Hanging Gardens of Babylon

“ As a boy no part of the world possessed a greater fascination for me than Babylonia and Assyria. This was, probably, because the first book I ever read contained wonderful stories of the Garden of Eden; of Babylon and its marvelous hanging gardens; of Nineveh and its magnificent temples and palaces; of the Tigris and the Euphrates whose waters were made to irrigate the vast and fecund plain of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. ”

“ With the exception of the Sacred Road and the bridge over the Euphrates, there is only one other place on the whole site of Babylon where hewn stone is used in bulk for building purposes, and that is the northern wall of the Ḳaṣr. Now, in all the literature referring to Babylon, stone is only recorded to have been used for buildings in two places, and those are the north wall of the Citadel and in the Hanging Gardens, a lower layer in the latter's roofing, below the layer of earth, being described as made of stone. ”

“ Piled high with glistering barbel, freshly-caught;
And foreign craft, with many-coloured sails,
And laden deep with precious merchandise,
That, over wide, bewildering waters,
Across the perilous world,
The adventurous, dark-bearded mariners,
Who swear by unknown gods in alien tongues,
Bring ever to the gates of Babylon.
We crossed the drawbridge, round whose granite piers
Swirled strong, Spring-swollen waters,
Loud and tawny,
And, through great brazen portals,
Passed within the palace gates,
When first I saw afar the hanging-gardens,
Arch on arch,
And tier on tier,
Against a glowing sky. ”

“ No such city ever stood in the earth again. Even the great cities of our days—Paris, London, New York and Berlin—do not reach the splendor, luxury and wealth of ancient Babylon. The king’s palace had a wall around it six miles long. The hanging gardens were considered the wonder of the world. The waterworks of Babylon, supplying the immense city and its hanging gardens from the river Euphrates, were more powerful and larger than any modern water supplies. ”

“ In the neighborhood of it was the royal palace, the site of which was identified with the ruins of Al-Kasr. Sloping toward the river were the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders, the location of which is in the northern mound of ruins, Babel.
The Tower of Babel, which is supposed to be the temple of Nebo in Borsippa, not far from Babylon, represents the most imposing ruin of Babylonia. It is termed in the inscriptions Ezida (“the eternal house”) , an ancient sanctuary of Nebo, and was restored with great splendor by Nebuchadnezzar. ”

“ Bas-relief, supposed to represent the Hanging Gardens at Babylon, about 645 b.c. On the slope is a temple, a stele with the figure of a king, and an altar on the path in front. On the right pointed arches support a terrace planted with trees. Streams water the sides of the wooded hill. British Museum, Assyrian Saloon, No. 92 (upper part) . The above, with Plate XIV., apparently illustrate Assur-bani-âpli's campaign against his brother Samas-sum-ukin (cf. page 391) . All these erections Nebuchadnezzar completed or altered and improved. ”

“ We have seen how the streets of Babylon followed the same lines throughout the whole of her dynastic period, and a similar spirit of conservatism no doubt characterized her architectural development. Temples were rebuilt again and again on the old sites, and even in the Neo-Babylonian period they retained the mud-brick walls and primitive decoration of their remote predecessors. Indeed, the conditions of life in Babylonia precluded any possibility of drastic change. ”

“ The people could stand in the court of the temple at Nippur and say of the mountain-like structure:
“O great mountain of Bêl, O airy mountain,
Whose summit reaches heaven,
Whose foundation in the shining deep is firmly laid,
On the land like a mighty bull lying,
With gleaming horns like the rays of the rising sun,
Like the stars of heaven that are filled with lustre!” [19]
When Babylon became the chief city of all Babylonia, it was natural that its god should be regarded as supreme. ”

“ One step, and only one, in the gratification of their desires, converted their enchanting mountain into a yawning gulf, and in its horrid wastes of darkness and of sorrow their high-blown pride was shamed and smothered. The haughty king walked on the terrace heights of Babylon, and, beneath the calm splendor of an Assyrian sky, voiced the complacent feeling which dulled his sense of dependence upon God—as the perfumes of the East lull into waking-slumber the faculties of the soul. ”

“ The Marriage of the Gods |Marriages of the gods in Babylonia and Assyria.| At Babylon the imposing sanctuary of Bel rose like a pyramid above the city in a series of eight towers or stories, planted one on the top of the other. On the highest tower, reached by an ascent which wound about all the rest, there stood a spacious temple, and in the temple a great bed, magnificently draped and cushioned, with a golden table beside it. ”

“ The excavations at Babylon have thus thrown some direct light upon the condition of the city during the period at which it first became the capital. It is true that no portion of a royal or sacred building as yet identified antedates the later Assyrian Empire, and that, as the result of extensive reconstruction, the ruins of temples, palaces and city-walls are mainly those of the Neo-Babylonian period. ”

“ The most ancient name of Babylon in the idiom of the Ante-Semitic population, Tin-tir-kî, signifies "the place of the tree of life." Finally, the representation of the sacred plant which we assimilate with that of the Edenic traditions, appears as a symbol of life eternal on those curious sarcophagi, in enamelled clay, belonging to the latest period of Chaldean civilization, after Alexander the Great, which have been discovered at Warkah, the ancient Uruk. ”

“ Above these sculptures ran bands of history, in the immaculate cuneiform, giving the story of Babylon from the time of her founding down to to-day. Still over this, on the enamelled tiles that carried the walls on up to the dim and shadowy roof, were the decorations for the feast. Great cloths of silk and muslin, elaborately and beautifully embroidered, fell, softly luminous, in the glowing light. Ropes of flowers were everywhere festooned; and their fragrance alone would have rendered the air rich. ”

“ More especially, the Belus temple, which was a stade square, and (according to some) a stade in height, must almost of necessity have a representative among the existing remains. This, indeed, is admitted on all hands; and the controversy is thereby narrowed to the question, which of two great ruins—the only two entitled by their size and situation to attention—has the better right to be regarded as the great and celebrated sanctuary of the ancient Babylon.
That the mound of Babil is the ziggurat or tower of a Babylonian temple scarcely admits of a doubt. ”

“ To the vast mound of Babel succeed long undulating heaps of earth, bricks, and pottery. A solitary mass of brickwork, rising from the summit of the largest mound, marks the remains known to the Arabs as the “Mujelibé,” or the “overturned.” [192]
Other shapeless heaps of rubbish cover for many an acre the face of the land. On all sides, fragments of glass, marble, pottery, and inscribed brick are mingled with that peculiar nitrous and blanched soil, which, bred from the remains of ancient habitations, checks or destroys vegetation, and renders the site of Babylon a naked and hideous waste. ”

“ The high-priest and his seers became more than ever absolute; ruling king and slave by means of unreasoning superstition; while in the houses of the priesthood [Pg 177] the gods were regarded as an amusing myth. But now—now—for two years past, all Babylonia, from Agâdé to the gulf, had been in a state of feverish religiosity, for the reason that there was a goddess in Babylon: a goddess—a living, baffling, radiant presence, whose origin none knew. Amraphel was baffled by her at every point ”

“ It draws all eyes by its superior height and sometimes by its costly ornamentation; it inspires awe by the religious associations which belong to it; finally, it is a stronghold as well as a place of worship, and may furnish a refuge to thousands in the time of danger.
A Babylonian temple seems to have stood commonly within a walled enclosure. In the case of the great temple of Belus at Babylon, the enclosure is said to have been a square of two stades each way, or, in other words, to have contained an area of thirty acres. ”

“ No sculptures or inscribed slabs, the panelling of the walls of palaces, have been discovered amongst the ruins of Babylon as in those of Nineveh. Scarcely a detached figure in stone, or a solitary tablet, has been dug out of the vast heaps of rubbish. “Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.” ”

“ THE TEMPLE-TOWER OF E-ZIDA AT BORSIPPA.
(II) THE LION OF BABYLON ON THE ḲAṢR MOUND
[Pg 19]
In order to grasp the character of the new evidence, and the methods by which it has been obtained at Babylon, it is advisable to bear in mind some of the general characteristics of Babylonian architecture and the manner in which the art of building was influenced by the natural conditions of the country. One important point to realize is that the builders of all periods were on the defensive, and not solely against human foes, for in that aspect they resembled other builders of antiquity. ”

“ Although the building materials thus used in the great edifices of Babylon may seem extremely mean when compared with those employed in the stupendous palace temples of Egypt, and even in the less massive edifices of Assyria, yet the Babylonians appear to have raised, [Pg 424] with them alone, structures which excited the wonder and admiration of the most famous travellers of antiquity. ”

“ There, too, they looked upon the buildings of old time, the fanes which were there when their forefather Abraham was a dweller in the land, changed, doubtless, beyond recognition. Chief among these was the great temple of Belus, joined to the tower called “the temple of the foundation of heaven and [pg 472] earth,” and which Nebuchadnezzar speaks of as “the tower of Babylon.” There, too, were the shrines dedicated to Zēr-panitum, consort of Merodach, the goddess Nin-maḫ; Nebo, the god of wisdom; Sin, the Moon-god; Šamaš, the Sun-god; Gula, the goddess of healing, and many other divinities. ”

“ In Babylonia there was a tradition that not long after the flood men were tall and strong and became so puffed up that they defied the gods and tried to erect a tower called Babylon by means of which they could scale heaven. ”

“ Beyond these surface ruins and below them there must be cities arranged, as it were, in underground flats, one piled on another, strata below strata, till we reach the debris of the pre-Semitic days of Western and Central Asia, when the Turanian races who supplied Arcadian civilization to Mesopotamia peopled the land. Just as we cannot tell exactly when Babylon first became a city, so are we confounded by the age of Balkh. Babylon belongs to the time when myths were grouped around the adventures of a solar hero. ”

“ Bel was no human king possessed of magical powers, who had once sat on the throne of Babylon; he remained the god who could, it is true, display himself at times to his faithful worshippers, but whose habitation was in the far-off heavens, from which he surveyed and regulated the actions of mankind. The gods of Babylonian mythology still belonged to heaven and not to earth, and its heroes are men and not humanised gods. ”

“ The town-life in Babylonia at this time must have had many features in common with that of any provincial town in Mesopotamia to-day, except that the paternal government of the First Dynasty undoubtedly saw to it that the streets were kept clean, and made strenuous efforts to ensure that private houses should be soundly built and maintained in proper repair. We have already followed out the lines of some of the streets in ancient Babylon, [30] and noted that, while the [Pg 184] foundations of the houses were usually of burnt brick, crude brick was invariably employed for their upper structure. ”

“ The present desolation of the country about Babylon is well known; the whole region, once so fertile, appears now to be little better than a desert, stripped alike of its people, its buildings, and its vegetation, all of which made, in former times, its surpassing glory and its wealth. If at one moment of a brief spring, grass and flowers are found upon those shapeless ruins, a scorching sun soon blasts their beauty ”

“ While the old buildings decayed, some new ones arose in their place, including a Greek theatre for the use of the large Greek colony. [40] Many of the Babylonians themselves adopted Greek names and fashions, but the more conservative elements, particularly among the priesthood, continued to retain their own separate life and customs. In the year 270 b.c. we have a record that Antiochus Soter restored the temples of Nairn and Marduk at Babylon and Borsippa, [41] and the recent diggings at Erech have shown that the old temple in that city retained its ancient cult under a new name. ”

“ They say that the first inhabitants of the earth, glorying in their own strength and size and despising the gods, undertook to build a tower whose top should reach the sky, in the place where Babylon now stands; but when it approached the heaven the winds assisted the gods, and overturned the work upon its contrivers, and its ruins are said to be still at Babylon; and the gods introduced a diversity of tongues among men, who till that time had all spoken the same language; and a war arose between Kronos and Titan. ”