The Hanging Gardens of Babylon have been one of the Seven Wonders of the World for quite some time. However, their location had not been located until now. Unfortunately for the legend, an Oxford University researcher has put the Babylon gardens’ legendary location 300 miles outside of the famous biblical-time city.
The researcher, Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University, has been looking into the gardens for about 18 years and not only discovered their location—but also their true architect, according to the Guardian.
According to Dalley, the gardens were the brain child of Assyrian king, Sennacherib, as opposed to the popularly-believed Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar.
Dalley was able to translate ancient Greek and Roman texts to find the gardens location and engineer. Among the analyzed scripts was a seventh-century BC Assyrian inscription which had been poorly translated in the 1920s, turning the literature into “absolute nonsense.”
She was surprised when she found the account Sennacherib gave of an “unrivalled place” and a “wonder for all people.” He went on to make reference to a complicated system which was used to bring water from Nineveh to the hanging gardens. Some recently-done excavations have uncovered traces of the aqueducts used in the system.
One of the aqueducts near Nineveh even had the inscription "Sennacherib king of the world … Over a great distance I had a watercourse directed to the environs of Nineveh…"
Although Dalley is looking forward to sharing her work, she understands that this new study will challenge conventional thinking:
"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."
Her new study will be published on May 23 in the Oxford University Press.
