byzantium, probably around 250 BC a kind of guide to the "Seven Wonders of the World " wrote.
According to the ancient writers, the Hanging Gardens were next to or on the palace and formed a square with a side length of 120 m. The terraces reached a height of about 25 to 30 m. The thick walls and pillars of the construction scaffold were predominantly made from fire bricks, under the individual stages paragraphs, passages should have been located. The floor floors consisted of three layers, a layer of pipe with a lot of asphalt, about a double layer of baked bricks, which were embedded in plaster, and the top thick sheets of lead. Thus, the penetration of moisture was prevented. In this design you could muster humus and various types of trees can plant. An irrigation was possible from the nearby Euphrates.
Archaeological localization experiments
Often the excavated by Robert Koldewey in the northeast part of the southern palace plant whose foundation consisted of several vaulted rooms, interpreted as a remnant of the hanging gardens. This building consisted of fourteen chambers. The foundation walls formed a trapezium with edge lengths 23-35 meters. In addition, decreed the construction of a fountain. Striking were the paternoster -like buildings that apparently transported water between several floors. It was found that this water sprang from several sources. The excavated area is assigned Nebuchadnezzar II.
Tungsten nail locates the gardens to the west of the Southern Citadel, probably in the region of the external drive, and then takes a new building in the Persian period by Atossa, the mother of Xerxes I., to which therefore had to their " great-aunt Amyitas " for Nebuchadnezzar gardens can be set up, wanted to remember.
Julian Reade locates the gardens in the outdoor work of the so-called Northern Palace, east to the palace oriented toward.
Stephanie Dalley suggested the early 90s that the model of the Hanging Gardens, the palace of the Assyrian king Sennacherib garden was in Nineveh on the Tigris. This had been built for his wife Tāšmetun - Sarrat and watered by an Archimedean screw. Dalley put 2013 in a book further evidence for topographical studies and historical sources for their hypothesis.
Other interpretations
Kai Brodersen assumes that these gardens never existed, but that an inaccessible palace garden of Nebuchadnezzar II in the imagination of the authors assumed ever more wonderful forms over the centuries. As evidence, he points out that these buildings until today could not be located satisfactorily, that the garden could be assumed forms of irrigation, which were invented only after Nebuchadnezzar II, and that report neither contemporary Babylonian texts still Herodotus of such a building. Other authors (eg Jursa 2004, 77) now doubt the interpretation Koldeweys.