# F_dalley_other.md — Stephanie Dalley's other statements of the Nineveh thesis, and the long reviews of the 2013 book Full texts are given where they were obtained from a lawful open source; otherwise the extract obtained is given and the gap is stated. Working copies of the raw downloads (`raw_F/`, files named below; items marked raw_D are the copies used for D_scholarship.md) are not included in this folder. ## Inventory | # | Item | Status | Source / URL | Raw file | |---|------|--------|--------------|----------| | A | Dalley 1993, "Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved", *Garden History* 21/1: 1-13 | FULL TEXT (OCR) | Internet Archive item `dalley-1993-hanging-gardens` (JSTOR-derived scan; JSTOR stable 1587050) | raw_D/dalley_1993_garden_history_ocr.txt (copy: raw_F/copy_of_rawD_dalley_1993_garden_history_ocr.txt) | | B | Dalley 2008, "Babylon as a Name for Other Cities Including Nineveh", in R. D. Biggs, J. Myers & M. T. Roth (eds), *Proceedings of the 51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale* (SAOC 62), Chicago: Oriental Institute, 25-33 | FULL TEXT | https://isac.uchicago.edu/research/publications/saoc/saoc-62 (open-access PDF; PDF leaves 37-45) | raw_F/saoc62.pdf; raw_F/dalley_2008_saoc62_babylon_as_name.txt | | C | Dalley, S. & Oleson, J. P. 2003, "Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw: The Context of Invention in the Ancient World", *Technology and Culture* 44/1: 1-26 | FULL TEXT | Project MUSE / JHU Press PDF (raw_D) | raw_D/dalley_oleson_2003.txt (+ _TC.pdf; copy in raw_F) | | D | Dalley 2017, "Sennacherib's Palace Garden at Nineveh, a World Wonder", in L. P. Petit & D. Morandi Bonacossi (eds), *Nineveh, the Great City* (PALMA 13), Leiden: Sidestone, 188-191 | FULL TEXT | Sidestone Press open-access PDF of the volume (raw_D/nineveh_great_city_2017_sidestone.pdf) | raw_F/dalley_2017_sidestone_ch37.txt | | E1 | Dalley, OUPblog, "The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced", 17 June 2013 | FULL TEXT | https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/mystery-hanging-garden-babylon/ | raw_F/oupblog_2013.html, dalley_oupblog_2013-06-17.txt | | E2 | OUPblog, "Demystifying the Hanging Garden of Babylon" (video interview), 29 June 2013 | text intro only (videos) | https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/demystifying-hanging-garden-babylon/ (via Goodreads mirror) | raw_F/goodreads_blog.html, dalley_oupblog_qa_2013-06-29.txt | | E3 | PBS *Secrets of the Dead*, "The Lost Gardens of Babylon: Q&A with Dr. Stephanie Dalley" (2014) | FULL TEXT | https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/the-lost-gardens-of-babylon-qa-with-dr-stephanie-dalley-tv-host-author-of-lost-gardens-of-babylon/1172/ | raw_F/pbs_qa.html, dalley_pbs_qa_2014.txt | | E4 | National Geographic News, 31 May 2013 (Dalley quotations) | extract | https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/130531-babylon-hanging-gardens-nineveh-seven-wonders | raw_F/natgeo_2013.html, natgeo_2013-05-31.txt | | E5 | CSMC Hamburg, "The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were at ... Nineveh!" (Mesopotamian Bulletins, 30 Jan 2018) — report of the thesis with translations of the inscriptions | FULL TEXT | https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/2018-01-30.html | raw_F/csmc_hamburg.html, csmc_hamburg_2018_lecture_report.txt | | E6 | ISAC (Oriental Institute) Chicago lecture abstract, 28 Oct 2015 | FULL TEXT | https://isac.uchicago.edu/article/lecture-stephanie-dalley-hanging-garden-babylon-elusive-world-wonder-traced | raw_F/isac_lecture.html | | E7 | Yale NELC Rosenthal Lecture listing, 8 Apr 2016 | listing only | https://nelc.yale.edu/event/hanging-garden-babylon-solution-old-problem | raw_F/yale_nelc.html | | F1 | Ariel M. Bagg, review of Dalley 2013, *Bibliotheca Orientalis* 71/3-4 (2014) cols. 485-492 | FULL TEXT | Peeters Online Journals, open-access section PDF https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3062124 | raw_F/bior71_3062124.pdf, bagg_2014_bior71_review_dalley.txt | | F2 | Timothy Potts, "Looking for the Hanging Gardens", *New York Review of Books*, 26 Sep 2013 | FULL TEXT | https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/09/26/looking-hanging-gardens/ (raw_D) | raw_D/nyrb_potts_2013.txt (copy in raw_F) | | F3 | Tom Holland, "By the Rivers of Nineveh", *Literary Review* 410 (June 2013) | opening two paragraphs only (paywall) | https://literaryreview.co.uk/by-the-rivers-of-nineveh | raw_F/litrev_holland.html, holland_literary_review_2013.txt | | F4 | R. J. van der Spek, "Hangende Tuin van Babylon in Ninevé?", *Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis* 126/4 (2013) 580-581, DOI 10.5117/TVGESCH2013.4.B4 | NOT OBTAINED (Cloudflare block at aup-online.com; Wayback tunnel reset) | https://doi.org/10.5117/tvgesch2013.4.b4 | raw_F/tvg_doi.html | | F5 | Bichler & Rollinger 2005 (critique of the thesis before the book) | FULL TEXT (raw_D) | achemenet.com pre-print | raw_D/bichler_rollinger_2005.txt; page-keyed extraction raw_F/br2005_dalley1994_citations.txt | | F6 | Publisher-quoted press notices (Lane Fox FT; Kirkus; Holland) and a 2023 blog review | extracts | OUP product page (Wayback 2016); itsmoreofacomment.com | raw_F/wb_oup_global.html, blog_imoac_2023_review.txt | | H | Reade, J. E. 2000, "Alexander the Great and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon", *Iraq* 62: 195-217 | Extract (opening) + full reference list only; PDF closed | https://doi.org/10.2307/4200490 (Cambridge Core 6D7FD83FF93A9BCF77A0F852C430E7C2) | raw_F/doi_reade2000.html, cc_reade2000_pdf.html, wb_jstor_reade2021.html | NOT FOUND ANYWHERE OPEN (searched: archive.org, scholar.archive.org, HathiTrust, Propylaeum-DOK, CORE, Unpaywall, OpenAlex, Google Books): Dalley 1997 (HSAO 6, 19-24); Dalley 2000 (BAIAS 18, 119-121); Dalley 2001/2002 (ARAM 13/14, 443-460); Dalley's review of Bagg 2000 in AfO 48/49 (2001/2002) 212-216; Dalley 2002 ("More about the Hanging Gardens", Of Pots and Plans, 67-73); Dalley 2005 (Anatolian Iron Ages 5, 39-43); Dalley 2015 paperback additions; reviews of the 2013 book in BMCR, JNES, JAOS, CR, JRAS, ZA, Iraq, Antiquity, LRB, TLS (none exist as far as Crossref, BMCR, LRB and TLS site searches show — the only journal reviews registered are van der Spek 2013, Choice 51-4596 (2014) and Bagg 2014). --- ## A. Dalley 1993, Garden History 21/1: 1-13 — FULL TEXT (OCR; hyphenation and OCR errors as in the scan; 'Sennachenib' = Sennacherib) Source: https://archive.org/details/dalley-1993-hanging-gardens (scan of the JSTOR PDF, stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/1587050). Pagination: the article runs pp. 1-13; page breaks are not marked in this OCR. ``` STEPHANIE DALLEY ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN GARDENS AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE HANGING GARDENS OF BABYLON RESOLVED The Babylonians and Assyrians planted gardens in cities, palace courtyards, and temples, in which trees with fragrance and edible fruits were prominent for re-creating their concept of Paradise. The famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of late antiquity, have finally been identified as the palace garden of the Assyrian king Sennachenib, constructed not at Babylon but at Nineveh, which was also known as ‘old Babylon’, around 700 B.C. Sennacherib invented the Archimedean screw, using cast copper or bronze, for watering the gardens. A sculpture now in the British Museum shows a part of the gardens in the reign of Sennacherib’s grandson, when the trees had matured. The king plants a date-palm in his palace and fills up the space beside her with a tamarisk. Meals are enjoyed in the shade of the tamarisk, skilled men gather in the shade of the date-palm, the drum is beaten, men give praise, and the king rejoices in his palace. The two trees, brother and sister, are quite different; the tamarisk and the palm-tree compete with each other. They argue and quarrel together. The tamarisk says: ‘Iam much bigger!’ And the date-palm argues back, saying: ‘I am much better than you! You, O tamarisk, are a useless tree. What good are your branches? There’s no such thing as a tamarisk fruit! Now, my fruits grace the king’s table; the king himself eats them, and people say nice things about me. I make a surplus for the gardener, and he gives it to the queen; she, being a mother, nourishes her child upon the gifts of my strength, and the adults eat them too. My fruits are always in the presence of royalty’. The tamarisk makes his voice heard; his speech is even more boastful. ‘My body is superior to yours! It’s much more beautiful than anything of yours. You are like a slavegirl who fetches and carries daily needs for her mistress’. He goes on to point out the king’s table, couch, and eating bowl are made from tamarisk wood, that the king’s clothes are made using tools of tamarisk wood; likewise the temples of the gods are full of objects made from tamarisk. The date-palm counters by pointing out that her fruits are the central offering in the cult; once they have been taken from the tamarisk dish, the bowl is used to collect up the garbage. THIS EXTRACT, from one of the most popular pieces of Babylonian literature, was written in cuneiform on clay tablets as early as 2000 B.C. It tells us about one of the earliest kinds of garden, 4,000 years ago. If we look at the natural, uncultivated environment of central Iraq, we can see immediately that the most important features of a garden would be trees for shelter from The Oriental Institute, Pusey Lane, Oxford OXI 2LE 2 ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN GARDENS the heat and the glare of the sun. By contrast, in the natural environment of southern Iraq’s beautiful marshlands, about which Wilfred Thesiger has written, we see the characteristic trees of the south — the date-palm, the tamarisk, and the Euphrates poplar — flourishing alongside the water-courses which lead into the cane-breaks of the marshland. THE COURTYARD GARDEN In ancient times the wild boar as well as domesticated pigs rootled everywhere, and the first city walls were designed not simply against human enemies but also to keep out greedy snouts, and to divert flood water whenever the great rivers — the Tigris and the Euphrates — burst their banks. For these reasons the garden was an urban phenomenon, set safely inside the walls of a city which formed a mound raised well above the flood plain of the adjacent countryside. More than that, the best place for a pleasant garden safe from marauding pigs and thieving urchins, grazing goats, and noisy people, was the large internal courtyard that was characteristic of royal palaces. This 1s where the tamarisk and the date-palm argued it out. One of the huge courtyards in the palace at Mari (c. 1800 B.c.) on the Middle Euphrates was called the Court of the Palms in contemporary written records. The walkways across it are made of baked brick, terracotta, and they are traditionally raised above the surface of the courtyard, to keep them free of drifting dust in hot weather and ubiquitous mud in winter. The ration lists found in this palace tell us that there were several professional gardeners on the palace payroll, and that the king and his entourage often ate their meals in the garden. There were certainly orchards and fishponds elsewhere, beyond the palace walls, but we know very little about them. However, it seems to have been a source of pride to have a large area within the city walls devoted to palm-groves or orchards, for the prologue to the Epic of Gilgamesh boasts of the famous city Uruk, saying: ‘One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is claypits’. The reason for such spaciousness was the need to drive herds inside the city walls at night for security and in times of siege. Indeed, an epithet of Uruk in myth is ‘the sheepfold’. By ‘orchards’, date-palm groves are probably implied. A few centuries later at the site of Ugarit on the coast of Syria, with its palace (c. 1400B.C.) looking towards the Mediterranean, we find the palace courtyard contain- ing a garden, with a not-quite-central stone basin for water forming an important feature. The excavators thought they found evidence for loose earth at the edge of one of these courtyards, and speculated that flowers or shrubs might have been planted there. It may be surprising, if one is thinking of later, Islamic gardens, that the stone water basin is not centrally placed in the courtyard. The reason may be that a tree normally took that position — either a real tree or an ornamental, imitation tree. The tree was so important in ancient Mesopotamia that it was personified as a god, Nin-Gishzida, ‘trusty tree’, and had the power of human speech, just as the date-palm and the tamarisk did in their dispute over superiority. Nin-Gishzida guarded the gate of heaven and acted as a sheriff in the Underworld. In a Babylonian elegy at the death of Tammuz (dating to the seventh century B.C. or earlier), the felled tree makes its lament in a first person narrative: STEPHANIE DALLEY 3 ‘Now they have felled me, they have carried me off forever. My father sees me and weeps. Texts and architectural remains from Ugarit suggest the possibility that gardens in palace courtyards served for the remembrance of dead ancestors. The dynastic tomb was sometimes located in a vault beneath the palace, sometimes actually beneath the courtyard; and sacrifices were offered at Ugarit to an Underworld god, Resheph, in the palace garden. The tombs of Assyrian queens of the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., found recently with all their finery beneath the paving of a courtyard in the north-west palace at Nimrud, are the most splendid examples of the practice. Is this our first evidence for the garden of remembrance? And does the tree planted in the centre of the courtyard thus symbolize regeneration in a very direct way, the family tree in every sense? Few kinds of trees are natural to central and southern Iraq, and perhaps that is the reason why the tree was so important to the ancient Babylonians. As the dispute between the date-palm and the tamarisk shows, they were valued for food and timber, but certain attributes that are less easily quantifiable are clear from scattered allusions to gardens as places for picnics, for courtship, for the display of military trophies, and for the quiet appreciation of nature’s beauty. Resinous scents were particularly valued. Several of these attributes are evident in the most famous garden picture from ancient Mesopo- tamia, although it shows a garden outside a palace: Assurbanipal, the last great king of Assyria, is shown on a sculpture feasting with his queen, reclining western-style upon a couch beneath an arbour of vines, attended by servants, courtiers, and musicians. Various trophies from his illustrious conquests are on display: an Egyptian-style necklace hangs from his couch; an Elamite bow rests on the table behind him with a sword of Iranian design. A little way off, suspended from the branch of a fragrant pine, is the dismembered head of his arch-enemy, the King of Elam. HUNTING PARKS Although the palace courtyard garden was sometimes large enough to accommodate a few attractive animals such as deer and gazelle, the royal urge to collect zoological specimens had generally to be satisfied in a wider landscape. From at least 2000 B.C. Mesopotamian kings who campaigned abroad and received exotic gifts from foreign vassal rulers took a great interest in strange plants and animals which were presumably kept at some distance from the palace, if not outside the city walls. The keenest collector of animals was Tiglath-Pileser I (around 1000 B.C.), who says in his royal inscriptions: I formed herds of horses, oxen and asses from the booty I took when I gained dominion over lands with the support of the god Assur, my lord. In addition, I got control of and formed herds of nayalu-deer, ayalu-deer, gazelle and ibex which the gods Ashur and Ninurta, the gods who love me, had given me in the course of the hunt in high mountain ranges. I numbered them like flocks of sheep .. .. I took cedar, box-tree, and Kanish oak from the lands over which I had gained dominion — such trees as none among previous kings, my forefathers, had ever planted — and I planted [them] in the orchards of my land. I took rare orchard fruit which is not found in my land and filled the orchards of Assyria. 4 ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN GARDENS ... I received tribute from the lands of Byblos, Sidon and Arvad; I received a crocodile and a large, female ape of the sea coast. ... I made replicas in alabaster and basalt of a nahiru which is called a sea-horse and which . . . I had killed with a harpoon of my own making in the Great Sea of the West; and of a live yak which was brought from the mountain Lumash on the far side of the country Habhu. CITY GARDENS Just over a century later another Assyrian king, Assurnasirpal 11 (883-859 B.c.), undertook enormous waterworks in order to bring water from the foothills and mountain streams to irrigate newly planted orchards in his capital city Nimrud, which lies by the Tigris river in northern Iraq. He has left us his own account of the garden that he planted: I dug out a canal from the Upper Zab, cutting through a mountain peak, and called it Abundance Canal. I watered the meadows of the Tigris and planted orchards with all kinds of fruit trees in the vicinity. I planted seeds and plants that I had found in the countries through which I had marched and in the highlands which I had crossed: pines of different kinds, cypresses and junipers of different kinds, almonds, dates, ebony, rosewood, olive, oak, tamarisk, walnut, terebinth and ash, fir, pomegranate, pear, quince, fig, grapevine .... The canal-water gushes from above into the gardens; fragrance pervades the walkways, streams of water as numerous as the stars of heaven flow in the pleasure garden .... Like a squirrel I pick fruit in the garden of delights. Not all of these saplings came from far-distant countries; we are lucky enough to have a letter of the late eighth century B.c. that indicates a flourishing nursery trade in fruit trees on the Middle Euphrates. When Sargon II (722-704 B.C.) built an entirely new capital city, named Dur-Sharrukin, north-east of Nineveh, he bought up land from local owners who were properly compensated, and had parks and orchards laid out for his royal pleasure, where he and his family could practise hunting lions, and falconry. A letter from one of his governors sent him a report as follows: I have levied upon the people of Nemad-Istar the supply of 2,350 loads of apple trees, and 450 loads of medlar trees. [The people of Suhu province] are collecting saplings of almond, quince and plum trees, and they are transporting them to Dur-Sharrukin. The people of Suhu are also bringing saplings from the land of Lage: 1,000 loads of apple trees. Their vanguard has arrived and I have seen it, but their rearguard has not yet arrived. Although in some areas, the municipal planting was perhaps not very imaginative, for example alongside the banks of rivers or the sides of roads, in other places, particularly in the gardens of royal cities, the planting was varied in every way. It is almost certain that the slopes, an artificial lake, and a pavilion shown on the monumental relief sculptures of Sargon were contrived to give a more interesting landscape (Figure 1). A finely built altar here graces the top of a hill surrounded by a grove of fragrant pines; at the foot of the hill, set out over the water like a boathouse is a splendid little pillared pavilion, backed by fruit trees. The various trees, a hilly terrain, flowing water, and the particular architectural features become characteristic of royal gardens within cities. Whether Sargon’s garden and boating lake were set within the walls of his city or outside it, is not clear. But the style of garden is obviously naturalistic: this is emphatically not the forerunner of the Persian garden with its geometric layout and STEPHANIE DALLEY 5 Figure 1. Garden of Sargon II at his new capital Dur-Sharrukin. Drawing from P. E. Botta and E. Flandin, Monument de Ninive 11 (Paris, 1849), pl. 114 symbolic water conduits leading to a central pool. It is a hilly mountainside in which the king can go hunting with falcons, or boating. Like the pillared pavilion which was explicitly a North Syrian or Anatolian borrowing, ‘just as they are in the Hatti-land’, the style of garden may have been adopted from the same area. Sargon’s successor Sennacherib (704-681 B.C.) brought clear water from a mountain river down to his gardens and parks at Nineveh along channels and aqueducts from a beautiful place called Bavian, north-east of Nineveh. The remains of this aqueduct can still be seen, built in monumental stone, with arches that have pointed tops. Sennacherib described his works in his own words: I cut through the hills with iron pickaxes and ran a canal over one and a half double-hours (about 10 miles?) of ground ... and I made the water flow through in channels. To arrest the flow of the water through those orchards, I made a swamp and set out a cane-brake in it: herons, wild boar, beasts of the forests I released into it. By the command of the gods, vines, all kinds of fruit trees and herbs thrived and burgeoned within the gardens. Cypress and mulberry trees grew large and multiplied; cane-brakes grew fast to mighty proportions; sky-birds and water-birds built their nests; and the wild sows and beasts of the forests brought forth their young in abundance. I cut down some mulberries and cypresses that grew in the parks, and reeds from the swamp, and used them as needed in building my royal palaces. This swamp was a completely artificial creation, inspired by the campaign that Sennacherib had conducted successfully in southern Babylonia. What we can never expect to find out is whether the imported plants and animals thrived in their new situation: cotton and olives which Sennacherib tried to raise may have failed to flourish; his artificial swamp may have nourished more mosquitoes than wild boar; and local fish-pond managers surely protested vehemently at herons who reared their young on fish intended for the royal table. 6 ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN GARDENS TEMPLE GARDENS Sennacherib also built a temple of the New Year Festival within a garden, outside the walls of Assur, the traditional capital of Assyria on the middle Tigris. Thanks to careful excavation of the root-pits, the layout of trees or bushes was discovered by a German expedition, although the type of plant could not be established. Within the central courtyard of the simple, rectangular building, as well as outside it on all four sides, trees or shrubs had been planted very neatly in regular rows. The excavators reconstructed them as bushes, but they may have been trees with slim trunks, to give the impression of a sanctuary within a grove. This single example shows us that temple courtyards, like palace courtyards, were used for gardens. There seems, however, to be a marked difference between Assyrian temples in the north and Babylonian temples in the south; the latter possessed far larger land-holdings, apparently in close proximity to the temple buildings themselves, and those lands were cultivated as small-holdings that took turns to provide offerings to the cult, especially dates, pomegranates and figs. The temple of the New Year Festival may have been the place where the king, representing the god, performed the ritual marriage ceremony with a priestess. That love-making took place in gardens, is clear from the love lyric of Nabu, god of wisdom and his divine spouse, Tashmetu: “The shade of the cedar, shade of the cedar, shade of the cedar, is the king’s shelter. The shade of the cypress is for his nobles. The shade of the juniper is shelter for my Nabu and for my games!’ ‘For what, O what, are you dressed up, my Tashmetu?’ ‘So that I may go into the garden with you, my Nabu, let me go into the garden, into the garden to my lord. Let me go alone into the beautiful garden . . .. May my eyes see the plucking of your fruit, May my ears hear the song of your birds . . .. Bind your days to the garden and to the Lord! Bind your nights to the beautiful garden.’ ‘Let my Tashmetu come with me into the garden.’ Major temples in ancient Mesopotamia have been found decorated with semi- engaged columns imitating the trunks of date palms and the spiral-patterned trunks of a palm with inedible fruit, perhaps Chamaerops humilis. The facade of the temple to the Sun god at Larsa, for instance, was adorned in this baroque fashion. The temple of the New Year Festival at Assur, described above, stood in a grove of trees. We can deduce that some urban and suburban temples were given an architectural form and decoration symbolic of a setting in a sacred grove, in the garden of paradise. Usually the main temple in a big city had a ziggurrat or temple tower with several stages and a shrine on top. When Sir Leonard Woolley excavated at Ur, he found that the ziggurrat was a mud-brick structure with an outer casing of baked brick. The whole structure was perforated at regular intervals by holes which penetrated right into the brickwork. Woolley interpreted them as drainage holes to carry off water from plants which adorned the various stages of the tower. This was incorrect: the holes are there to enable the brickwork to dry out evenly and so to prevent cracking and collapse. Several more recently discovered representations of ziggurrats, both on monumental sculptures and in miniature on cylinder seals, have confirmed that the towers were indeed not planted with trees or bushes. Sometimes they are topped with animal horns as are also the battlements of cities. STEPHANIE DALLEY 7 Quite apart from the structural problems of planting large plants to grow on a mud-brick tower, and the mechanical problems of raising water so high, it would have been almost impossible to supply them with enough water without washing away the mud-brick of the tower. THE HANGING GARDENS Woolley’s writings were so popular that it has proved difficult to dislodge this miscon- ception about ziggurrat gardens from the public mind. Many people still think that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were planted on the stages of the ziggurrat, so that the foliage hung over the sides, even though there is nothing in the descriptions of Classical writers to support the idea. A part of the problem lies in the English word ‘hanging’, which implies trailing plants, growing downwards below the place where they are rooted. The Greek word, kremastos, is explained in some detail by Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, and Philo of Byzantium. It was used for artificial slopes raised up on terraces constructed of stone, bitumen, and timber like a Greek theatre, upon which soil was heaped and trees planted. For years there has been an embarrassing problem about the location and appear- ance of the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. They were described by several Classical authors, among whom are Berossos (known from quotations in the writings of Josephus), Strabo, and others mentioned above. Berossos stated that Nebuchadnezzar had built them; Quintus Curtius Rufus stated that an Assyrian king who conquered Babylon built them. All agreed that they lay in Babylon near the royal palace. They were said to be built upon vaulted stone terraces and to imitate a mountainside with trees. Diodorus Siculus and Strabo empha- sized that they were particularly marvellous for a system of watering which carried water invisibly up to the top of the gardens. Strabo specifically said that it was an Archimedean screw. A German team excavated the centre of Babylon and the palaces of Nebuchad- nezzar, so that the layout of the palace area is now particularly well known, and there are cuneiform texts which describe the topography of the city. The excavators did discover a brick vaulted substructure within one of the palaces, but nothing on a scale that might have warranted a description as one of the wonders of the world. Since the Classical texts stated that the gardens lay beside the river, and since an enormous amount of water would have been needed to irrigate such a garden, investigators searched for a site alongside the Euphrates beside the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar, but failed to find any evidence for the famous gardens. I came to the conclusion that since there was a lot of confusion between Nineveh and Babylon and between Assyria and Babylonia in Classical sources, a solution to the problem might be found by analyzing that confusion. Diodorus Siculus, in describing ‘Babylon’, seemed to give details that belonged to Nineveh, in particular his description of a palace with walls that were adorned with sculptured stone reliefs depicting scenes of hunting and battles. This is appropriate to the well known palaces of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal at Nineveh, but definitely inappropriate to the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, which were decorated in an entirely different way. When describing 8 ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN GARDENS Nineveh, on the other hand, Diodorus Siculus located it on the wrong river, the Euphrates, rather than the Tigris. Another confusion existed: between Nebuchadnezzar and Sennacherib. This arose mainly from Jewish sources which seem to have conflated the two attacks on Jerusalem described in the Old Testament. A particularly clear example of this confusion is evident in the aprocryphal Book of Judith, which opens with the statement that Nebuchadnezzar was king of the Assyrians (Babylonians would be correct) and ruled in Nineveh (Babylon would be correct). A breakthrough came from a new attempt to understand the technical description given in one of Sennacherib’s inscriptions. He described the building of his new ‘Palace without a Rival’ in Nineveh, the layout of adjacent gardens, and the new invention which, instead of the usual shaduf, watered the gardens. The curious vocabulary, of which previous translators had been able to make no good sense, created new technical meanings. The word ‘tree trunks’ described cylinders (in fact the word was already attested in this sense in mathematical texts). The name for a palm tree that has a spiral pattern on the trunk where the old fronds have broken away was used to describe a screw. The Babylonian name for this palm, known from other texts to have inedible fruit, is alamittu, and it had already been tentatively identified as Chamaerops humilis, which does indeed exhibit a spiral effect on the trunk. (There are two particularly fine, mature examples of this tree at present in the palm house at the Botanic Gardens in Oxford.) Proof that this pattern was thought of as a spiral comes from architectural evidence: semi-engaged columns on temples have been excavated at several ancient Mesopotamian sites, giving alternate pairs of imitation date-palm trunks with a scallop pattern and non-edible-fruit palm with a spiral pattern; the two kinds of pattern are made with shaped bricks. Sennacherib described how he cast the two components out of copper or bronze from clay moulds, and put them together to make a water-lifting device. It is perhaps not surprising to find that the Archimedean screw existed some four centuries before the lifetime of Archimedes himself. Great inventions are commonly attributed to a later person who succeeded in publicizing the discovery or in putting it to a new use. In the case of Archimedes (as also with the theory of Pythagoras), it is likely that he claimed the honour for having been the first to describe mathematically and with precision the physical principles behind the practical application. Sennacherib’s text does not make it clear how the screws were rotated. They were set over cisterns. The inscription does not specify how many there were. It does seem clear that the tremendous problem of watering mountain trees planted upon artificially terraced slopes was solved in this way. It is significant that Sennacherib gave such prestige to the construction of the gardens and their watering system. This set a precedent for future kings. One of the main arguments for denying that Nebuchadnezzar had ever built the gardens was that his building inscriptions, complete and detailed as they are, never described new gardens or a new system of watering. In the latter respect he restricted his interest to the completion of a municipal shaduf platform beside the Euphrates which his father had begun. By locating the Hanging Gardens in Nineveh another puzzle has been solved. When Herodotus described the city of Babylon in the fifth century B.c., he failed to mention the Hanging Gardens, and has been vilified for his unreliability in this matter. But with the STEPHANIE DALLEY 9 gardens at Nineveh, his account is vindicated. By rejecting Nebuchadnezzar in favour of Sennacherib as the builder, we can show that Q. Curtius Rufus was correct in saying that an Assyrian king who conquered Babylon was responsible. The one remaining problem is to explain how Nineveh came to be called Babylon, and recent evidence has come to light showing that this could be the case. The information comes from ancient astronomical data preserved in Arabic sources and used by Kepler. The standard calculation for the longest day was said to come from ‘old Babylon’ and was widely used even in India, regardless of latitude. The calculation was made not from the latitude of Babylon, but from the latitude of one of the northern Assyrian cities: Nineveh or Nimrud. Sennacherib himself described the garden and its watering system as a ‘Wonder for all Peoples’. A similar phrase had been used by some of his predecessors as kings of Assyria, from which we may deduce that the idea of having Wonders of the World to demonstrate man’s most marvellous constructions dates back to the ancient Assyrians. The Greek word theamata, ‘sight, wonder’, used to describe the Seven Wonders of the World, is a very close translation of the Babylonian word tabrat.. Sennacherib’s palace garden was the end product of quite a long period of development. His lengthy inscription admits that there was a previous palace on the site, but that it was too small, and was not sufficiently beautiful. This earlier building was almost certainly a palace laid out by one Assur-resh-ishi and completed by his son, the outstanding Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I (1114-1076 B.C.); beside the palace a garden was laid out, watered by a canal led from the River Khosr; and the garden boasted a small palace or pavilion. In some ways, therefore, it was a smaller, earlier version. These constructions would then have been 400 years old; Sennacherib describes how the foundations had been undermined by the flow of river water too close to the building, and by a swampy area developing around it. He pulled palace and garden down completely, and carried out extensive canal-building work to bring water in to the new palace and gardens from a mountain river. As for creating an artificial landscape, such a concept had recently been put into practice by his own father Sargon II, whose capital city Khorsabad was built on a virgin site. There he had re-created the changes of level that one expects in an old city, where over time deposits of old building rubble would have been levelled off at various different heights and new buildings set upon them. Sennacherib’s hanging gardens, watered with Archimedean screws from cisterns fed by a canal which brought water from a mountain river, represented mountain slopes planted with various kinds of aromatic trees, expressly attempting to imitate the natural landscape of the Amanus mountains in north-west Syria. There were several pavilions, described in the inscription as small palaces, within the gardens. A small relief sculpture in the British Museum almost certainly represents the garden under his grandson Assurbanipal (668—627 B.C.) in its maturity (Figure 2). Although it is not in very good condition, and may be only about a quarter of the original whole, the sculpture gives a good idea of how the garden looked. The palace is on the left of the picture; a path with an altar runs from the pavilion down to the bottom of the picture, and streams of water trickle across it. A masonry aqueduct with pointed arches brings water into the garden at the middle level; but water also flows out from under one of the arches, so it is not entirely clear whether the arched structure extended back into the hill to support a terrace, or IO ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN GARDENS COV s VES ‘ WIV LIAS ah YY Sif Ñ Z SS Am ANY VBS ASN = g OIBILIRILORLLOSIRIEIIII LIGI LASRASLA LESE TAT Y BES E ~} Y ee CEMS fe -l A > pe ‘1 o_O . PA Lay a- DADAAN Y F Woah GOH ial N LANNE ( V GMS ‘ © ee AY =a al P mee Figure2. Garden at Nineveh, drawn from a fragment of relief sculpture of Assurbanipal now in the British Museum, showing the garden described by Sennacherib. The corner of Sennacherib’s palace is just visible top left Authors drawing: © Stephanie Dalley whether it was a simple aqueduct built against the side of the hill and looking as if it supported it. The screws are not shown; as Strabo says, they raised water invisibly; but the mechanisms may have been shown on part of the picture that is now missing. The garden seems to be bowl-shaped, like a Greek theatre, corresponding to the description of Diodorus Siculus. HERBS AND FLOWERS Much has been described about trees, but very little about herbs and flowers. There is a curious cuneiform text which lists herbs and vegetables in the garden of Merodach- Baladan II, a contemporary of Sargon II and Sennacherib during the height of Assyrian garden design, who ruled from Babylon. The reason for the order of plants in fifteen different sections is not certain, but it could correspond to an arrangement of plants in different beds. The vocabulary, as far as we understand it, is highly specialized and differentiated: there are at least five different kinds of mint, for instance. Quite a few of the plants have distinctly non-Babylonian names. Although it is possible that all the STEPHANIE DALLEY II MZ IRAAN | li TSS ih Wy Wy. Ss ay SOS VA ay 2525 SS rs t j | OSS: Figure 3. Fragment of relief sculpture of Assurbanipal showing rare details of flowers in a hunting park Author’s drawing: © Stephanie Dalley plants belong toa physic garden, each one having a medicinal use, we cannot be certain of this, nor is the location specified as being in a palace. It expressly belongs to the king. Herbal medicine was certainly developed to a high art in Babylonia by that period, as many esoteric medical texts demonstrate. The garden of Merodach-Baladan was dis- cussed in the pages of this journal by Dr Helen Leach ten years ago. Least known for ancient Mesopotamia is the vocabulary for flowers. Certainly, they were appreciated: Sargon II’s courtiers often hold a flower in one hand; and a sculpture showing lions at rest in a royal garden (Figure 3) definitely shows flowering plants, one a lily. Where art critics have praised certain relief sculptures of Assurbanipal for their modern use of unfilled space, I suspect that details such as flowers were painted on to the smooth stone and have since disappeared. But as trees and shrubs supply the shade, fragrance, and fruit that ancient Mesopotamians required from their gardens, it is possible that the art of growing garden flowers for their own value was less highly esteemed. PARADISE AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN The Greeks used a Persian word, paradetsos, for an enclosure, a garden, an orchard and for paradise and the Garden of Eden. As we have seen, the idea of an enclosed area was fundamental to the ancient Mesopotamian garden. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, on the other hand, the forest of pines or cedars, which stood on the mountain slopes of the Lebanon, was a sacred place guarded by the giant Humbaba, appointed by the highest gods. The I2 ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN GARDENS hero Gilgamesh and companion Enkidu committed sacrilege by entering it, killing its guardian, and cutting down its trees. In the Arabian Nights’ story of Gilgamesh (the Tale of Buluqiya), the giant guards the trees of the Garden of Eden, where Solomon’s Tomb lies. This serves to emphasize that the Garden consisted of trees, and shows the connection of trees with the Garden of Eden, and with ‘paradise’ as the last resting place of great sages. Does this mean that the ‘original’ garden of Eden is to be located in Lebanon? Even within the ancient Mesopotamian tradition there are two different places for Humbaba’s forest; the Sumerian story puts it in the Zagros mountains between Iraq and Iran. The origin of the word Eden is uncertain; the Sumerian Edin, with which it has been compared, is an unlikely proposition, since it is a word for the arid semi-desert beyond the areas of cultivation. A North Syrian state called Bit Adini in Assyrian times has also been suggested; certainly the country there is beautiful, with a profusion of trees, but there is no reason to connect the words except a vague similarity of sound. It has been suggested that Bahrein, an island in the Arabian/Persian Gulf, famous for its fresh water springs (but otherwise rather desolate) is the site of Eden because some Sumerian myths are set there, according to its identification as ancient Dilmun. This seems quite unlikely; in Sennacherib’s time Dilmun was well known as a backwater inhabited by roughnecks who still used copper tools in the Iron Age. For the Arabs Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, then known as Serendib, was equated with earthly paradise, perhaps because of the fabulous gardens of Sigiriya, dating from the fifth century A.D. No doubt even in early antiquity many different locations were favoured by different groups of people, according to the most famous gardens and groves in the vicinity. | The place of ancient Mesopotamia in garden history is fundamental. The identifica- tion of the elusive Hanging Gardens at Nineveh, alias ‘old Babylon’, helps to show the character of its tradition. This 1s quite different from the formal, symbolical, layout of later Persian and other Middle Eastern gardens. It has its own symbolism and a special appeal as the re-creation of paradise, the Garden of Eden. It belongs to a romantic tradition, in creating by artificial means a seemingly natural landscape into which an altar or an elegant pavilion might be inserted, as in a sacred grove, a royal paradise. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Scottish branch of the Garden History Society for inviting me to repeat a lecture (first given at the Department for Continuing Education in Oxford) during the course of which the solution to the problem of the Hanging Gardens began to occur to me. In this bibliography earlier discussions of the problem are included for source information and for historical interest. NOTE The author is writing a detailed account of the Hanging Gardens for a book. BIBLIOGRAPHY ALBENDA, P. ‘Grapevines in Assurbanipal’s garden’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 215 (1974), pp. 5-17. ALBENDA, P. ‘Landscape bas-reliefs in the Bit hilani of Assurbanipal’, BASOR 224 (1976), pp. 49-72; and 225 (1977), pp. 29-48. STEPHANIE DALLEY I3 AL-KHALESI, Y. ‘The Court of the Palms’, Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 8 (Malibu, 1978), with review of P. Talon, Bibliotheca Ortentalts 36 (1979), pp. 331-33. ALWAN, K. ‘The vaulted structures of the so-called hanging gardens’, Sumer 35 (1979), pp. 134- 36. ANDRAE, W. ‘Der kultische Garten’, Welt des Orients 1 (1952), pp. 485-94. BARNETT, R. D. Sculptures from the North Palace of Assurbanipal at Nineveh (London, 1976), p. 41. BECKER, A. and U. ‘Altes’ und ‘neues’ Babylon, Baghdader Mitteilungen 2 (1991), pp. SOI-II. BLEIBTREU, E. Die Flora der neuassyrischen Reliefs (Vienna, 1980). | BULLETIN OF SUMERIAN AGRICULTURE (Cambridge, 1984 onwards), ed. J. N. Postgate and M.A. Powell. COCQUERILLAT, D. ‘Recherches sur le verger du temple campagnard de!’Akitu’, Welt des Orients 7 (1973-74), Pp. 96-134. CONTENAU, G. ‘Drogues de Canaan, d’Amurru et jardins botaniques’. In: Mélanges syriens offerts a Monsieur René Dussaud, 1 (Paris, 1939), pp. 11—14. FINKEL, I. ‘The Hanging Gardens of Babylon’. In: Seven Wonders of the World, ed. P. Clayton (London, 1988), pp. 38—58. GRAYSON, A. K. Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, 2 (Wiesbaden, 1976). HEIDEL, A. ‘The Octagonal Sennacherib Prism in the Iraq Museum’, Sumer 9 (1953), pp. 117 ff. HROUDA, B. ‘Some remarks on the topography of Babylon’, Sumer 41 (1985), pp. 14-15. LEACH, H. ‘On the origins of kitchen gardening in the Ancient Near East’, Garden History 10:1 (1982), pp. I-16. LIVINGSTONE, A. Court Poetry and Literary Miscellanea, State Archives of Assyria 111 (Helsinki University Press, 1989), no. 16 (SU 52/233). NAGEL, W. ‘Where were the Hanging Gardens?’, Sumer 35 (1979), pp. 241-42. OPPENHEIM, A. L. ‘On royal gardens in Mesopotamia’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (1965), pp. 328-33. PARPOLA, S. The Correspondence of Sargon 11, part I, State Archives of Assyria v (Helsinki University Press, 1987), no. 226 (K.688). SCHAEFFER, C. F. A. et al. Ugaritica Iv (Paris, 1962), pp. 16-17 and p. 27, fig. 21. WILCKE, C. ‘Die Emar-Version von “‘Dattelpalme und Tamariske’’ — ein Rekonstruktions- versuch’, Zeitschrift fiir Assyriologie 79.2 (1989), pp. 161-90. WISEMAN, D. J. ‘Mesopotamian gardens’, Anatolian Studies 33 (1983), pp. 137-44. ``` --- ## B. Dalley 2008, "Babylon as a Name for Other Cities Including Nineveh", SAOC 62, pp. 25-33 — FULL TEXT Source: Oriental Institute (ISAC) open-access PDF https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/saoc62.pdf (page markers '===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf N (printed p. M) =====' inserted by me). ``` ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 37 (printed p. 25) ===== BABYLON AS A NAME FOR OTHER CITIES INCLUDING NINEVEH 25 BABYLON AS A NAME FOR OTHER CITIES INCLUDING NINEVEH Stephanie Dalley, University of Oxford The use of stereotypical imagery drawn from the genre of lamentation makes it impossible to distinguish the capture of one great city from the capture of another, apart from the name of the city itself. Huddlestun has shown this to be the case for Egyptian Thebes, likewise for the fall of Nineveh in ca. 612 B.C. and the capture of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 B.C.1 The lack of distinction in describing such events led to confusion in Hebrew and Greek sources. This confusion is only a contributory factor. There is quite a range of different types of evidence indicating that “Babylon” was the name given deliberately to other cities in Babylonia by the end of the second millennium B.C. This paper describes the evidence and then shows reasons for extending the model to Assyrian royal cities.2 We begin with the lexical text Antagal, which gives the information that Borsippa was “Babylon the Second,” “another Babylon.”3 Copies of this text were found in the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, and so the informa- tion it contains is no later than the seventh century B.C. Various other pieces of information, some of them datable, support that evidence. A hymn to Marduk, datable to some time before 1068 B.C., calls him “Lord of Esagila, the hope of Babylon, the lover of Ezida, preserver of living things, leader of Emahtila, renewer of life.”4 In these lines, as in similar poems, the two great temples of Borsippa, namely Ezida and Emahtila, are treated as if they were a part of Babylon alongside Esagila, as the editor of that hymn, Tzvi Abusch, has shown in some detail.5 The fact that Hammurabi consecrated Ezida to the god of Babylon suggests that the equation of Borsippa with Babylon was made as early as the nineteenth/eighteenth century B.C.6 Another city whose name became interchangeable with Babylon was Eridu. The lexical list Erimhuå V 26 and the topographical list TIN.TIR˚ I 21 and V 90–91 show that Eridu was a name for Babylon proper. A version of the Sumerian King List gives Eridu as the first city ever to receive kingship from heaven, where the first king was Alulim. This man was called Aloros in the text attributed to Berossus, who wrote in the fourth century B.C., but Berossus named the city ruled by Aloros as Babylon, not Eridu. Eridu is the city in which Hammurabi king of Babylon was crowned, and this may be a reason to date the phenomenon early in the Old Babylonian period.7 These items may be related to the myth known as the Eridu Genesis, in which Eridu and Babylon refer to the same primeval city;8 it is not likely, therefore, to be an invention by Berossus or his transmitters. According to TIN.TIR˚, Eridu was the name for the religious quarter of Babylon; the text dates from perhaps the time of Nebuchadnezzar I and may have earlier antecedents. The text gives an equation of the kind characteristic of lexical texts: “Eridu = Babylon the pleasant city,” in I 21.9 Other texts, in which Eridu is written but the city Babylon is often supposed to 1 J. R. Huddlestun, “Nahum, Nineveh, and the Nile: The Descrip- tion of Thebes in Nahum 3:8–9,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 62 (2003): 97–110. 2 A first version of this paper was delivered in Sheffield, and a third in Leiden. The writer would like to thank D. Edelman in Sheffield, the organizers of the RAI in Chicago, M. de Jong, and A. van der Kooij in Leiden, for warm encouragement and hospitality. 3 CT 19 25:25; see E. Unger, Reallexikon der Assyriologie 1 (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1932), s.v. Barsipa; A. Cavigneaux in M. Civil, Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon Supplementary Series 1 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1985), p. 240, N 25 bàd. si.a.ab.ba˚ = tin.tir min.kám˚. 4 T. Abusch, “The Form and Meaning of a Babylonian Prayer to Mar- duk,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 103 (1983): 3–15. He puts the date of composition “sometime before the reign of Adad- apla-iddina,” i.e., before 1068 B.C. 5 Abusch, “The Form and Meaning,” n. 16. 6 D. Frayne, Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Periods 4, Old Babylonian Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 355, ll. 27–33, in which Hammurabi built Ezida in Borsippa for Marduk. A. R. George, Babylonian Topographical Texts (Leuven: Peeters, 1992), No. 14, gives the measurements of Esagila and Ezida on the same tablet, which may represent the same phenomenon. 7 J. van Dijk, “L’Hymne à Marduk avec intercession pour le roi AbÏ- eåuh,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung 12 (1966): 57– 74 (TCL 16 61). 8 George, Topographical Texts, p. 252, quoting CT 13 35:12–14. 9 See also TIN.TIR˚ V 90–91, and discussion George, Topographical Texts, pp. 251–52. 25 oi.uchicago.edu ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 38 (printed p. 26) ===== 26 STEPHANIE DALLEY be meant,10 date to the mid-second millennium B.C. — the reigns of Gulkiåar11 and Nebuchadnezzar I (and perhaps others). In the Neo-Babylonian period the king of Babylon occasionally called himself LUGAL NUN˚, meaning king of Eridu (in Babylon).12 An Achaemenid reference to a governor of Babylon as LÚ paha(t) NUN˚, literally “gover- nor of Eridu,” in the reign of Darius shows that the tradition survived beyond lexical texts and scholarly circles into an administrative term current in the Persian period.13 Another version of the Sumerian King List gives Kuºara as the name of the first city.14 Kuºara, known later as Kumar, is also the name for a quarter of Babylon, known from the topographical list TIN.TIR˚. A gloss tu-ba for the city name Kuºara, written logographically as A.HA˚,15 suggests that Tuba is a name for Kuºara (note that the dis- tricts Tuba and Kuºara are marked as adjacent on sketch maps showing the area names within Babylon). Kuºara’s city-god, Asarluhi, is well known as a name taken by Marduk in Babylon; and at least one shrine of Asarluhi was located within Esagila. This is Kuºara-in-Babylon. If the naming of a city as the first recipient of kingship is enough to qualify it as a “Babylon,” we may include Kish alongside Eridu and Kuºara, from the recently published version of the Sumerian King List which differs from other versions of that list in giving the first dynasty as based in Kish.16 This reminds us of the Epic of Etana, which opens with the building of the city Kish by the gods and their search for a king to rule over its people. It is possible that the emphatic expression of Nebuchadnezzar saying that he built his palace “in the land of Babylon which is within Babylon” ina erœet KÁ.DINGIR.RA åa qereb Babili, implies that he was distinguishing the original Babylon from its metonyms, e.g., Borsippa and Eridu, by comparison with the expression “the land of Kumar which is within Babylon” erœet kumari åa qereb Babilum.17 Eridu and Kuºara/Kumar, then, are names both for individual early cities and names for parts of Babylon. In the case of Eridu it is known for certain that Babylon was meant when Eridu was named in a particular context, both in the mid-second millennium and in the Neo-Babylonian period. Similar to Eridu and Kuºara is Kullab as the name for a quarter of Babylon. Kullab is the name for a part of Uruk, city of Gilgamesh in southern Mesopotamia. The cult of the gods of Uruk was carried out in Babylon proper; this is known from a ritual text.18 The early city Tentir near Umma may have given rise to the writing TIN.TIR for Babylon. If so, the tradition of old cities giving their name to Babylon goes back to the Old Babylonian period, when that logogram was occasion- ally used. With these four cities, Borsippa, Eridu, Kuºara (Tuba), and Kullab, all incorporated as parts of Babylon, and one of them explicitly called “Babylon the Second,” the most ancient and prestigious cities of lower Mesopotamia became “Babylons.” Kish and Tentir may also belong in this category. The tradition began before the late second millennium, when individual, dated contracts refer to those quarters of the city by name, and very likely existed in the reign of Hammurabi, the intervening Kassite period providing evidence from intermittent titles and epithets. We can identify from these various examples the possible hallmarks for recognizing whether or not a city has been assimilated as a Babylon: the original city itself may be known as a Babylon (Eridu); it may give its name to a quarter of Babylon proper (Eridu, Kullab, Kuºara); and Babylon proper may contain a temple of the incorporated city’s patron god where rites specific to the original city are performed (Kullab and Borsippa); and the city may be a place where kingship was first received from heaven (Eridu, Kuºara, Kish) according to different versions of the Sumerian King List. These namings may be reflected in the declaration made by Marduk in the Babylonian Epic of Creation VI. When Babylon had been built by the gods as the first city, Bel invited the gods to a banquet there and proclaimed: “Indeed, Babylon is your home too!” Then the decrees, designs, and destinies were fixed for the world. 10 References given by R. Zadok, Répertoire géographique des textes cunéiformes 8 (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert, 1985), p. 52. 11 C. J. Gadd, “A Middle-Babylonian Chemical Text,” Iraq 3 (1936): 87 ff.; see A. Leo Oppenheim et al., Glass and Glassmaking in An- cient Mesopotamia (Corning: Corning Museum of Glass, 1970), p. 63:41; and see George, Topographical Texts, p. 251. 12 Zadok, Répertoire 8, p. 56. 13 H. G. Stigers, “Neo-and Late Babylonian Documents from the John Frederick Lewis Collection,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 28 (1976): 36, 22:7, with Zadok, Répertoire 8, p. 58 for restoration. 14 See A. K. Grayson, Reallexikon der Assyriologie 6 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980–83), s.v. Königslisten, text WB62. 15 CT 25 14:30. 16 P. Steinkeller, “An Ur III Manuscript of the Sumerian King List,” in Literatur, Politik und Recht in Mesopotamien, Festschrift für Claus Wilcke, edited by W. Sallaberger et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), pp. 267–92. 17 Further references in Zadok, Répertoire 8, pp. 40–43, include refer- ences to unidentified names for Babylon: TE.E˚, E˚, ÅU.AN.NA˚. 18 A. R. George, “Four Temple Rituals from Babylon,” in Wisdom, Gods and Literature: Studies in Assyriology in Honour of W. G. Lambert, edited by A. R. George and I. L. Finkel (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000), pp. 259–99 BM 78076:18. oi.uchicago.edu ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 39 (printed p. 27) ===== BABYLON AS A NAME FOR OTHER CITIES INCLUDING NINEVEH 27 None of this information is new, although it has not previously been gathered together for this context. The phenomenon is based on an earlier one: compare the details that establish Babylon’s use of traditions from Nippur, and how they were taken up in Assur. In Babylon the modeling of Marduk’s temple as a replica of Enlil’s temple at Nippur is well attested and probably goes back to the time of Hammurabi.19 At Assur city the remodeling of the god Aååur’s temple as a replica of the temple of Enlil in Nippur from the time of Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243–1207 B.C.) has been noted,20 and the substitution of Assur city for Babylon in the Assyrian reworking of the Epic of Creation is also attested.21 This information establishes a precedent: that an ambitious and successful king could draw on a presti- gious tradition to use the names of Nippur’s temples Eåarra and Ekur. Emulation to acquire prestige by association was the motive. Another precedent is specifically linked to Kish. During the early second millennium B.C. (and perhaps also ear- lier)22 the title “king of Kish” became used to mean, more or less, “king of the world,” a phenomenon linked to the similarity of the city-name Kish with the Akkadian word kiååatu “totality,” used in royal titles. We now turn to Assyria in the late eighth century, first to Calah. Versions and fragments of a bilingual Åu’ila- prayer to Marduk were found at Nimrud (Calah), Nineveh, Assur, and in Babylonia. In the Nimrud version, the name Calah had been inserted alongside that of Babylon and Borsippa, and the prayer was addressed not to Marduk but to Nabu.23 The Åu’ila was recited during the New Year Festival at Babylon, and perhaps, but not certainly, also at Calah. The relevant lines are: line 35 Behold Babylon and Esagila, may they say to you, “Lord, calm down” Behold Borsippa and Ezida, may they say to you, “Lord, calm down” Behold Calah, O Nabu, may it say to you, “Lord, calm down” line 36 Restore the lock of Babylon, the bolt of Esagila, the bricks of Ezida, and of Calah. As is well known, there was a large temple and temple library dedicated to Nabu in his Ezida temple in Calah; and a variant gives an alternative dedicatee for this hymn, Ninurta, the patron god of Calah. It has long been recognized that the name of the primeval god Anåar, who has a small but fundamental part in the Babylonian Epic of Creation, was manipulated for the Assyrian version, so that Anåar took the part of Marduk and was equated with Aååur as a near-homonym. The god Anåar is also a key to two syncretisms in Assyria, and one in Babylonia, at Uruk. There is evidence that Sargon II initiated at least some part of the relevant changes many years before his son sacked Babylon. Sargon is the earliest Late Assyrian king to use the spelling An-åaπr for Aååur in his inscriptions, as Tadmor pointed out in 1958.24 He does not do so everywhere: the new spelling occurs in his Nimrud (Calah) in- scriptions, but not in those from Khorsabad. This suggests a link between the Åu’ila from Nimrud addressed to Nabu in one version and Ninurta in another. Is there evidence from other texts in support of the suggestion that a reform took place during the reign of Sargon II, in which Calah was incorporated into the tradition of cities that became Babylons? Van De Mieroop has suggested that two chronicles, the Weidner Chronicle and the Chronicle of Early Kings, which tell that Sargon (of Akkad) built a new Babylon, in fact refer to Sargon II of Assyria because the mention of Babylon and of Marduk is anachronistic.25 19 S. Maul “Die altorientalische Hauptstadt – Abbild und Nabel der Welt,” in Der orientalische Stadt: Kontinuität, Wandel, Bruch, edited by G. Wilhelm (Berlin: Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, 1997), p. 120 with references; and S. Maul, “Marduk, Nabû und der assyrische Enlil: Die Geschichte eines sumerischen Åu’ilas,” in tikip santakki mala baåmu: Festschrift für Rykle Borger, edited by S. Maul (Gron- ingen: Styx Publication, 1998), pp. 159–97, especially ll. 31–33, call- ing Nippur and Babylon both Marduk’s city. See also George, Topo- graphical Texts, p. 325. 20 Maul, “Die altorientalische Hauptstadt,” p. 122 with references. 21 W. G. Lambert, “The Assyrian Recension of En„ma Eliå,” in Assy- rien im Wandel der Zeiten: 39e Rencontre assyriologique internatio- nale, Heidelberg, 6.–10. Juli 1992 (Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orient- verlag, 1997), pp. 77–79. 22 See D. O. Edzard, Reallexikon der Assyriologie 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1976–80), p. 610 s.v. Kish, for a summary of the evidence and arguments for its interpretation. 23 Maul, “Marduk, Nabû und der assyrische Enlil,” extending the study of J. S. Cooper, “A Sumerian ÅU.ÍL.LA from Nimrud, with a Prayer for Sin-åar-iåkun,” Iraq 32 (1970): 51–67, with collations of R. Borger, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 66 (1976): 278–79. 24 H. Tadmor, “The Campaigns of Sargon II of Assur: A Chronologi- cal-historical Study, Part 3,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 12 (1958): 77–100, esp. p. 82 n. 231. See also E. Frahm, Einleitung in die Sanherib-Inschriften, Archiv für Orientforschung, Beiheft 26 (Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik, 1997), p. 283. One occurrence in the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta, noted by K. Deller, Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires 1987/101, and another in a literary text from Aååur city of the Middle Assyrian period, to be published by Frahm, suggests that Sargon may have revived a previous reform. I thank Dr. Frahm for this information. 25 Marc Van De Mieroop, Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History (Oxford: Routledge, 1999), p. 73. oi.uchicago.edu ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 40 (printed p. 28) ===== 28 STEPHANIE DALLEY Marduk … looked with joy upon him and gave to him sovereignty over the Four Quarters. The provisioning of Esagila, … Babylon his tribute … he extracted soil from its excavated earth and … in front of(?) Akkad he built a(nother) city and he called its name Babylon.26 For the abomination which he had done he (Marduk) became hostile to him and people from East to West became hostile to him, and sleeplessness was imposed upon him (Weidner Chronicle).27 “Sargon … dug up soil from a clay-pit of Babylon and built a replica of Babylon next to Akkad. For the abomination which he had done the great lord Marduk became angry and destroyed his people by famine; from East to West they became hostile to him, and he, Marduk, inflicted sleeplessness upon him (Chronicle of Early Kings).28 Sleeplessness here does not refer to simple insomnia, but to the condition of an unburied corpse whose ghost does not receive appropriate offerings.29 It fits the case of Sargon II of Assyria who died in battle, and whose body was never recovered for proper burial. If the identification with Sargon II of Assyria is correct,30 these two chroni- cles can be understood as a veiled attempt to explain why the gods allowed Sargon II to die in this way, and perhaps also giving an anti-Assyrian point of view. The episode in which Sennacherib, having sacked Babylon, put earth from there into the temple in Assur after capturing it, could then be understood as a repetition of his father’s action. These two chronicles are not true chronicles. They are explanatory texts which ostensibly try to explain the good fortune and misfortune of long-past kings in terms of actions that pleased or displeased Marduk, the god of Babylon, and the period in which those kings lived is long before Babylon and Marduk rose to prominence. Grayson reckoned that the Chronicle of Early Kings used two identifiable sources: omens concerning early kings, including omens copied in the Neo-Assyrian period, and the Weidner Chronicle. Two of the known pieces of the Weidner Chronicle come from Assur, the Assyrian capital. The two tablets of the Chronicle of Early Kings are of uncertain prov- enance.31 The accusation leveled at the king in these two texts indicates that to call an Assyrian city a “Babylon” by the late eighth century B.C. could be regarded as an impious act. A later, sixth-century example of the phenomenon may account for the charge leveled against Nabonidus in the Verse Account of Nabonidus, that he imitated Esagila in Harran and built a palace of Babylon in Tayma.32 Sargon II of Assyria is generally thought to have modeled himself upon his famous predecessor in Akkad when he took Åarru-kÏnu as his throne-name, and various connections between him and his illustrious namesake have been noted, not least in the text that accompanies the World Map and the Legend of Sargon’s Birth, of which a copy was found at Nineveh. Possible evidence that Sargon II equated at least a part of Assyria with Babylon comes from the World Map.33 This tablet comes with a text which relates some of the deeds of Sargon of Akkad (reminiscent of the link made by those two so-called chronicles) and is generally agreed to come from the reign of Sargon II. The curi- ous thing about it is that it does not name a single Assyrian city: Assur, Calah, Nineveh, and Sargon’s new city Dur- Åarrukin are all absent. Instead, Babylon is more or less central and is the only named city of Babylonia.34 26 Note that the Sippar version reverses the order, to give Akkad built as a new city opposite Babylon. The new text also shows that the text takes the form of an Old Babylonian royal letter. See J.-J. Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), pp. 263–68. 27 The mention of Babylon and Marduk before the building of a Baby- lon opposite Akkad may not be a mistake as Van De Mieroop, Cunei- form Texts, pp. 72–74, supposed, if a second Babylon is correct. 28 This theme is picked up in omens; see L. W. King, Chronicles Concerning Early Babylonian Kings (London: Luzac & Co., 1907), pp. 27–28, 34–35; and A. K. Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (Locust Valley, New York: J. J. Augustin, 1970), pp. 45– 47. Omens naming Sargon (but not Babylon), in the omen series MultΩbiltu, are now edited by U. S. Koch, Secrets of Extispicy (Mün- ster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2005). 29 See, for example, C. Wilcke, “Der Tod im Leben der Babylonier,” in Tod, Jenseits und Identität: Perspektiven einer kulturwissenschaft- lichen Thanatologie, edited by J. Assmann and R. Trauzettel (Freiburg and Munich: K. Alber, 2002), pp. 252–66, especially p. 256. 30 J. S. Cooper, review of Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History, by Marc Van De Mieroop, in Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori- ental Research 327 (2002): 79. 31 Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, pp.152–53, com- mentary. 32 H. Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 256 (Münster: Ugarit- Verlag, 2001), p. 568. 33 W. Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1998), chapter 2. For the newly joined fragment, see S. Dalley, ed., The Legacy of Mesopotamia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 177. 34 This corresponds to a letter written to a late Assyrian king, perhaps Sargon, from Babylonia, in which it is said: “When he has entered Babylon, he will have set foot on the centre of the lands”; see M. Dietrich, The Babylonian Correspondence of Sargon and Sennach- erib, State Archives of Assyria 17 (Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press, 2003), No. 84:12'. oi.uchicago.edu ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 41 (printed p. 29) ===== BABYLON AS A NAME FOR OTHER CITIES INCLUDING NINEVEH 29 If these deductions are correct, some part of Assyria, probably Calah, was already considered to be a Babylon when Sennacherib became king.35 Sargon II may have taken a precedent from Uruk, where Anåar was equated with the city’s patron god Anu, perhaps as early as the mid- or late second millennium, when the god list AN = Anum was composed. Anåar seems to have been equated not only with Anu but also with Aååur at Uruk during the late Babylonian period, and perhaps also earlier.36 It is probably significant that the so-called Divine Heptad text found at Assur, KAR 142, lists a statue of Marduk in the temple of Anåar.37 When Sennacherib rebuilt the temple of the New Year Festival just outside the city of Assur, he described the cosmic battle from the Epic of Creation which was represented on its doors, but the god Anåar as Aååur had taken the place of Marduk. This change is known also from small pieces of text giving a reworking of the Babylonian Epic of Creation, in which the genealogy of the great gods had been altered to allow the primeval god Anåar to be reinter- preted as a form of the name Aååur, and for Anåar-Aååur to take the part of the victorious hero Marduk. Babylon’s name is replaced by Bal.til˚, a name of Aååur, as already mentioned. It has long been reckoned that Sennacherib’s sack of Babylon was the crisis that inspired this rewriting of the great epic as an act of revenge, and that the rewrit- ing was part of a religious reform to allow Aååur to take over the power and functions of Marduk. Symbolizing the event, soil from Babylon was put into the temple of the national god Aååur in his city Assur. As far as I know, the dating to the reign of Sennacherib of the equation of Aååur with Anåar for the revision of the epic has not been questioned. But there are certain difficulties in this, not least Sennacherib’s own inconsistency in using the spelling in records written after the capture of Babylon, when one would expect the innovation to be enforced most rigor- ously. The evidence from Sargon’s reign suggests that a reform had already taken place in the time of Sennacherib’s grandfather and was not carried out as an act of vengeance. In any case, the change of spelling from Aååur to Anåar in Nimrud inscriptions of Sargon has nothing at all to do with the later sack of Babylon. Rather than being an act of retribution, it must bear the opposite interpretation: an act of association to gain prestige. It belongs with the phenomenon we have described for southern Mesopotamia, from the evidence of lexical texts, the topographical list TIN.TIR˚ with the names of quarters of Babylon, and variant names for the first city to receive kingship in the Sumerian King List. Now we turn to Nineveh. It has long been recognized that Sennacherib’s Bavian Inscription, in relating the sack of Babylon, presents the rebuilding of Nineveh as an antithesis to the destruction of Babylon.38 Just as Babylon was leveled and abandoned, in the hyperbole of lamentation, so Nineveh rose up and was populated. If the worship of another city’s gods in Babylon is an indication that that city had been accorded the status of a Babylon, an extension to Nineveh can be deduced from the fact that Iåtar-of-Nineveh had a temple in Babylon.39 Exactly when this cult be- gan is not known; it is found in TIN.TIR˚ IV 32 and so arrived there long before the time of Sargon and Sennacherib. Once again, we cannot attribute reform to Sennacherib, whose son Aååur-nadin-åumi renovated the shrine of the goddess in Babylon.40 Just as the introduction of the spelling an-åaπr is significant for the new role of the god Aååur, so is the writing of the name Nineveh. From the time of Aååur-rËå-iåi (contemporary with Nebuchadnezzar I) onward, the logo- graphic writing UNUG≈HA begins to replace syllabic spellings.41 The change links Nineveh to ancient Nina, a reli- gious center in Girsu-Lagash in southern Iraq, where the city and its goddess Nanåe are both written with the same 35 The connection between Babylon and Assyria may have been strengthened by the use, in the early part of the Assyrian King List, of two royal names, Hanû and Didanu, that are also found in the genealo- gy of Hammurabi. See J. J. Finkelstein, “Genealogy of the Hammurabi Dynasty,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 20 (1966): 95–118. 36 P.-A. Beaulieu, “The Cult of Aååur/Anåar in Babylonia after the Fall of the Assyrian Empire,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 11 (1997): 55–74. 37 B. Pongratz-Leisten, ed., Ina åulmi Ïrub: Die Kulttopographische und ideologische Programmatik der akÏtu-Procession in Babylonien und Assyrien im 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr., Baghdader Forschungen 16 (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 1994), pp. 221–27. 38 H. Galter, “Die Zerstörung Babylons durch Sanherib,” Studia Ori- entalia 55 (1984): 159–73; followed by Van De Mieroop, “Revenge, Assyrian Style,” Past and Present 179 (2003): 3–23; “Reading Baby- lon,” American Journal of Archaeology 107 (2003): 257–75; “A Tale of Two Cities: Nineveh and Babylon,” Iraq 66 (2004): 1–5. 39 R. Da Riva and E. Frahm, “Åamaå-åum-ukÏn, die Herrin von Nini- ve und das babylonische Königssiegel,” Archiv für Orientforschung 46–47 (1999–2000): 156–82; A. R. George, “Marduk and the Cult of the Gods of Nippur at Babylon,” Orientalia NS 66 (1997): 65–70; and George, “Four Temple Rituals,” pp. 259–99 (BM 78076:18). 40 See Da Riva and Frahm, “Åamaå-åum-ukÏn.” 41 See R. Kutscher, “Excursus: The Orthography of Nineveh,” Biblio- theca Orientalis 33 (1976): 197–98; and see D. O. Edzard, Reallexi- kon der Assyriologie 9 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998–2001), s.v. NINA, where the attribution to Kutscher of Sollberger’s understanding of AS 7, and the king in whose reign the first attestation of the logo- graphic writing for Nineveh occurs, should both be corrected. oi.uchicago.edu ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 42 (printed p. 30) ===== 30 STEPHANIE DALLEY sign, UNUG≈HA. Nanåe, “mistress of the precious ordinances,” nun garza kal.la.ke› in TIN.TIR˚ II 43, had a shrine in Babylon at the main gate to Esagila on the eastern side. Iåtar-of-Nineveh, “who controls the most precious ordi- nances of Anu” hΩmimat garza.meå ∂Anu å„qur„ti, in the Ishtar Temple Inscription of Assurbanipal,42 also had a temple in Babylon at the time when TIN.TIR˚ was compiled, the compilation taking place apparently at roughly the time when the logographic writing of the name Nineveh was introduced, in the twelfth century B.C.43 In a Hymn of Assurbanipal to Iåtar-of-Nineveh, the goddess is described as “just like Anåar, she has a beard” akÏ Anåar ziqni zaqnat.44 This statement equates the goddess of Nineveh with Anåar and gives her the visible attri- bute of a male god. The choice of Anåar is significant because the syncretisms of gods that we have described were made via Anåar. Iåtar-of-Nineveh was equated with the Bowstar, and the Bowstar has an exceptional role in the Epic of Creation, although it is rather briefly mentioned: in tablet VI, after Babylon was built and destinies decreed, the (female) Bowstar was set in heaven and placed on a throne, whereupon Marduk declared “You are the highest of the gods.” This statement appears to give the goddess a higher rank than that of Bel-Marduk. In the Iåtar Temple Inscription of Assurbanipal (lines 30–40), an account of the restoration of the temple of Anåar is followed by that of Emaåmaå, Iåtar’s temple in Nineveh, and her ziggurat there. Again we see a very close connection between Anåar and Iåtar-of-Nineveh.45 The title of Iåtar-of-Nineveh in that inscription as “king of heaven and earth” LUGAL AN-e u KI-tim, elsewhere a title of Marduk proclaimed during the New Year Festival when the deity took his place on the parak åÏmΩti “dais of fates,” suggests that the goddess played a similar role at Nineveh in the time of Assurbanipal. If the text goes back to earlier versions, her role too would have an earlier date. The terms in which Sennacherib described Nineveh as a city from time immemorial, corresponding to the writing of the firma- ment, has been linked to the concept of a metropolis as the reflection of heaven and the navel of the world46 and is one of the characteristics of cities equated with Babylon. How could the great female goddess of love and fertility be represented as a masculine god? Quite simply, it seems: in the mystical text KAR 307: 19–21 we read: “Iåtar of Durna (a name for Nineveh) is Tiamat, she is the wet-nurse of Bel. She has four eyes and four ears” (a description that matches that of Bel-Marduk in the Epic of Creation). “Her upper parts are Bel. Her lower parts are Mullissu.”47 This explains why several late Assyrian texts refer to Iåtar-of-Nineveh or her other manifestation, Iåtar-of- Arbela, as “king” or as “the Lord” Bel. The Assyrian prophecy text K.883 begins: “The word of king Mullissu” abat LUGAL ∂NIN.LÍL;48 the Ishtar Temple Inscription refers to the goddess as “king (LUGAL) of heaven and earth,” and the Assyrian prophecy text K.4310 refers apparently to Iåtar-of-Arbela when stating: “I am Bel” anΩku ∂EN.49 These are not mistakes in the text. They show that Iåtar-of-Nineveh and Arbela had become Bel.50 An extension of this tradition is found in connection with Arbela, the city where Iåtar was worshipped in very close association with Iåtar-of-Nineveh. The city is described in a late Assyrian hymn as “the likeness (tamåil) of Babylon,” the “bond of the lands” rikis mΩtΩti, and the city which fixes the far-off destinies mukÏn parœÏ r„q„ti, all hallmarks elsewhere of Babylon’s role as the leading city.51 As we have mentioned already, Iåtar-of-Arbela intro- duced herself in an Assyrian prophecy by declaring “I am Bel.” She was still known as Sharbel in the fourth century A.D. 42 A. Fuchs in R. Borger, Beiträge zur Inschriftenwerk Assurbanipals (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), pp. 258–96:6. 43 Da Riva and Frahm, “Åamaå-åum-ukin,” p. 173, quote an unpub- lished commentary on the Epic of Creation which refers to the cult of Iåtar-of-Nineveh in Babylon. The reference to BËlet Nina in the Reli- gious Chronicle (Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, 133 i 6–7) could refer either to Nina in the south or to Nineveh in the north. 44 A. Livingstone, Court Poetry and Literary Miscellanea, State Ar- chives of Assyria 3 (Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press, 1989), No. 7:6. 45 Compare the combined account of construction in Babylon and in Aååur by Esarhaddon, R. Borger, Die Inschriften Asarhaddons, Königs von Assyrien, Archiv für Orientforschung, Beiheft 9 (Graz, 1956) AsBbE; and discussion by B. N. Porter, Images, Power, Poli- tics (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1993), p. 67. 46 Maul, “Die altorientalische Hauptstadt,” especially p. 124. See also V. Hurowitz, I Have Built You an Exalted House: Temple Building in the Bible in the Light of Mesopotamian and North-West Semitic Writings, Journal of the Society for Old Testament Study, Supple- ment 115 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), p. 74 n. 4, for Sennacherib’s association of Nineveh with Apsu-lalgar. 47 Livingstone, Court Poetry, No. 39. 48 S. Parpola, Assyrian Prophecies, State Archives of Assyria 9 (Hel- sinki, University of Helsinki Press, 1997), No. 7. Attempts to explain away this explicit wording are noted in Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East, edited by M. Nissinen et al. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), p. 128 note a. 49 Parpola, Assyrian Prophecies, No. 1:4. Nabu is named at the end of the text, probably as Iåtar’s closest associate, a relationship evident from K.1285 (Livingstone, Court Poetry, No. 13) and the proximity of the temple of Nabu to Iåtar’s temple at Nineveh. Iåtar-of-Nineveh and Iåtar-of-Arbela were regarded as virtually the same goddess. 50 See also Da Riva and Frahm, “Åamaå-åum-ukÏn,” pp. 156–81. 51 Livingstone, Court Poetry, No. 8. oi.uchicago.edu ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 43 (printed p. 31) ===== BABYLON AS A NAME FOR OTHER CITIES INCLUDING NINEVEH 31 Tarsus in Cilicia is another possibility, since we know that the name of the local god Sanda was written in the Late Bronze Age with the logogram normally reserved for Marduk, and Berossus says that Tarsus was rebuilt by Sennacherib in the likeness of Babylon.52 As with the use of Anåar as a writing for the god Aååur and the logogram Nina for Nineveh, the use of a particular logogram is significant far beyond mere variation in writing. Long after the fall of Assyria as an imperial power, the title Bel persisted, attached to the great Assyrian god- dess. Cuneiform texts confirm that Iåtar-of-Nineveh was still worshipped in Assyria in the time of Darius.53 In the Parthian period, Aramaic inscriptions from Assur and Hatra show that the title had become part of her name: Issarbel.54 Issar is the Assyrian dialect form of the Babylonian form Iåtar. And according to a Syriac text, a priest of the pagan goddess Sharbel at Arbela, who had converted to Christianity, was martyred by the Zoroastrian king Shapur II in A.D. 355.55 From a political and theological point of view, it cannot be considered a sign of hatred or enmity that Babylon lent its name to northern Assyrian cities and incorporated their cults into its own establishment, as it had done with southern cities.56 Rather, it is a sign of the enormous prestige of Babylon, and a sign of admiration and emulation that inspired late Assyrian kings to use the name of Babylon for cities in Assyria, blending all of ancient Mesopotamia into a unitary whole. There are certain terms which seem to mark cities that belong in the category we are trying to define. Their foun- dation must be put back into primeval times, as Babylon proper is in the Epic of Creation, as Kish is in the Epic of Etana, and as Nineveh is in the Prism Inscription of Sennacherib: “Nineveh whose plan was designed in the begin- ning with the writing of the firmament” Ninua åa ultu ullâ itti åiøir burummê eœrassu eœret.57 The temple of the city god must be the navel of the earth where a cord connects heaven to the earth. This idea is first found at Nippur and was taken over for Babylon.58 In this connection Iåtar-of-Nineveh is “she who holds the cord of the holy firmament, which is founded in the wide heavens” [œΩbitat/mukillat] markas burummê KÙ.MEÅ åa ina åamê rapå„ti åuråudu, and “the ruler of heaven and earth who decrees fates, who controls the most precious rites of Anu, who grasps the responsibilities of Enlil” åar åamê u erœeti muåÏm åÏmΩti … hΩmimat parœË åa Anu å„qur„ti tΩmihat piqitti Enlil„ti.59 The cord that joins heaven to earth can refer to Arbela.60 The so-called dais of destinies61 is the place where a ritual took place that was crucial to the future of the world; it is found not only in this text from Nineveh, but also in Nippur, Babylon, Duru, Uruk, Akkad, Kish, Arbela, and Assur.62 This model of southern cities known to be “Babylons,” which was extended to some cities that may have in- cluded Calah, Assur, Arbela, and Nineveh, helps to explain why Nineveh was known to later, biblical and classical, traditions as Babylon. The royal inscriptions of late Assyrian kings do not use the name Babylon for Nineveh or Calah, which suggests that the use of the metonym was restricted. We have looked at two pseudo-chronicles and the World Map in which the phenomenon may occur. In what other types of text can the metonym be found? One possibility is astronomical texts. The evidence for this is not direct and is in some ways very unsatisfactory because it comes from a medieval source in which there was an “Old Babylon” on the latitude of Assyrian cities, a “Second Babylon” in central Mesopotamia, and a “New Babylon” in southern Mesopotamia. As long ago as 1934, Schott pointed out that the latitude from which the standard figure for the longest day was taken and used in suppos- 52 See S. Dalley, “Sennacherib and Tarsus,” Anatolian Studies 49 (1999): 73–80. 53 Zadok, Répertoire 8, pp. 238–29. For the worship of Iåtar-of-Arbela in the reign of Cyrus, see J. McGinnis, “Temple Ventures across the River,” Transeuphratène 27 (2004): 32–33, BM 62805. 54 K. Beyer, Die aramäischen Inschriften aus Assur, Hatra und dem übrigen Ostmesopotamien (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Rupre- cht, 1998). The identification of the deity as a goddess was made by J. T. Milik, Dédicaces faites par les dieux (Palmyre, Hatra, Tyr) et des thiases sémitiques à l’époque romaine, Recherches d’épigraphie proche-orientale 1 (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1972). 55 P. Peeters, “Le Passionaire d’Adiabène,” Analecta Bollandiana 43 (1925): 261–304. 56 See, for example, W. G. Lambert, “The God Aååur,” Iraq 45 (1983): 86, who claims that Sennacherib hated Marduk and attempted to put an end to his cult; a similar view is expressed by Van De Mieroop, “Revenge, Assyrian Style,” “Reading Babylon,” and “A Tale of Two Cities.” 57 D. D. Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib, Oriental Institute Publications 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), p. 94:64 and p. 103:28. 58 George, Topographical Texts, p. 244. 59 Fuchs apud Borger, Beiträge, pp. 264–65; and see George, Topo- graphical Texts, pp. 262 and 266–67, for the other cities. 60 Livingstone, Court Poetry, No. 8. 61 Miguel Civil suggests (personal communication) that BARAG parakku is a tent curtain that screened off a private and sacred space, rather than a dais or platform, and cognate with Hebrew pΩroketh. 62 George, Topographical Texts, pp. 287–91; and see also Livingstone, Court Poetry, No. 8:18, for Arbela as parakki åÏmΩti. oi.uchicago.edu ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 44 (printed p. 32) ===== 32 STEPHANIE DALLEY edly Babylonian astronomical texts was the latitude, approximately, of Nimrud, Assyrian Calah.63 His conclusion is confirmed in the full edition of MUL.APIN, a compilation which is based on observations taken in the latitude of 76 degrees. Medieval translations into Latin of the Toledo astronomical tables used in western Europe said that the standard figure was that of “Old Babylon.” This may be taken as an indication that an Assyrian city, probably Calah, had become known as a Babylon when MUL.APIN was compiled, probably in the late eighth or early seventh century B.C.64 A second possibility is that the name of Babylon was used with deliberate ambiguity in a pseudo-prophecy. The Marduk Prophecy was found at Nineveh in the house of a Sargonid exorcist, and presumably the text, or copies of it, date to the late eighth or the seventh century B.C. In the Marduk Prophecy, in the second part of the text where verbs change from past tenses to present / future ones, the Babylonian king who brings / will bring Marduk back to Babylon may be understood as referring either to Nebuchadnezzar I or to Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. The de- struction of Elam by a king fits both periods equally well. The blessing which Marduk accords to Assyria, closely followed by his command to bring tribute to Babylon, also fits both periods. The later date would allow the “king of Babylon” to be an Assyrian king ruling in Nineveh, even when the Assyrian king was not performing the duties of a Babylonian king in Babylon. But another possibility is the reign of Sargon II, who ruled from Calah during almost all of his reign. We have seen that the Chronicle of Early Kings has passages in common with omens and is thought to have used omens as a source. During the Neo-Assyrian period a category of texts became explicitly differentiated from others as secret literature.65 The information comes from colophons which are seldom preserved. The category links certain texts to divine origin, authorship that came from heaven, sometimes through the mediation of the sages. Borger has suggested that secret literature may be ancestral to the term Mysterium from later antiquity. As we have seen, the reference to Mullissu as a goddess whose upper half was Bel in KAR 307 gives only the rare esoteric name, Durna, for Nineveh. Omens and astronomical literature both belong to this category. Therefore we may suggest that the reason Nineveh is not called Babylon in so many historical texts comes from the restricted usage of the metonym, confined to a secret category of literature. Omens and astronomical literature were widely diffused throughout the Assyrian empire and later. The concept of “secret” meant that the information in the text had a divine origin, not necessarily that its dissemination was restricted. For biblical and classical scholars, there are some applications of these discoveries. First, in the passage in Isaiah 14:4–23 describing the death in battle of the Son of the Dawn, the mention of Babylon may be contemporary with the events to which it alludes; Assyria is named in verse 25. Likewise the oracles in Isaiah 13 and 14, also in 21:9, the fall of “Babylon,” described with the stereotypes of lamentation, may equally refer to Nineveh, since it was the fall of Assyria, not of Babylon, that required a prediction at that time. The ambiguity of the name would have been a boon to later interpreters. Second, when Manasseh went to “Babylon,” 2 Chronicles 33:11, it is likely that Assyria, probably specifically Nineveh, is meant.66 In both cases commentators have suggested that the text contains either an emendation by a later redactor or has been inserted spuriously. The new understanding of the name of Babylon used as a metonym, certainly by the end of the eighth century B.C., shows that the suggestion is unnecessary. Third, the Book of Revelation and some apocryphal writings67 refer to “Babylon the mother of harlots” as a metonym for Rome. The tradition of naming by metonym other great cities, in this instance Rome, persisted and expanded beyond Mesopotamia in the Roman period. This is clearly understood in all the commentaries on the Book of Revelation, but unfortunately not by several Assyriologists, who have wrongly applied the expression “mother of harlots” to Babylon instead of Rome, forgetting that the “virgin daughter of Babylon” is the expression used in 63 A. Becker and U. Becker, “‘Altes’ und ‘Neues’ Babylon?” Bagh- dader Mitteilungen 22 (1991): 501–11. 64 H. Hunger and D. Pingree, MUL.APIN: An Astronomical Compen- dium in Cuneiform, Archiv für Orientforschung, Beiheft 24 (Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik, 1989), pp. 9–10. 65 See R. Borger, Reallexikon der Assyriologie 3 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1957–71), s.v. Geheimwissen. 66 See H. M. G. Williamson, 1 and 2 Chronicles, New Century Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans and Marshall; London: Mor- gan and Scott, 1982), with reference to Babylon as the place visited by Manasseh: “superficially curious as a seat of Assyrian power, must have been consciously included as a pointer to the national exile later on.” 67 For example, F. J. Murphy, Fallen is Babylon: The Revelation to John (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 1998), pp. 43–44. oi.uchicago.edu ===== SAOC 62 PDF leaf 45 (printed p. 33) ===== BABYLON AS A NAME FOR OTHER CITIES INCLUDING NINEVEH 33 Isaiah 47:1.68 The image of whoring is not found with reference to Babylon elsewhere in the Old Testament, but it is used of Nineveh in Nahum 3:4: “Whore of Nineveh, cunning witch who enslaved nations by her debauchery and tribes by her spells.” Diodorus Siculus, describing a scene in the palace at “Babylon” of “Semiramis” hunting lions, is referring to beardless men in the famous lion-hunt sculptures of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, not necessarily as a confusion; the static, heraldic style of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace decoration in Babylon proper is very different. A confusion is evi- dent in the Book of Judith, in which Nebuchadnezzar is called king of the Assyrians, ruling in Nineveh.69 As for the Book of Jonah, the reverse suggestion, that the name of Nineveh stands for Babylon,70 is unnecessary now that the importance of Nineveh proper has been established for the Seleucid period and presumed for the Persian period.71 The statement of Pseudo-Eupolemos, that Babylon was a city of Assyria,72 may refer to the tradition outlined here, although other explanations are possible. We may take into account the possibility that Bel in biblical and apocryphal texts could refer to Assyrian Iåtar. Victor Hurowitz has recently argued that the story of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28:10–22, because it includes motifs drawn from the Babylonian Epic of Creation that associate Bethel with Babylon, alludes to a specific link be- tween the two cities as a theological and political act.73 In conclusion, there was an indigenous tradition in which great cities of southern Mesopotamia became known by metonymy as Babylon, at least from the Late Bronze Age, and perhaps earlier. This tradition grew out of two older traditions. In the case of Nippur, the main god and temple of Nippur were applied to the main god and temple of another great city. In the case of Kish the city name became used for the whole world, in part as a play upon the syllable kiå. In the case of Babylon, the application of its name to northern cities in Assyria and Cilicia, probably including Assur, Nineveh, Arbela, and Tarsus, may go back to the Late Bronze Age but was perhaps extended by Sargon II in the late eighth century to include Calah. This phenomenon can sometimes be traced from a shift in the writing of a god name or place name, and in several instances the god Anåar plays an intermediate role. The metonymic usage was confined to a restricted category of texts. Scholars in neighboring countries knew about that use of the name Babylon at least by the seventh century B.C. Several biblical and Greek sources name Nineveh as a Babylon, not by confusion but from a knowledge of that Mesopotamian tradition. Their knowledge of it may well go back to the late eighth century, if not earlier. 68 Van De Mieroop, “Reading Babylon,” p. 257; J. Assante, “From Whores to Hierodules,” in Ancient Art and its Historiography, edited by A. A. Donohue and M. D. Fullerton (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2003); G. Leick, Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 1. 69 For the same confusion in an Arabic source, see G. Komoroπczy, “Ein assyrischer König in der arabischen Überlieferung,” Altorientali- sche Forschungen 1 (1974): 153–64. 70 See M. C. A. Korpel, “Disillusion among Jews in the Postexilic Period,” in The Old Testament in Its World (Papers read at the Winter Meeting, January 2003, The Society for Old Testament Study and at the Joint Meeting, July 2003, The Society for Old Testament Study and het Oudtestamentisch Werkgezelschap in Nederland en België), edited by R. P. Gordon and J. C. de Moor (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 141. I thank Prof. de Moor for this reference. 71 In a forthcoming book on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the writer will propose an explanation for Xenophon’s description of de- serted Assyrian cities in the Anabasis. 72 F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 3 C/2 (Leiden: Brill, 1958), p. 678. I am grateful to Prof. de Moor for this reference. 73 V. A. Hurowitz, “Babylon in Bethel – New Light on Jacob’s Dream,” Teshurot LaAvishur: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, edited by M. Helzer and M. Malul, Archaeological Center Publications, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 2004. I thank Prof. Hurowitz for show- ing me a draft of his paper in advance of its publication. oi.uchicago.edu ``` --- ## C. Dalley & Oleson 2003, "Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw", Technology and Culture 44/1: 1-26 — FULL TEXT Source: JHU Press / Project MUSE (DOI 10.1353/tech.2003.0011), obtained as raw_D/dalley_oleson_2003_TC.pdf; page markers '===== PAGE N =====' = printed pages 1-26. Dalley wrote the Assyrian sections (her translation of the prism passage is on pp. 7-8); Oleson the Greek/Roman sections; the 'Conclusions' (pp. 25-26) are joint, and Oleson's own leaning towards Archimedes is stated there. ``` ===== PAGE 1 ===== 1 This article will present the cases for and against Archimedes as the origi- nal inventor of the most striking and famous device attributed to him, the water screw. It takes the form of a case study that focuses as much on the context and motives for the invention as on the possible inventor himself. In brief, an Archimedean water screw consists of a cylinder containing sev- eral continuous helical walls that, when the entire cylinder is rotated on its longitudinal axis, scoop up water at the open lower end and dump it out the upper end. Both Aage Drachmann and John Oleson have summarized the literary and archaeological evidence from the classical world suggesting that Archimedes (287–212 B.C.) was the first person to design and construct a mechanical water-raising screw, and they accept him as the inventor.1 Stephanie Dalley, on the other hand, reinterpreting a passage of cuneiform Akkadian and a statement by Strabo, has proposed that the water screw was Dr. Dalley is Shillito Research Fellow in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute and Somerville College, University of Oxford. She has published primary editions of cunei- form texts from excavations in Iraq and Syria and from museums in Britain, as well as specialized studies and more general books. She has translated all the Assyrian texts used in this article. Dr. Oleson is professor of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. His areas of fieldwork and research include ancient hydraulic technology, Roman harbors and their construction, and the Roman Near East. He has published widely in all these areas. Except where otherwise noted, he has translated all the Greek and Latin texts cited in the article. The authors are grateful to a number of scholars for their assistance with this article, including Richard Dight, Peter Kingsley, David Oates, Simon Raikes, and the Technology and Culture referees. ©2003 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/03/4401-0001$8.00 1. Aage G. Drachmann, “The Screw of Archimedes,” Actes du VIIIe Congrès Inter- national d’Histoire des Sciences, Florence-Milan (Florence, 1958), 3:940–43; John Peter Oleson, Greek and Roman Mechanical Water-Lifting Devices: The History of a Technology (Toronto, 1984), 291–94, and “Water-Lifting,” in Handbook of Ancient Water Technology, ed. O¨rjan Wikander (Leiden, 2000), 217–302, esp. 242–47 on the water screw. Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw The Context of Invention in the Ancient World S T E P H A N I E D A L L E Y a n d J O H N P E T E R O L E S O N ===== PAGE 2 ===== T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 2 already known during the reign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.) and that the design was put to use in spectacular fashion to water his palace garden at Nineveh.2 The precise identification of the inventor of a device or procedure is problematic, since nearly every technological advance is the result of long accumulation of human experience. As any modern patent lawyer can attest, it is difficult to document the originality of even a complicated or specialized technique or device. This problem is compounded for ancient technological innovations because firsthand documentary records are rare, and historical texts, where they exist, can be unclear, mistaken, or tenden- tious.3 The frequent lists of “inventors”in Pliny’s Natural History (especially 7.191–215) are an example of the doubtful attribution in the mid-first cen- tury of particular devices and techniques to individuals. Ancient authors occasionally preserve a story of invention that sounds convincing and fits into the known contemporary cultural and technological context—for example, Vitruvius’s charming depiction (On Architecture 9.8.2–4) of the youthful inventions of the Alexandrian Ctesibius (third century B.C.), who provided helpful gadgets for his father’s barber shop.4 Memorable and entertaining as such stories are, there is no method by which modern scholars can distinguish genuine biographical detail from an etiological fiction containing plausible details added to increase the immedi- acy. Fortunately, identification of a specific individual inventor is far less important or interesting than an understanding of the historical and cultural context that spawned the invention and fostered its reception. The pre- cocious Ctesibius sounds like the young Thomas Edison, enlivening his modest surroundings with innovative gadgets, setting the stage for his later accomplishments through induction, invention from the bottom up. Occa- sionally we hear of the motives and procedures of a royal patron in the clas- sical world, of top-down innovation. The historian Diodorus Siculus (Dio- dorus of Sicily), for example, writing in the mid-first century B.C., describes a sort of think tank set up by the ambitious King Dionysius I of Syracuse 2. Stephanie Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved,” Garden History 21 (1993): 8–10; “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled,” Iraq 56 (1994): 51–54;“More about the Hanging Gardens,” in Of Pots and Plans: Papers on the Archaeology and History of Mesopotamia and Syria Presented to David Oates in Honour of his 75th Birthday, ed. Lamia Al-Gailani Werr et al. (Cambridge, 2002). The main focus of Dalley’s research is her proposal that the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, praised by Greek and Latin authors, were actually the gardens of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh. 3. P. Edfou 8, a third-century B.C. papyrus document from Egypt, may be an excep- tion; see Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 146–47, and “Water-Lifting,” 289. 4. See the discussions of this passage in Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 109–10, and “Water-Lifting,” 290. Many of the passages in Greek and Latin authors on inventors are gathered in John Humphrey, John Oleson, and Andrew Sherwood, Greek and Roman Technology: A Sourcebook (London, 1998), 588–97. ===== PAGE 3 ===== DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 3 (430–367 B.C.) to solve a particular problem of military technology (History 14.41.3–4, 42.1). The high wages, performance bonuses, and focused work groups would not be out of place in a modern computer company: Dionysius, therefore, immediately assembled technicians, command- ing them to come from the cities he ruled, and luring them from Italy and Greece—and even from Carthaginian territory—with high wages. For he intended to manufacture weapons in great numbers and pro- jectiles of every sort. . . . After assembling a great number of techni- cians, he divided them into work-groups according to each one’s own talents. . . . In fact, the catapult was invented [euJrevqh] in Syracuse on this occasion, since the most able technicians were gathered together from all over into one place. The high wages stimulated their enthusiasm, along with the numerous prizes offered to those judged the best. A similar situation later on in Alexandria is reported by Philo of Byzan- tium (fl. ca. 200 B.C.), who in his book on catapults (Belopoeika 50), reports that Alexandrian craftsmen derived systematic rules for catapult construc- tion “because they were heavily subsidized by kings who loved prestige and fostered technology.”5 By the third century, at least, the prestige of the patron seems to have become as important as the practical benefit of these innovations. The public inscriptions of the Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman cultures naturally celebrate the accomplishments of the great persons who set them up, and all ancient historians relied heavily on the biographical approach. In such a climate, the innovations of an anonymous technician were rou- tinely attributed to his patron, and credit for an invention was more read- ily assigned to a famous personality—divine, human, or eponymous—than to a research group, a slave, or no one at all. In particular, the name of a known inventor or scientist could easily attract the credit for anonymous inventions appropriate to his métier. Stories about the young Ctesibius, of course, were repeated, or even created, because of his later accomplish- ments. It has also been suggested that some of the inventions attributed in antiquity to Archimedes, the most famous ancient technician and poly- math, may have been developed by other individuals, possibly long before he lived. The genius of Archimedes, like that of Leonardo da Vinci, became the stuff of legend even during his lifetime.6 During April 1999 the authors served as joint technical advisors and par- ticipants in the production of a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television film titled “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,”which examined the theory that the water screw was known in Assyria in the seventh century B.C. 5. Translation, Michael J. T. Lewis, “The Hellenistic Period,” in Wikander, 634. 6. Eduard J. Dijksterhuis, Archimedes (Copenhagen, 1956), 14–32; Dennis L. Simms, “Archimedes the Engineer,” History of Technology 17 (1995): 46, 65–67. ===== PAGE 4 ===== T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 4 In the course of the film Oleson supervised the construction of two full-scale wooden water screws and shadufs (counterbalanced sweeps with buckets, used for raising water) to experiment with techniques of irrigation, and Dalley advised on the casting of a small bronze water screw. The wooden water screws were built largely according to the detailed instructions given by Vitruvius (On Architecture 10.6.1–4), while the bronze water-screw design was based on a description in an Assyrian text called The Palace without a Rival. Neither of us having succeeded in convincing the other about the chronology of the water screw during the filming, we subsequently decided to collaborate on this article, presenting the evidence in a more scholarly fashion and with a focus on the cultural context of invention and innovation in both periods. In the course of our discussions, we became acutely aware of the extent of the gulf between scholars who study the classical cultures and those who study the cultures of the ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamia. His- torians of “ancient” technology have traditionally given preferential treat- ment to the accomplishments of the Bronze Age Egyptian and the Greek and Roman cultures, while ancient Mesopotamian achievements tend to be relegated to the specialist publications of Sumerian scholars or Assyriolo- gists, such as the recent synthesis by Ariel Bagg.7 Given the deep roots of Greco-Roman culture in the Near East, this lack of exchange is a serious impediment to research. One cause for this gap in communication arises from the separation of the study of Indo-European languages from that of the Semitic languages. In addition, judgments about racial and linguistic superiority or polemical views of “orientalism” were for a long period innate in various branches of learning in western scholarship. The Black Athena controversy has recently made these issues very clear, at least in North America.8 Another factor is the esoteric difficulty of cuneiform, progress in the understanding of which, though rapid in recent years, has yet to make its way into general works such as encyclopedias and general overviews. There are far greater gaps in the information than is the case for the Greek and Roman cultures. A seemingly obvious question to a classicist, “Why is there no evidence of the water screw for several centuries?” is astounding to an Assyriologist, 7. Ariel Bagg, Assyrische Wasserbauten (Mainz, 2000); see the detailed review by Stephanie Dalley forthcoming in Archiv für Orientforschung 48. Bagg (201–3, 206–7, 277–79) objects to Dalley’s proposal that Sennacherib made use of the water screw largely on the basis that no other early evidence for the device exists. 8. In essence, many African-Americans accept Martin Bernal’s proposal that the Egyptians were blacks, that the culture and accomplishments of the Greeks were based on black Egyptian accomplishments, and that this cultural heritage has been repressed as a result of Eurocentrism and racial prejudice. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro- asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. (London, 1987). For a critique of Bernal’s argument, see Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). ===== PAGE 5 ===== DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 5 9. Note, for example, Pliny’s account of the inventors of navigation, Natural History 7.206–9. The phenomenon in general is discussed in detail by Adolph Kleingünther, Prw`to~ euJrethv~ (Leipzig, 1933), and John F. Healey, Pliny the Elder on Science and Tech- nology (Oxford, 1999), 347–52. 10. See, for example, Albert K. Grayson, “Assyria: Sennacherib and Esarhaddon (704–669 B.C.),” Cambridge Ancient History, rev. ed., vol. 3, pt. 2 (Cambridge 1991), 103–119. 11. Thorkild Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd, Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (Chicago, 1935); Fuad Safar and Faraj Basmachi, “Sennacherib’s Project for Supplying Erbil with Water”(in Arabic), parts 1 and 2, Sumer 2 (1946): 50–52; 3 (1947): 23–25. Dalley is grate- ful to Lamia Al-Gailani Werr for translating the Arabic text. who has to take into account, on a regular basis, long distances between oases of information. Greek culture follows an unbroken thread of tradi- tion through the Renaissance, whereas the civilization of Mesopotamia has had to be reconstructed after complete loss. Its attractions are less obvious: even in modern times, with an increase in multicultural perspectives and easy travel, the decayed mud-brick palaces of Assyria cannot compete with the stone monuments of the classical world, and this is a severe disadvan- tage nowadays when visual media are dominant. Finally, the phenomenon of the named, national culture-hero has affected our appreciation of ancient Mesopotamian culture. In ancient Mesopotamia, creative efforts, whether in literature or technology, were either anonymous or attributed to the royal patron. Among Greeks and Romans, inventions or principles could be attributed, rightly or wrongly, to famous men such as Archimedes and Pythagoras, and appealing human-interest stories recorded or con- structed.9 But despite the anonymity of their engineers, the Mesopotamian cultures made major advances in hydraulic technology. Assyrian Kings and Technology Sennacherib ruled a vast area that stretched from Tarsus, in what is now southern Turkey, to the eastern border of Egypt, and from Armenia to Bah- rain (fig. 1). It was the duty of a successful Assyrian king not only to enrich the nation through conquest but also to display power through fine build- ings, the patronage of great art, and engineering works to manage the sup- ply of water to his great cities. Provided that the technology was available, he had the manpower and the raw materials to achieve whatever he wanted, regardless of time, expense, or detriment to the health of his workmen.10 Numerous long inscriptions survive that suggest Sennacherib had a direct personal interest in engineering, beyond what his position required, and the material remains of spectacular canals, tunnels and an aqueduct prove the veracity of the texts.11 He channeled water from several mountain streams east of Nineveh across varied terrain, making eighteen different channels, beginning at Bavian, 50 kilometers away to the northeast. The ===== PAGE 6 ===== T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 6 flow crossed a wide valley on an aqueduct more than 280 meters long and 22 meters wide, built up on freestanding stone arches, and entered Nineveh at just the right height to irrigate the lower portions of the garden built out- side Sennacherib’s palace. Some of the water was diverted to irrigate or- chards and fields to the north of Nineveh.12 To accommodate surges in the water flow, Sennacherib constructed an artificial marshland, an excellent solution that municipal engineers have recently reinvented; such marshes absorb and delay flow, filter the water, and attract wildlife. He was particu- larly pleased to have designed an automatic sluice that “opens by itself, without using a spade or a shovel, and allows the waters of prosperity to flow. Its gate is not opened by any action of men’s hands.”13 At Arbela, Sennacherib built an underground tunnel to bring high-quality water into the city, constructing it like a qanat (an underground aqueduct with shafts to the surface at intervals), and recorded his deed on an inscription (badly eroded) at the entrance.14 Works such as these show how completely the Assyrians had mastered the principles of hydraulic engineering. 12. Julian E. Reade, “Studies in Assyrian Geography: Sennacherib and the Waters of Nineveh,”Revue d’Assyriologie 72 (1978): 47–72, 157–80, and Reallexicon der Assyriologie, s.v. “Nineveh,” 406. 13. Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Glückstadt, Ger., 1980), s.v.“narpasu.” The numer- ous volumes of this dictionary that have appeared over fifty years are organized by let- ters of the alphabet. 14. Safar and Basmachi; see also Jørgen Laessøe,“Reflexions on Modern and Ancient FIG. 1 Map of Mesopotamia and the Levant. (Drawing by Stephanie Dalley.) ===== PAGE 7 ===== DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 7 Water Screws in Sennacherib’s Palace Gardens at Nineveh? In an Akkadian inscription written on a clay prism, Sennacherib de- scribes at great length his main achievements in improving Nineveh with a palace, a palace garden, and various measures for water control. His south- west palace, known as “the Palace without a Rival,”and the gardens that were raised up beside it are described together and termed “a Wonder for All Peoples.”The text touches on both of the topics important to a discussion of the water screw before Archimedes: bronze casting and water control.15 One passage mentions large bronzes of various shapes for a variety of purposes, cast using a new method, and the installation of some of them for the purpose of raising water: Whereas in former times the kings my forefathers had created copper statues imitating real forms, to put on display inside temples, and in their method of work they had exhausted all the craftsmen for lack of skill and failure to understand principles [?]; they needed so much oil, wax and tallow [or lanolin] for the work that they caused a shortage in their own lands—I, Sennacherib, . . . knowledgeable in all kinds of work, took much advice and deep thought over making that work: great pillars of copper, colossal striding lions, such as no previous king had ever constructed before me, with the technical skill that [the god] Ninshiku brought to perfection in me, and . . . I invented a technique for copper and did it skillfully. I created clay molds as if by divine intelligence for great cylinders and alamittu palms, tree of riches; twelve fierce lion-colossi together with twelve mighty bull-colossi which were perfect castings; twenty-two cow-colossi invested with joyous allure, plentifully endowed with sexual attraction; and I poured copper into them over and over again; I made the castings of them as perfectly as if they had only weighed half a shekel each. . . . In order to draw water up all day long I had ropes, bronze wires and bronze chains made, and instead of shadufs [makâte] I set up the great cylinders [gisˇmahhu] and alamittu palms over cisterns. I made those royal lodges look just right. I raised the height of the surround- ings of the palace to be a Wonder for all Peoples. I gave it the name: “Incomparable Palace.” A park imitating the Amanus mountains I laid out next to it, with all kinds of aromatic plants, orchard fruit trees. . .16 Oriental Waterworks,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 7 (1953): 29. The question of the qanat at this date is discussed in more detail by Dalley, “Water Management in Assyria from the Ninth to Seventh Centuries B.C.,” ARAM 13/14 (2002): 443–60. 15. D. D. Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (Chicago, 1924), 94–127. 16. Translation by Dalley. For makâte, see Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Glückstadt, Ger., 1977), s.v. “makutu.” The sequence of sentences is particularly disjointed here, and results from the way in which royal inscriptions reused and recombined passages from other, more extensive inscriptions. ===== PAGE 8 ===== T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 8 Some of the bronze castings were architectural items in the form of ani- mals, probably used as column bases. It has been calculated that they weighed up to 43 tons, an enormous mass made possible by new casting methods.17 The items used to raise water are described as a “great tree trunk” (gisˇmahhu), which is the word used for a cylinder (for example, in mathematical problem texts), and as an alamittu palm tree. In fact, it is the molds that are described as being these two, separate items, not the casting itself, which Dalley interprets as a bronze water screw. The weight of such a bronze screw cannot be calculated with any accuracy, since length, diame- ter and thickness of metal are all unknown, but if we assume dimensions similar to those of wooden Roman water screws or the BBC reproductions (3 meters long, with a diameter of 0.45 meters), they would have weighed 2 or 3 tons.18 Dalley has proposed the hypothesis that the term alamittu was used metaphorically to indicate the spiraling helix of such a water screw.19 The spiral form itself had been familiar to engineers in both northern and southern Mesopotamia since the Middle Bronze Age, and was used in mud- brick columns constructed of trapezoidal bricks laid in a decorative spiral pattern (fig. 2), some of them still visible in Sennacherib’s day.20 In addi- tion, some stone and terra-cotta sculptures show palms with a spiral-pat- terned trunk.21 The difficulty of finding an appropriate technical term in the languages of preindustrial cultures is well illustrated by the Assyrian usage of gisˇmahhu, “great tree-trunk,” for a hollow cylinder, and by the Greek use of kocliva~, “snail,” for a spiral or helix. Nevertheless, the recog- nition that a helical form hidden inside a cylinder could be used to raise water is a significant conceptual leap. 17. Stephanie Dalley,“Neo-Assyrian Textual Evidence for Bronze-Working Centres,” in Bronze-Working Centres of Western Asia, c. 1000–539 B.C., ed. J. Curtis (London, 1988), 97–110. 18. Personal communication with Dalley by Andrew Lacey of Bronze Age Castings in London, who carried out the casting of a small bronze screw for the BBC program. 19. Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens” and “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens” (both n. 2 above). For a duplicate text, see Alexander Heidel, “The Octagonal Sennacherib Prism in the Iraq Museum,” Sumer 9 (1953): 117–88. 20. See David Oates, “Innovations in Mud-Brick: Decorative and Structural Tech- niques in Ancient Mesopotamia,” World Archaeology 21 (1990): 388–406, and Eleanor Robson, Mesopotamian Mathematics (Oxford, 1999), 142–45. The ziggurat built by Sargon II at Khorsabad was reconstructed as a spiral staircase rising up a circular tower, and it is often shown thus in books on the history of architecture. However, a recent study has indicated that the tower consisted of superimposed rectangles, on which a spi- ral staircase could not have been fitted; see Jean-Claude Margueron, “E´tude architec- turale,” in Khorsabad (Paris, 1995), 190–93. 21. For example, at Larsa, Ur, Tell al Rimah, Tell Haddad, Tell Basmusian. The iden- tification of the alamittu palm as Chamaerops humilis in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Glückstadt, 1963), s.v. “alamittu,” can now be seen to be incorrect; Dalley, “More about the Hanging Gardens” (n. 2 above). ===== PAGE 9 ===== 22. Andreas Fuchs, Die Inschriften Sargons II aus Khorsabad, rev. ed. (Göttingen, 1994), 128–30; see also Dalley, “Neo-Assyrian Textual Evidence.” 23. On the issues surrounding early ironworking, see John E. Curtis et al., “Neo-As- syrian Ironworking Technology,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123 DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 9 Sennacherib’s new water-lifting device for his palace garden was cast in bronze, and thus combined his metallurgical and hydraulic interests. His father, Sargon II, was also personally interested in the techniques of mining, smelting, and alloying.22 To show such a detailed interest in technical mat- ters, to be enthusiastic about innovative technology, is unusual in the writ- ings of Mesopotamian kings. At the time when Sennacherib recorded his achievements, the craft of the bronzeworker was steadily being displaced by the new craft of the ironworker. The process of change was a slow one, partly for reasons of social status. The bronzeworker had a high standing in society and was attached to the palaces and temples from which his patron- age came. The ironworker, on the other hand, came as a tinker, a refugee, a displaced foreigner, and his material, iron ore, was common. Worked iron could not be reused as easily as bronze and decayed more readily, which made it unsuitable for storing as treasure or using as currency.23 In these cir- cumstances, bronze production grew specialized, drawing upon its royal FIG. 2 Spiral column façade at Tell al Rimah, northern Iraq, Middle Bronze Age. (David Oates, “The Excavations at Tell Al Rimah, 1966,” Iraq 29 (1967), pl. XXXII.b.) ===== PAGE 10 ===== (1979): 369–90; Radomir Pleiner and J. K. Bjorkman, “The Assyrian Iron Age: The History of Iron in Assyrian Civilizations,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 118 (1974): 283–313; Theodore A. Wertime and James D. Muhly, The Coming of the Age of Iron (New Haven, Conn., 1980). 24. Herbert Maryon and Harold J. Plenderleith, “Fine Metalwork,” in A History of Technology, ed. Charles Singer et al. (Oxford, 1954), 1:623–27. On the history of bronze hollow casting and the use of piece molds in the Near East and later in Greece, see Denys E. L. Haynes, The Technique of Greek Bronze Statuary (Mainz, 1992). Many of the bronze casting techniques used by the Greeks were developed in the Near East. 25. Andrew Lacey estimates that the difference was about 100 degrees Centigrade. 26. Prudence Harper, Joan Aruz, and Françoise Talon, The Royal City of Susa (New York, 1992), 132–35. 27. In the Louvre, dated by the Elamite inscription they carry; Friedrich W. König, Die elamischen Königsinschriften (Graz, Aus., 1965), 17 n. 45. 28. Dalley thanks Peter Northover for this calculation. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 10 patronage to create works of art and interesting devices. Sennacherib, like his father, was an ideal patron because he took a personal interest in the pro- cesses involved and described them in his royal inscriptions. Hollow casting is attested in Mesopotamia as early as the dynasty of Agade (circa 2334–2279 B.C.) by the bronze head of Sargon found at Nineveh.24 The outer layer of an object was hollow cast by a typical lost-wax technique, but using a copper alloy containing only 1 percent tin along with some lead, iron, silver, nickel, bismuth, and cobalt. The object was then filled with a different copper alloy, composed of 11 percent tin and signifi- cantly less of the other added metals, the core thus having a much lower melting point and so not melting the outer layer.25 Concentric casting with different alloys was practiced in Elam on the border of Babylonia in the fourteenth century B.C., as attested by the statue of Napirasu, which even in its present truncated state is 1.29 meters tall and weighs 1,750 kilograms.26 The solid bulls and lions cast by Sennacherib were presumably made by a similar method, except that Sennacherib claims to have dispensed with the wax and tallow used in the first stage of the casting in order to produce even larger objects than were previously possible. Two hollow bronze cylinders from Susa that date to the twelfth century indicate clearly the technological heritage Sennacherib could draw upon in casting his cylindrical water-lifting devices.27 The one on display in the Louvre is 4.36 meters long, 0.18 meters in diameter, its irregular walls around 1.5 centimeters thick—more or less the same length as the water screws proposed for Nineveh, but smaller in diameter. The estimated weight is 125–30 kilograms.28 Although the casting of a helix inside a cylin- der is a more complex task, it is clear Sennacherib had at his disposal the metallurgical skills needed to produce large bronze water screws. As part of the BBC program, and in an attempt to reconstruct Assyrian casting procedures, Andrew Lacey cast a small-scale water screw, using 60 kilograms of bronze. The furnace was constructed simply and in the open ===== PAGE 11 ===== 29. That is, the Byzantine writer of paradoxes (i.e., marvels), not the Hellenistic engineer. Philo of Byzantium, the engineering author of circa 200 B.C., keeps popping up in the discussion of the water screw, usually because of a confusion with an author bet- ter referred to as Philo Byzantinus or Philo the Paradoxographer, a paradoxographer and rhetorician of the fourth century A.D. The later Philo wrote a handbook on the seven wonders of the ancient world and describes the use of water screws at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Wilhelm Kroll,“Philon (49),” Realencyclopädie, vol. 20, bk. 1 (1960), 54–55; Kai Brodersen, Reiseführer zu den Sieben Weltwundern, Philon von Byzanz und andere antike Texte (Frankfurt, 1992), 15. Peter A. Clayton and Martin Price, eds., The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (London, 1988), 170, are aware of the late date of the Philo who wrote on the seven wonders, but one of the contributors to their book, Irving L. Finkel, “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon” (38–58), unaccountably refers to him in the text as “Philo of Byzantium who probably flourished around 250 B.C.” (45). This inconsistency, combined with the popularity of Clayton and Price’s book, has misled many later authors, including Dalley; see “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens” (n. 2 above), 53. But it is nonetheless useful to consider why Philo of Byzantium (the Hellenistic technical writer, fl. ca. 200 B.C.) does not mention the water screw anywhere in the frag- ments of his work that have survived in Greek, or in Latin and Arabic translations. Of the possible nine books of his compendium, only two are wholly extant, and a few other fragments deal only with war machines. The two books that remain would not necessar- ily have included the screw, since the Parasceuastica (preserved in Greek) deals with cat- apults and his Pneumatica (preserved in Arabic) deals with siphons and related devices. So it is possible that Philo the engineer, and his teacher Ctesibius of Alexandria (floruit 270 B.C.), knew of the screw in Egypt before the time of Archimedes, and we have been unlucky in the chance survival of texts that happen not to mention screws. This silence of the sources, of course, allows one to argue exactly the opposite as well. Hellenistic technical writing, like Assyrian landscape relief, survives only erratically. DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 11 air, and the casting accomplished largely with tools and materials appropri- ate to an early Iron Age culture. Lacey fashioned a wood-and-rope model for the helix, coated with clay and suspended inside a separate cylinder of baked clay that encased the whole. The molds for the helix and the cylinder were separate, and the casting they produced was a unitary bronze screw with a hollow center, the helix and the surrounding cylinder cast as a single piece. A separate bronze rod was then inserted as the axle. No wax was used, since Sennacherib implies that wax was not needed for his new method of casting, or at least not in such huge quantities as previously. The shape is ideal for casting, since there are no awkward angles where air might be trapped and the metal flows smoothly through the mold. There do not appear to be any technical obstacles to the casting of a large water screw as a single unit, other than the difficulties inherent in any large casting project. Dalley has argued that two passages in classical literature also imply the existence of water screws in Sennacherib’s garden at Nineveh: Strabo Geog- raphy 16.1.5 and the later Philo of Byzantium, better known as Philo the Paradoxographer, On the Seven Wonders of the World 1.4.29 Both passages describe the method of raising water for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Dalley has made a good case that these gardens never existed in Babylon ===== PAGE 12 ===== 30. See Dalley,“Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens,” also “Why Did Herod- otus not Mention the Hanging Gardens?” forthcoming in Herodotus and His World: Essays in Memory of George Forrest, ed. Peter Derow and Robert Parker (Oxford). 31. Strabo traveled widely (cf. Geography 2.5.11), particularly in the Near East and Egypt (2.5.12), but the precise extent of his journeys is unclear. Curtius Rufus History of Alexander 5.1.32–35. 32. Ctesias of Cnidus, Persica, in Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Histori- ker, vol. 3, pt. C (Leiden, 1958), 484–85, no. 688, frag. 34a-b. See Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting (n. 1 above), 39–41. The reconstruction by Stevenson of an irrigation sys- tem for the gardens based on wheels with compartmented rims, turned by treading, is essentially feasible, but not supported by any archaeological or literary evidence: D. W. W. Stevenson, “A Proposal for the Irrigation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” Iraq 54 (1992): 35–55. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 12 proper, but that later authors knew Nineveh under the name Babylon and were describing Sennacherib’s garden in Nineveh.30 If she is correct, Stra- bo’s description of Babylon in the later first century B.C. may be derived from some earlier source, even though his description of the Near East seems to be based in part on personal travel. Quintus Curtius Rufus also records that the gardens (like the other world wonders) were still flourish- ing in his own day (first century A.D.?).31 The apparent transfer of the Hanging Gardens from Nineveh, later known as “Old Babylon,” on the Tigris, to Babylon on the Euphrates was permanent. Many travelers con- fused the two rivers because of numerous branching streams and canals connecting them. Strabo wrote (Geography 16.1.5): “The topmost story is approached by a stairway that has water screws [kocliva~] installed alongside, by means of which those assigned to the task used to raise water up continuously into the gardens from the Euphrates.” The arrangement makes technological sense. A series of water screw installations was constructed from the river to the top of the garden structure, parallel to stairs providing access pre- sumably both to the individuals rotating the water screws and to other serv- ice personnel, as well as to those seeking pleasure. Strabo says the screws were set alongside steps that led to the top of the terraced garden, possibly a stepped corridor protected from the sun by a mud-brick barrel vault or leafy arbors. There is a similar passage in a description of the same “Gar- dens of Babylon” by his contemporary Diodorus Siculus (History 2.10.6): “There was one [gallery] with shafts from the highest level and water-lift- ing machines [o[rgana] by means of which a quantity of water was drawn up from the river, although no one outside could see the activity.” There is no way to determine what sort of water-lifting device Diodorus thought was in use here, although the mention of “shafts” [diatomav~] might imply a vertical lift by means of ropes, rather than a hidden, sloping corridor for water screws. In this case, the animal-operated bucket and pul- ley (the cˇerd) may be considered an option, and it was known in Mesopo- tamia by at least the fourth century B.C.32 Neither Strabo nor Diodorus, ===== PAGE 13 ===== 33. Translation based in part on that of David Oates in Finkel, 46; see also Brodersen, 24–25. Although late and a rhetorician, the reputation of Philo the Paradoxographer for conveying accurate information about the ancient “wonders” has been upheld by Denys E. L. Haynes, “Philo of Byzantium and the Colossus of Rhodes,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 77 (1957): 311–12. 34. British Museum no. 124939. See Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens,” 51–52; Pauline Albenda, “Landscape Bas-Reliefs in the Bit Hilani of Ashur- banipal,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 224 (1976): 49–72, fig. 4. 35. Reade,“Studies in Assyrian Geography” (n. 12 above). Dalley deals with some of these issues at length in “More about the Hanging Gardens” (n. 2 above). DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 13 however, refer to animals, and the long walkway needed for a cˇerd is likely to have been visible to onlookers. The account of the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” in the handbook to the Seven Wonders of the World written by Philo the Paradoxographer in the fourth century A.D. is derived from unknown sources, and rendered in typi- cally florid Byzantine Greek. Philo describes the associated irrigation system as follows (1.4):“Streams of water issuing from springs higher up flow partly downward in a direct course, partly are forced upwards through bends and spirals to gush out higher up, being pushed through the twists of these devices by mechanical forces. So, brought together in frequent and com- modious sources at a high level, these waters irrigate the whole garden. . . .”33 The mention of bends, spirals, and twists make it clear that the water-lifting device intended could only be a water screw. The supply system is mixed, however, since the author also mentions the provision of some of the water by gravity flow, presumably to the lower portion of the gardens. There is no other evidence in Assyrian inscriptions for knowledge of the water screw, and no illustrations of water screws in surviving Assyrian relief sculptures. The absence of representations, however, is hardly sur- prising, given the low survival rate for these reliefs. The one relief sculpture that may illustrate the garden itself is a badly damaged panel only 35 per- cent complete (fig. 3). It was set up at Nineveh during the reign of Ashur- banipal, Sennacherib’s grandson, who was unfortunately the last king to use such bas-reliefs.34 Ever since its discovery, attempts have been made to com- pare details of the garden relief with the descriptions of the Hanging Gar- dens by Strabo and Diodorus Siculus: an aqueduct brings water into the garden halfway up the slope, and artificial terraces thick with plants are built up on stone vaults. One of the drawings made of a now missing frag- ment has recently been recognized as providing further details of the gar- dens: at the top of a steep slope is a pillared walkway supporting trees grow- ing on the thick roof. This detail is found in the depiction of the gardens by Philo the Paradoxographer, who describes stout columns with beams set on top supporting soil and trees.35 No water-lifting devices, however, are visi- ble in the surviving portion of the relief. Of the known ancient water-lifting devices, the water screw best fits the words of Sennacherib’s inscription as interpreted by Dalley, but neither the ===== PAGE 14 ===== 36. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 293 37. Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens” (n. 2 above), 53. 38. Aage G. Drachmann,“The Crank in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,” in Changing Per- spectives in the History of Science, ed. Teich Mikulás (London, 1973), 33–51, marshals the evidence that the crank did not exist in antiquity, with the possible exception of one application by Archimedes to turn a pulley system. Simms (n. 6 above), 100 n. 5, rejects even this limited use, probably correctly. Michael J. T. Lewis, Millstone and Hammer (Hull, 1997), 15, presents a typically iconoclastic, but halfhearted, argument that the T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 14 inscription nor the visual evidence prove the existence of the water screw in the seventh century B.C. Only the passage in Strabo is early enough and clear enough to carry some authority, and yet there is no guarantee that the water screws he mentions appeared in his source or that the source itself predates Archimedes. The water screws might even have been retrofitted at the gardens after their invention by Archimedes, to replace some other, less efficient method of irrigation.36 None of these passages mentions the method of turning the devices. In her 1992 article, Dalley suggested that the screws she reconstructs were turned with a crank mounted on the upper end of the axle.37 This ap- proach, however, is almost certainly wrong, since it seems that the princi- ple of the true crank was not discovered until the second century B.C., when it appears in rudimentary form on rotary querns, and it was apparently not put to use in ancient machinery.38 The inertia of such heavy bronze water FIG. 3 The British Museum Nineveh garden relief. (Drawing by Stephanie Dalley.) ===== PAGE 15 ===== small rotary hand quern might have been known as early as the seventh century B.C. The evidence he cites is secondhand and extremely doubtful. 39. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting (n. 1 above), 370–80; cf. Donald R. Hill and M. T. Wright,“Byzantine and Arabic Mathematical Gearing,”Annals of Science 42 (1985): 87–138, and Derek J. de Solla Price, “Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechan- ism, a Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C.,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 64 (1974): 7. 40. Described by Andrea Büsing-Kolbe, “Frühe griechische Türen,” Jahrbuch des Deutsches-Archäologisches Institut 93 (1978): 66–174. 41. Armas Salonen, Die Türen des alten Mesopotamien (Helsinki, 1961), 120–21. 42. Dalley is grateful to Chris Addison for his help with calculations. They are based on the weight of dried conifer timbers, and do not include the quite substantial weight of the bronze bands, doorknobs, and locks. A total weight of 2 tons is realistic. 43. Peter R. S. Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries (Winona Lake, Ind., 1999), 337. 44. Diodorus Siculus History 2.10.2. 45. This figure is strikingly close to White’s estimate of the discharge of the Vitruvian DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 15 screws and the friction of their bearings would have made it impossible to drive them by means of humans treading the top of the barrel, as shown in Roman illustrations of wooden screws. Any method that requires cogs may be discounted, since the cog also seems to have been unknown before the Hellenistic period.39 The mention of ropes, wires, and chains in connection with the water-lifting device of Sennacherib’s inscription suggests to Dalley that the screws she restored at Nineveh were driven by a system of chains wound around the barrels and hauled from below. The hinge sockets that took the weight of the enormous doors at some Near Eastern palaces provide a possible parallel for the bearings. These doors were strapped to a vertical, cylindrical beam, which was set into a copper-lined stone socket and rotated to open the door leaf.40 Lard and other oils were supplied to doorkeepers, some presumably for lubrication.41 The wooden double doors with bands of bronze found at Balawat near Nineveh weighed at least 1,120 kilograms.42 They date to about two hun- dred years earlier than Sennacherib and were provided with sockets made of a very hard, dense, black stone.43 The bearings for the screws might have been similar, the shaft bedded in journal or thrust bearings lined with cop- per or bronze and kept well oiled. The splashing water lifted by the screws would also have served to lubricate the bearings. Lack of evidence prohibits precise calculation of how much water had to be raised from one terrace to another in the gardens at Nineveh. The height of the terraces above the aqueduct is not known, nor do we know how many trees or which species were grown there. Diodorus Siculus describes the size of the garden as “like a Greek theater, 4 plethra on each side” (roughly 120 meters).44 The BBC water screws lifted approximately 150 liters per minute (9,000 liters per hour) for short periods of time over a height of about 1.5 meters.45 This discharge is equivalent to 162 cubic ===== PAGE 16 ===== water screw: 2,000 gallons/hour (9,092 liters/hour) by a one-man water screw over a head of 4 feet (1.22 meters). See Kenneth D. White, Greek and Roman Technology (Lon- don, 1984), 194. See also Landels’s estimates of 9,600 to 14,100 liters/hour, in John G. Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (London, 1978), 63. 46. M. Arnoldi and Karlheinz Schaldach,“A Roman Cylinder Dial: Witness to a For- gotten Tradition,” Journal of the History of Astronomy 28 (1997): 107–17. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 16 meters of water in an eighteen-hour day. Such a high rate of discharge sug- gests that just one or two series of water screws would have been sufficient to irrigate the gardens, perhaps working only a few hours each day. In addi- tion, not all the water would have had to be lifted to the highest terrace. Two series of screws might have been used to lift water as high as the midpoint of the total lift, with irrigation water being drawn off from the sumps on each terrace, while only one series continued on to the higher terraces. It is also possible that the aqueduct illustrated in the British Museum’s Nineveh relief and alluded to by Philo the Paradoxographer brought water in high enough that only the top few terraces had to be irrigated by lifted water. Given the absence of specific details about the gardens, however, it is impossible to provide detailed statistics of need or potential discharge. It should be emphasized that if the object cast by Sennacherib was a water screw, it could not have represented the first use of that mechanism for raising water. There must have been working examples in wood that inspired or were copied for the bronze casting, since nobody would cast such a device full-scale in bronze unless he already knew it would work. Just as the sophistication of the Antikythera cog mechanism (by far the earliest material evidence for gearing) was part of a long period of technical evolu- tion largely hidden from us, so the manufacture of Sennacherib’s screw in expensive and intractable bronze was presumably the result of considerable previous experience and practical use.46 Since wood rarely survives in Mesopotamia, we are unlikely ever to find wooden water screws there. In summary, the details of the Palace without a Rival inscription as reinterpreted by Dalley remain the principal pre-Hellenistic evidence for the existence of the water screw. This interpretation is supported by Strabo’s description of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon only if one attrib- utes the gardens to Sennacherib at Nineveh rather than to another king in Babylon and accepts the antiquity of Strabo’s sources. The same provisos affect interpretation of the passage in Philo the Paradoxographer. If the screw was invented or adopted by the Assyrians in the seventh century B.C., they would likely have introduced it into Egypt when they took control of the Nile Valley in the mid-seventh century, where Archi- medes might have seen it at work four centuries later. A passage in Deu- teronomy (11:10), probably dating to the seventh century B.C., mentions that in Egypt, unlike Palestine, men watered their gardens “with their feet.” The phrase may refer to the shovel work necessary for impounding and ===== PAGE 17 ===== 47. Although few scholars would allow a date as late as the third century B.C. for this text, a late date cannot be ruled out, so the evidence it provides is not conclusive. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting (n. 1 above), 98–99, dates it to the seventh century B.C. and sug- gests that the text might in fact refer to the shaduf or the compartmented wheel. 48. Jaromír Málek, Egyptian Art (London, 1999), 368. 49. For discussions of the Greco-Roman water screw, see Oleson, Mechanical Water- Lifting, 291–301, and “Water-Lifting” (n. 1 above), 242–51. Archimedes’ treatise on spi- rals is discussed by Wilbur R. Knorr, “Archimedes and the Spirals: The Heuristic Back- ground,” History of Mathematics 5 (1978): 43–75. The design of the hypothetical wooden water screws that might have preceded Sennacherib’s palace design, of course, is com- pletely unknown. The related principle of threaded bolt and nut was known by the third century B.C., but practical application seems to have come only in the first century B.C. Because of the difficulty of cutting accurate threads, small metal bolts were rare even in the Roman period, seen most often in jewelry and luxury metal objects. The threaded bolt and nut were most commonly manufactured on a very large scale in wood, for use in grape, olive, or clothes presses. The metal carpenter’s screw for wood was unknown in antiquity. See Franz Kiechle, “Zur Verwendung der Schraube in der Antike,” Technik- geschichte 34 (1967): 14–22; Aage G. Drachmann, “Heron’s Screwcutter,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 56 (1936): 72–77; Rudolf Kellermann and Wilhelm Treue, Die Kultur- geschichte der Schraube, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1962); Barbara Deppert-Lippitz et al., Die Schraube zwischen Macht und Pracht: Das Gewinde in der Antike (Sigmaringen, Ger., 1995). DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 17 channeling irrigation water in the Nile Valley, or it may simply be a meta- phor for hard labor. But if the phrase is to be interpreted literally, the only appropriate irrigation devices would be the water screw or the wheel with compartmented rim, and for the latter there is no evidence earlier than the third century B.C.47 One might expect Egyptian paintings to show screws in action in the Nile Delta during the Persian or early Ptolemaic periods if they existed then, but by that time the vogue for landscape art, so popular in the Late Bronze Age period of the New Kingdom, had passed.48 One can only hope that more evidence will come to light in the future. Did Archimedes Invent the Water Screw? Is the case for Archimedes as the inventor—or even the reinventor—of the water screw any stronger than that for Sennacherib? Without doubt Archimedes wrote a mathematical treatise on spirals, for which the main application known at that time was the water-lifting screw. The question is, was he responsible also for the mechanical invention?49 And even if we can- not verify that he invented (or reinvented) the device, what was the context that spawned the innovation? The design of the everyday Greek and Roman water screw, in contrast to the heavy bronze device of Sennacherib, with its problematic drive chains, has a powerful simplicity. A double or triple helix was built of wood strips (or occasionally bronze sheeting) around a heavy wooden pole. A cylinder was built around the helices using long, narrow boards fastened to their periphery and waterproofed with pitch, and tread- ===== PAGE 18 ===== T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 18 ing cleats were fastened around the outside of the barrel, toward the center (figs. 4 and 5). Screws of this type, which might be 2 meters to 3 meters long, turned on simple metal pivots at each end of the axle. All surviving representations of the water screw in action show a single individual stand- ing on the treads to work the screw, which is set at a low angle, and the lit- erary texts describe only treading. The treader balanced and partly sup- ported himself on a pole stuck in the earth nearby or on a horizontal beam supported by a thatched sun shelter, and moved the treads with his feet. There is a fresco representation of an agricultural water screw in the House of Menander at Pompeii (fig. 4), and Philo Judaeus provides a clear descrip- tion of such a water screw action in the first century A.D. (De confusione lin- guarum 38): Compare the screw, the water-lifting device. There are some treads around the middle on which the husbandman steps whenever he wants to irrigate his fields, but naturally he keeps slipping off. To keep from continually falling, he grasps something sturdy nearby with his hands and clings to it, suspending his whole body from it. In this way he uses his hands as feet and his feet as hands, for he supports himself FIG. 4 Pompeii, House of Menander, fresco of Egyptian water screw in opera- tion. (Photo by John Peter Oleson.) ===== PAGE 19 ===== 50. Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, vol. 2, pt. A (Leiden, DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 19 with his hands, which are generally used for working, and he works with his feet, which customarily serve as supports. For a high angle of installation, such as might be needed for draining deep mines or lifting water up a steep slope, a different method of rotation may have been used, but no descriptions or representations of a screw at such an angle exist to show how this might have been done. All the surviving archaeological evidence for the water screw dates to the first century A.D. or later, and the few possible papyrological references belong to the first and second centuries A.D. Greek literary sources, how- ever, begin in the second half of the third century B.C. Vitruvius (On Archi- tecture 10.6.1–4) provides the best ancient description of the water screw, and complete instructions on how to construct it. After adapting the design to reduce the number of helices to two, the procedures outlined by Vitru- vius were followed without difficulty during design and construction of two full-size water screws for the BBC television production (fig. 5). Diodorus of Sicily associates the water screw with Archimedes in a pas- sage concerned with irrigation in the Nile Delta (History 1.34.2):“[T]he Nile . . . in its annual inundation always deposits new mud, and the inhabitants easily irrigate the whole region by means of a certain device which Archimedes the Syracusan invented [ejpenovhse], called the screw [kocliva~] on account of its design.”50 Here we meet a crux of interpretation which is FIG. 5 The BBC water screw, complete and mounted. (Photo by John Peter Oleson.) ===== PAGE 20 ===== 1961), 213, no. 86, frag. 19, attributes this passage to an unknown work by Agatharchides of Cnidus, who wrote in the third quarter of the second century B.C. 51. Ibid., 309, no. 87, frag. 117. The passage probably originated in an unknown work by Posidonius of Apamaea written in the first half of the first century B.C. 52. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 92–93. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 20 applicable also to other passages discussed below. Common meanings of the verb ejpinoei`n include to think about, to think of, contrive, purpose, observe, invent. It can be seen that one might substitute “observed” or “found” for “invented” without disturbing the narrative or the syntax significantly. A second passage in Diodorus (History 5.37.3–4), probably quoted from the first-century B.C. author Posidonius, contains two cruxes.51 Not only can the verb euJrivskw be ambiguous, allowing the meanings to find, find out, discover, invent, get, gain, and earn, but tecnivth~, “craftsman,” might be either a direct reference to Archimedes or a generic term for the inventive human being. The passage describes the working of mines in Spain: At a depth they sometimes break in on rivers flowing beneath the sur- face whose strength they overcome by diverting their welling tributar- ies off to the side in channels. Since they are driven by the well- founded anticipation of gain, they carry out their enterprises to the end, and—most incredible of all—they draw off the streams of water with the so-called Egyptian screw [Aijguptiakoi; koclivai], which Archimedes the Syracusan invented [eu|ren] when he visited Egypt. By means of these devices, set up in an unbroken series up to the mouth of the mine, they dry up the mining area and provide a suit- able environment for carrying out their work. Since this device is quite ingenious, a prodigious amount of water is discharged with only a small amount of labor, and the whole torrent is easily dis- charged from the depths into the light of day. One might reasonably marvel at the inventiveness of the craftsman [Archimedes?] not only in this, but also in many other even greater inventions celebrated throughout the whole world, each of which we shall discuss carefully in turn when we come to the age of Archimedes. The translation of eu|ren as “invented” in this passage finds support in the use by Diodorus of the same verb to record the invention of siege engines by Dionysius of Syracuse’s think tank, in a passage quoted above. It is also possible to find support in the famous story of Archimedes’ discov- ery of the principle of specific gravity while floating in a basin at a public bath in Syracuse (Plutarch Moralia 1094C): He leaped out of the tub in his excitement, crying eu|rhka (also from euJrivskw), “I’ve found it!” (the solu- tion to the problem confronting him, that is), and ran home naked through the streets.52 But should account be taken of the essential difference ===== PAGE 21 ===== 53. For example, Dijksterhuis (n. 6 above), 21–22; Brian Cotterell and Johan Kamminga, Mechanics of Pre-Industrial Technology (Cambridge, 1990), 94; and doubts expressed by Morris R. Cohen and Israel E. Drabkin, A Sourcebook in Greek Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 350–51. Contrary arguments are collected in Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting (n. 1 above), 291–94. Danielle Bonneau, Le Régime adminis- tratif de l’eau du Nil dans l’Égypt grecque, romaine, et Byzantine (Leiden, 1993), 97–98, accepts Archimedes as the inventor. 54. See Lewis, “The Hellenistic Period” (n. 5 above), 635. DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 21 between discovering a preexisting law and inventing a new mechanical device? Archimedes cannot be said literally to have invented the principle of displacement. Thus the verb in Plutarch may mean to come across, dis- cover, rather than to devise first, to originate (in the sense known to patent law), and some scholars interpret it in this way.53 According to this inter- pretation, preexistence of the water screw would also explain why Posidon- ius (in Diodorus Siculus) calls them “Egyptian screws” here and in a simi- lar fragment quoted in Strabo Geography 3.2.9. On the other hand, one also can interpret eu|ren in the passage from Posidonius to indicate that—as with the discovery of specific gravity— Archimedes observed the principles of spirals and helices in nature and applied his analysis of natural phenomena to the solution of a human engi- neering problem. This seems to have been Vitruvius’s understanding, since in his version of the story Archimedes “cried out in a loud voice that he had found what he was seeking” (On Architecture 9, preface 9–10, “significabat clara voce invenisse, quod quaereret”). Vitruvius lists Archimedes among the superior innovators who based their practical inventions on mathematics and natural laws (On Architecture 1.1.17): “Archimedes and Scopinas of Syracuse. They have left to posterity many treatises on machinery and time- keeping devices in which mathematics and natural law are used to make discoveries and explain them.” Unfortunately, the verb is too common and the contexts in which it is used are too fluid to allow the modern reader pre- cise semantic distinctions. Finally, mention must be made of Plutarch’s description (Marcellus 14.4–9) of how mechanics was a subject entirely distinct from geometry, and how King Hiero of Syracuse had trouble persuading Archimedes “to turn his art somewhat from abstract notions to material things.” This com- ment is unique and probably represents rhetorical posturing, but it is inter- esting to note that Plutarch reports Hiero’s motivation to have been “pres- tige,” like that of the contemporary Ptolemies, who subsidized applied research in Alexandria.54 In this context he calls Archimedes dhmiourgov~ (14.9), a term for “craftsman” with more mythical overtones than that used by Posidonius. Another passage which can be interpreted to show that Archimedes invented the water screw is quoted by Athenaeus (Philosophers at Dinner 5.207–208) from Moschion’s Treatise on the Great Ship of Hiero of Syracuse, ===== PAGE 22 ===== 55. Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, vol. 3, pt. B (Leiden, 1964), 677, no. 575, frag 5.3. 56. Compare, in particular, Aeschylus Prometheus Bound 460, 469 (to invent mathe- matics, writing, and inventions); Herodotus History 1.8 (to invent rules); Plato Republic 566b (to devise a petition). 57. Landels (n. 45 above), 66, is probably correct that a single water screw could not have provided enough lift to pump out Hiero’s large (and thus deep-hulled) ship. For a full discussion of the ship, see Jean M. Turfa and Alwin G. Steinmayer,“The Syracusia as a Giant Cargo Vessel,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 28 (1999): 105–25. On bilge pumps, see Oleson, “Water-Lifting” (n. 1 above), 263–67, 298–99. 58. See Peter Kingsley, “Artillery and Prophecy: Sicily in the Reign of Dionysius I,” Prometheus 21 (1995): 15–23. 59. On the special character of the technological climate in Hellenistic Alexandria, see Lewis, “The Hellenistic Period.” 60. In the twelfth century, Eustathius (ad Iliadem M 293) also attributes the inven- tion of the water screw to Archimedes, but—despite his deep classical learning—his tes- timony is too late to carry any particular weight. 61. Dijksterhuis (n. 6 above), 21–22. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 22 written sometime soon after 241 B.C.55 “And the bilge, although of a remarkable depth, was pumped out by a single man operating a water screw [dia; koclivou], which Archimedes invented [ejxeurovnto~].” The verb used here, ejxeurivskein, has a range of meaning: invent, discover, find out.56 Although the water screw is not well adapted to bilge pumping and was soon replaced for this purpose by chain pumps and force pumps, Moschion may have had information either that Archimedes invented the water screw and then put it to use in this highly experimental ship, or that Archimedes found the screw in Egypt and introduced it to the people of Syracuse, inventing a new use for it.57 According to the long, detailed text quoted in Athenaeus, Archimedes was the technical overseer (gewmevtrh~ ejpovpth~) of the whole project (Philosophers at Dinner 5.206d).58 Oleson believes that the fragments of Moschion, Agatharchides, and Posidonius (as quoted in Athenaeus and Diodorus Siculus) can be inter- preted to indicate either that Archimedes invented the water screw or that during or soon after his lifetime and in the course of the second century B.C. individuals familiar with his life and work believed that he had invented a new device called the water screw. In either case, the chronology suggests that the device was invented around the time of Archimedes, in the partic- ularly fertile climate of practical innovation associated with the Museion, the Museum at Alexandria.59 Dalley interprets the evidence to show that he was associated with the screw only because of his treatise on spirals, his observation of preexisting screws in use in Egypt, and his adaptation of the device for Hiero’s ships.60 Dijksterhuis is another scholar who believes that Archimedes found the water screw already in use when he visited Egypt, arguing that “neither Strabo, nor Philo of Byzantium [sic], nor Vitruvius, who all three mention or describe [the water screw], associate it with the name of Archimedes.”61 These objections are groundless, since it is clear ===== PAGE 23 ===== 62. See n. 29 above. 63. Herbert Addison carried out experiments with a reconstructed water screw showing, among other results, that the capacity of the water screw is greatest at lower lifts and falls off very rapidly as the angle of inclination approaches the complement of the angle of the vanes; “Experiments on an Archimedean Screw,” Institution of Civil Engineers 75 (1929): 3–15. There is a more sophisticated mathematical model in Chris Rorres, “The Turn of the Screw: Optimal Design of an Archimedes Screw,” Journal of Hydraulic Engineering 126, no. 1 (2000): 72–80. 64. For example, the fresco of an Egyptian water-screw installation at Pompeii; see Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 241–42, and “Water-Lifting,” 247–49 (both n. 1 above). 65. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 207–9, 227, 241–42. DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 23 from the context that by “Philo of Byzantium” Dijksterhuis intended Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, whose description of a screw in action (quoted above) in fact does not mention Archimedes.62 The absence of Archimedes’ name from some of the texts that mention the water screw is certainly not conclusive. For comparison, Ctesibius’s works have been lost, but descriptions of gadgets and hydraulic devices specifically attributed to him have been preserved in the works of Philo of Byzantium, Vitruvius, and Hero of Alexandria. Ctesibius’s name is associ- ated in particular with the piston-operated force pump, called Ctesibica machina by Vitruvius (On Architecture 10.7.1). In the mid-first century A.D., however, Hero describes the same force pump in detail but calls it only a sivfwn, omitting any reference to the inventor. A parallel could be drawn with instances where Archimedes’ water screw is termed only “Egyptian screw” or simply “screw.” In the passages of his Geography which mention the water screw, Strabo is concerned with the design of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (16.1.5), the location of the Roman fort at Old Cairo (17.1.3), and the means of watering the many islands in the Nile river (17.1.52). There is no reason to mention Archimedes in any of these contexts. Whether the screw was introduced into the Nile Delta by Archimedes on behalf of Ptolemy II or arrived four centuries earlier under Assyrian occupation, the device was ideally suited to that environment. The water screw is particularly effective for low lifts, such as irrigation along the low- lying banks of the Nile Delta. In addition, the device is essentially self-purg- ing and can lift water that is thick with silt and vegetable matter. There are no small intake holes or compartments to clog, the water simply flows unrestricted over smooth-walled surfaces.63 A passage in Strabo (Geography 17.1.52) describes this situation: “There are a great many islands scattered along the course of the Nile. Some are completely covered during the flood, others only in part, and the particularly high spots are irrigated with water screws [koclivai~].” The water screw remained a typical image of the Egyptian landscape in literature and art through the Roman period.64 Numerous terra-cotta reliefs and one fresco representing water-screw installations at work have survived from the Roman imperial period, along with one model.65 None ===== PAGE 24 ===== 66. O¨rjan Wikander, Exploitation of Water-Power or Technological Stagnation? (Lund, 1984), discusses the lack of chronological overlap between archaeological and literary evidence for the existence of mechanical devices in classical antiquity. 67. Girolamo Cardano, De subtilitate (Basel, 1554), quoted in E. M. P. Evans, “Ancient Mining,” Antiquity 17 (1943): 52. The craftsman is described as a faber ferrar- ius. Thomas Ewbank, A Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and Other Machines for Raising Water (London, 1842), 139. 68. For example, Agostino Ramelli, Le diverse e artificiose machine del capitano Agostino Ramelli (Paris, 1588), which contains several devices utilizing the water screw. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 24 of this evidence coincides with the period of Archimedes and his immedi- ate successors, showing the incompleteness of the pictorial record.66 There are, of course, no representations of water screws that predate Archimedes. One possible explanation for the absence of any evidence of the existence of the water screw between the examples Dalley reconstructs for Senna- cherib’s garden and those embedded in the literary sources for Archimedes’ career is that the device fell out of use, was forgotten, and was reinvented by Archimedes or a near contemporary. Although the water screw has in fact never fallen out of use since Archimedes, it has allegedly been reinvented several times. The sixteenth-century Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano says he had heard of a blacksmith in Milan who thought he was the first to invent this device and went insane from joy. The nineteenth-century engi- neer Thomas Ewbank reports that he, too, as a boy heard of a shoemaker who had suffered the same delusion.67 If these stories are true, it may be sig- nificant that both these individuals were workmen who—in addition to never having been exposed to a water screw in operation—presumably did not have access to the classical authors or the numerous books on applied technology already available in the sixteenth century.68 Whether true or not, the stories arose in environments not dissimilar to that of Hellenistic Alexandria. Conclusions What can we conclude from all this? The chronology of the first discov- ery of the water screw is still clouded in uncertainty. Sennacherib was inter- ested in the problems of water supply, and he constructed some sort of clever or spectacular device to assist the irrigation of his gardens at Nineveh. The Palace without a Rival inscription applies metaphorical terminology that an Assyriologist with a knowledge of the water screw can argue refers to that device. We know that the water screw existed by at least the mid-third century B.C., since literary sources describe it in explicit terms. It seems likely that Archimedes invented (or reinvented) the device in Egypt at the request of one of the Ptolemies to solve irrigation problems in the Nile Delta, but this conclusion is not certain. The design of the water screw can be inter- preted as either an offshoot of Archimedes’ research into the mathematics of ===== PAGE 25 ===== 69. Knorr (n. 49 above). 70. See, for example, Athenaeus Philosophers at Dinner 5.198e–f, and, in Athens, a mechanical snail that left a trail of slime: Polybius History 12.13.11. There is a popular discussion of this phenomenon in Robert S. Brumbaugh, Ancient Greek Gadgets and Machines (New York, 1966). DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw 25 spirals or the very inspiration for that research.69 If the water screw did, in fact, exist in Mesopotamia early in the seventh century B.C., what is particu- larly interesting is the observation that it seems either to have fallen out of use completely or to have been so completely divorced from the realities of urban society in Mesopotamia and Egypt that Archimedes could be awarded credit for its invention or rediscovery almost five hundred years later. If the water screw had such a negligible impact on the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean before the time of Archimedes, the actual date of its original invention is of little importance. But the similarity of the condi- tions in seventh-century Nineveh and third-century Alexandria that might have led to its discovery is striking. Both cultures depended completely on exogenous river systems to supply water for irrigating their rich, alluvial soils, and on technologies and regulations that facilitated irrigation agri- culture. Both were ruled by royal houses interested as much in broadcast- ing the prestige and imagery of technological success, the tangible evidence of human triumph over the forces of nature, as in the practical results. Sen- nacherib conquered the river, forcing it to serve humankind, and com- memorated the results in public reliefs and inscriptions. He also con- structed his show garden for his queen, to heal her homesick memories for the verdant mountain slopes of her native land, and he irrigated the artifi- cial mountainside conspicuously with conduits and some water-lifting device, commemorating it in the same manner as what seem to us his more practical accomplishments. The pharaohs boasted of their control of the Nile in a similar manner. Their technological heirs, the Ptolemies, made astute practical use of the water screws, catapults, and giant ships designed by their court scientists, but they delighted as well in the banquet table gad- getry designed by Ctesibius and in automated parade floats that paraded such cleverness to the public.70 One significant difference, however, sets the Ptolemaic response apart. In the premodern period, specific, individual, nonmythical inventors are only rarely given credit for their efforts and insight, but at Alexandria and (to a lesser extent) Syracuse in the mid-third century there was a brief his- torical moment in which individual genius was recorded. If one of Senna- cherib’s engineers found the water screw in use along an irrigation canal, or dreamed up the device on the basis of an understanding of natural and man-made spiraling forms, the credit belonged to his absolute ruler. Archi- medes, in contrast, was given personal credit for the water screw, which grew out of his personal intellectual interests, and for many other devices constructed for his patrons there and in Syracuse. Before him in Alexandria, ===== PAGE 26 ===== 71. Innovation, in fact, could be perilous, as an “urban myth” circulated in Rome in the first century A.D. emphasizes. An anonymous craftsman supposedly invented “flexi- ble” or “unbreakable” glass, and he showed a specimen to the emperor Tiberius (14–37 A.D.) in the hope of a great reward. After determining that no one else knew the secret, Tiberius had him killed in the fear that the invention would ruin the bullion-based econ- omy. The story is preserved in a number of first-century texts: Petronius Satyricon 50–51; Pliny Natural History 36.195; Dio Cassius History 57.21.6. 72. On the Museion and its scientists, see Eduard Müller-Graupa, “Museion,” Realencyclopädie vol. 16, no. 1 (1933), 797–821; Lewis, “The Hellenistic Period” (n. 5 above), 632–35; Michael J. T. Lewis, “Theoretical Hydraulics, Automata, and Water Clocks,” in Wikander, Handbook of Ancient Water Technology (n. 1 above), 343–69. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2003 VOL. 44 26 Ctesibius and Philo of Byzantium benefited from the same sort of celebrity. In contrast, the members of the think tank that worked for Dionysius of Syracuse 150 years previously remain anonymous, as do nearly all the inno- vative engineers and architects who transformed the Mediterranean world during the Roman empire.71 The question of why individual technicians remained associated with their innovations in mid-third century B.C. Alex- andria and Syracuse cannot be answered here, but the presence of the Museion, a well-funded, more or less independent research institute in Alexandria, undoubtedly played an important part, along with the well- documented rivalry of King Hiero II of Syracuse with Ptolemy II, Ptolemy III, and Ptolemy IV.72 The very fact of the potential recognition of individ- ual effort and accomplishment may also have been a trigger for innovation. But this florescence was brief, and the attitudes and structures typical of the ancient world had to fall away before an individual such as Leonardo da Vinci could once again derive personal fame from his inventions. ``` --- ## D. Dalley 2017, "Sennacherib's Palace Garden at Nineveh, a World Wonder", in Nineveh, the Great City, pp. 188-191 — FULL TEXT Source: Sidestone Press open access (https://www.sidestone.com/books/nineveh-the-great-city), PDF pp. 188-191; figure captions in [caption/margin] brackets. ``` <<<< printed page 188 >>>> 37. Sennacherib’s Palace Garden at Nineveh, a World Wonder [caption/margin] Stephanie Dalley Sennacherib (reigned 705/704-681 BC; fig. 35.1) stated, in his prism inscriptions of 694 BC, that he had raised the ground beside his new palace, which we now call the Southwest Palace, and planted a garden. He created, in his own words, ‘a wonder for all peoples’, implying that the palace and garden were one harmonious whole. They stood on Nineveh’s high citadel Kuyunjik, overlooking the Tigris River to the west and the Khosr River to the east. The term ‘wonder’ had been used by previous Assyrian kings for particularly spectacular buildings; by adding ‘for all peoples’, Sennacherib made the expression superlative. The garden was ‘hanging’ in the sense that it was built upon stone terraces supported on arches, so that plants relied upon the external provision of water. His palace garden has recently been identified as the legendary Hanging Garden of Babylon. The attribu­ tion to the city of Babylon arose from several confusions: between Nineveh and Babylon, Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Sennacherib described how he had cast in bronze two forms, gišmahhu ‘tree-trunk/ cylinder’ (used in mathematical problem texts) and alamittu ‘a type of palm tree/spiral’, which ‘instead of a shaduf’ (a bucket lowered and raised from a counterweighted tip-beam) continuously raised water. Alamittu has been identified as the male date-palm, rendered on Mesopotamian sculptures with a spiral pattern on its trunk, to distinguish it from the female date-palm, represented by a scallop or diamond pattern. The cylinder and the spiral (or screw) are the two components of a so-called Archimedes screw which, Strabo wrote, was used to lift water up the terraces in the fabled Hanging Garden. This device, miraculous for the ease with which it lifts water, partly accounts for why Sen­ nacherib’s garden was known as a world wonder, for it included a marvel of engineering, defying gravity. The king emphasized that he had cleverly invented a new method for casting large objects in bronze. From a gorge in the mountains of Kurdistan far to the northeast of Nineveh (fig. 37.1), a canal led off water from the river Gomel and then linked up with lower streams and crossed valleys by aqueducts along the way to reach a high point on a citadel (Morandi Bonacossi, this volume). The scheme extended for about 95 km towards Nineveh and was so carefully graded that it brought water on to the citadel, again along an aqueduct, half way up the garden. This end-point is perhaps shown on a palace sculpture panel carved in the time of Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal; it shows stone terracing and an aqueduct, as well as a pillared pavilion (fig. 37.2). The planting is shown with basic stereotypes of an evergreen pine-tree type and a deciduous fruit-tree type, representing the fragrant and shade-giving trees of the Amanus mountains in Northwest Syria and Southeast Turkey, a beautiful environment which Sennacherib states he aimed to recreate for his garden. It has not proved possible to identify them. In other inscriptions he [caption/margin] 188 nineveh, the great city <<<< printed page 189 >>>> mentions rare plants brought back from abroad, but they may have been planted in other gardens in and around the lower city. [caption/margin] Figure 37.1 Mountains and water of Kurdistan. Courtesy of Daniele Morandi Bonacossi, Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project. The long canal and its aqueducts are dated by panels of sculpture showing the king, and by inscriptions naming him, carved in stone at particular points along the way. The enterprise of bringing water up to the citadel was another extraordinary feat of engineering. Alexander the Great (356-323  BC) camped for several days before the Battle of Gaugamela, which took its name from the river Gomel and the town Tell Gomel. He took with him historians to record his travels and triumphs, and they would have seen the canal and the aqueducts with their inscriptions and sculptures, and heard tales of their purpose. They would have recorded the marvels, but none of their writings have survived. Much later, from the last century  BC onwards, Classical writers included extracts and paraphrases from those now missing histories. From Diodorus of Sicily comes the information that the garden resembled a Greek theatre for size, shape and terracing, roughly 120 m in length and width. Particular emphasis is placed by Philo on the top terrace, where stood a pillared walkway. It was roofed so ingeniously with layers of palm trunks and soil that mountain trees were planted upon it, so that trees affording fragrance and extra shade grew above those who strolled alongside the pillars. This gave a miraculous appearance to the whole garden. When the palaces with their panels of sculpture were excavated in the mid-nine­ teenth century, just before the advent of photography, many of the panels were drawn soon after they were found. To help with accuracy and speed, a camera lucida was used. The original drawings are now collected in four huge volumes in the British Museum. One of them shows three adjacent, badly damaged panels; at the top of the garden scene, a row of pillars is shown roofed with several distinct layers, which are planted with trees (fig. 37.3). This feature corresponds to that described by Philo. 189 part iv: neo-assyrian nineveh: the largest city in the world <<<< printed page 190 >>>> [caption/margin] Figure 37.2 Relief depicting the parkland in Nineveh. Nineveh, Iraq; Room H, N Palace; 645- 635 BC; limestone/gypsum; H 208.3 cm, W 129.5 cm; British Museum, London (1856,0909.36/ BM 124939,a). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Overall the garden and its water supply as described by Sennacherib, and the panels of sculpture from the palaces showing a garden at Nineveh, correspond in important respects with Classical descriptions of the Hanging Garden as a world wonder. The Assyrian images of the garden that survive focus on the structure and architecture of the garden, as do the Classical accounts. But there may have been sculptures, undiscovered or destroyed, that gave details of plants, for a small fragment of sculpture in the British Museum shows a foreground with plants in detail, one of them definitely a lily, another definitely a vine; the colours once painted on them have vanished. Robert Koldewey (1855-1925), who excavated Babylon from 1899 to 1917, suggested that a vaulted building within his Southern Palace might have had a roof garden to be identified with the world wonder. But he was well aware that no Babylonian or Classical texts matched any details, regretfully concluding that there was no place on the site for an alternative location. Rather than earlier, fanciful pictures showing a roof garden, or a temple tower, or a courtyard garden, or watering by a wheel, a new reconstruction can now be given from details that match Assyrian sources with Classical ones, based on evidence (figs. 37.4-5). [caption/margin] 190 nineveh, the great city <<<< printed page 191 >>>> [caption/margin] Figure 37.3 Drawing of relief from the Southwest Palace showing the pillared walkway roofed with trees. British Museum, London (Original Drawing IV 77). © The Trustees of the British Museum. [caption/margin] Figure 37.4 Reconstruction of Sennacherib’s palace garden at Nineveh, by Terry Ball. Courtesy of the author. [caption/margin] Figure 37.5 Author’s drawing of Ashurbanipal’s garden sculpture. 191 part iv: neo-assyrian nineveh: the largest city in the world ``` --- ## E. Dalley's own popular restatements and lecture abstracts ### E1. OUPblog, 17 June 2013 — FULL TEXT Source: https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/mystery-hanging-garden-babylon/ ``` The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced June 17 th 2013 I once gave a general talk about ancient Mesopotamian gardens, and was astonished, when I prepared for it, to find that there was really no hard evidence for the Hanging Garden at Babylon, although all the other wonders of the ancient world certainly did exist. A member of the audience stood up and said how disappointed she was that I had not mentioned it. All the stories of the garden were written by Greek writers many centuries after the garden was supposedly built, so some scholars thought the accounts were fairy-tale fiction. That meant that the Hanging Garden didn’t fit the category of marvellous places you could visit. I could see that my audience was disappointed, and the problem lingered irritatingly in the back of my mind. Some years later I was working on an inscription of the Assyrian king Sennacherib who ruled around 700 BC, at Nineveh not Babylon. It was edited in the 1920s, and one passage made nonsense in the translation. With a further 70 years of scholarly work now available, including vastly better dictionaries, I have been able to show that the passage relates how Sennacherib cast screws in bronze for watering his terraced garden, some centuries before the time of Archimedes whose name is usually quoted as the inventor. The castings were huge. Sennacherib’s own inscriptions show that he was personally proud of his technical achievements in metal-casting, water management, and collecting exotic foreign plants. Sennacherib called his work a wonder for all peoples. Because this was all so unusual and unexpected, I re-read the Greek accounts of the Hanging Garden. Strabo mentioned the use of the screw, and must have known that Archimedes lived long after the garden was supposedly made. Herodotus described Babylon, but did not mention the garden. Only one author, Josephus , actually named Nebuchadnezzar as the builder. Another wrote that an Assyrian king built it. Could it be that there were so many confusions, especially Nebuchadnezzar for Sennacherib, Babylon for Nineveh? In the British Museum a panel of sculpture found at Nineveh had long been understood as a likely prototype for the Hanging Garden at Babylon. It was carved in the reign of Sennacherib’s grandson, and was thought to show Sennacherib’s garden when it had matured. It shows an aqueduct supplying water just as the Greek accounts said. The British Museum also has a 19th century drawing of a sculpture from Nineveh, now lost, which matched the most original detail in the Greek texts: there was a pillared walkway on the top terrace of the garden, thickly roofed, and trees were planted on top of that roof. The aqueduct shown in the British Museum’s sculpture could not be traced by archaeologists at Nineveh, but could be traced further away in a watercourse that stretched back 80km into the mountains. Wonderful rock-cut panels with huge sculptures of the king Sennacherib and the gods of Assyria , as well as an inscription, revealed that the palace garden at Nineveh was only the end result of a staggering work of water engineering. More than 300 years later, when Alexander the Great was preparing for the battle of Gaugamela in which he defeated the Persian king, he camped in the vicinity of a central part of Sennacherib’s watercourse where over two million dressed stones were used in an aqueduct crossing a valley. His scouts would have seen inscriptions and sculptures, and heard about the garden. Later Greek writers extracted their accounts of the Hanging Garden from Alexander’s companions whose writings no longer survive. There may be much confusion surrounding the Hanging Garden, but it is clear that amazing technology created a magnificent garden and justifies its place among the original seven wonders of the world. Stephanie Dalley is an Honorary Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, and a member of the Oriental Institute at Wolfson College, Oxford. With degrees in Assyriology from the Universities of Cambridge and London, her academic career has specialized in the study of ancient cuneiform texts and she has worked on archaeological excavations in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. Her most recent book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon , was published by OUP in 2013. Stephanie Dalley is an Honorary Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, and a member of the Oriental Institute at Wolfson College, Oxford. With degrees in Assyriology from the Universities of Cambridge and London, her academic career has specialized in the study of ancient cuneiform texts and she has worked on archaeological excavations in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. Her most recent book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon , was published by OUP in 2013. Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS . Subscribe to only classics and archaeology articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS . Posted In: Arts & Humanities Classics & Archaeology History Middle East World Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities. We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. Or subscribe to articles in the subject area by email or RSS Related posts: Recent Comments Gurbir Singh 24 th November 2013 Really enjoyed the documentary. New fresh idea and along with a fresh (to me), competent researcher/presenter. I particularly liked the “absence” of a final conclusive proof of the primary objective. Sufficient robust evidence was simply not there. One day soon – peace will come and normality will return to the people of the region. Perhaps you can then visit in person and make part two! I could not find a trailer online for the program but did find this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xEYE5kzdoc Really enjoyed the documentary. New fresh idea and along with a fresh (to me), competent researcher/presenter. I particularly liked the “absence” of a final conclusive proof of the primary objective. Sufficient robust evidence was simply not there. One day soon – peace will come and normality will return to the people of the region. Perhaps you can then visit in person and make part two! I could not find a trailer online for the program but did find this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xEYE5kzdoc Comments are closed. ``` ### E2. OUPblog video interview "Demystifying the Hanging Garden of Babylon", 29 June 2013 — introductory text (the content is in two embedded videos) Source: https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/demystifying-hanging-garden-babylon/ (read via the Goodreads syndication https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/4443052-demystifying-the-hanging-garden-of-babylon) ``` For centuries, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have captivated scholars as some of the most magnificent — and last remaining — representations of classical antiquity. Of those seven, the Hanging Garden of Babylon has particularly intrigued scholars, due in large part to the ambiguity surrounding the history of its physical construction, geographical location, and enduring architectural legacy. Stephanie Dalley, author of The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon , discusses the most elusive of world wonders, evaluating the accuracy of popular interpretations, the uniqueness of its origins, and its disputed impact on several imitative gardens in ensuing eras, including those constructed by Herod the Great and Nero. Click here to view the embedded video. On possible imitations of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: Click here to view the embedded video. Stephanie Dalley is an Honorary Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, and a member of the Oriental Institute at Wolfson College, Oxford. With degrees in Assyriology from the Universities of Cambridge and London, her academic career has specialized in the study of ancient cuneiform texts and she has worked on archaeological excavations in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. Her most recent book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon , was published by OUP in 2013. Stephanie Dalley is an Honorary Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, and a member of the Oriental Institute at Wolfson College, Oxford. With degrees in Assyriology from the Universities of Cambridge and London, her academic career has specialized in the study of ancient cuneiform texts and she has worked on archaeological excavations in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. Her most recent book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon , was published by OUP in 2013. Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS . Subscribe to only classics and archaeology articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS . The post Demystifying the Hanging Garden of Babylon appeared first on OUPblog . Oxford University Press's Blog Oxford University Press's profile 247 followers delete edit this post ``` ### E3. PBS Secrets of the Dead, "The Lost Gardens of Babylon: Q&A with Dr. Stephanie Dalley" (2014) — FULL TEXT Source: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/the-lost-gardens-of-babylon-qa-with-dr-stephanie-dalley-tv-host-author-of-lost-gardens-of-babylon/1172/ ``` Dr. Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute and author of “The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon” traveled to one of the most dangerous places on earth to prove not only that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon did exist, but also to identify where they most likely were located, describe what they looked like and explain how they were constructed. After filming her journey for Secrets of The Dead on PBS, Dr. Dalley shared some of her interests, background and techniques that led to her historical discoveries. Do you recall a moment or period in your life when you became interested in the Hanging Gardens? Yes, I was trying to prepare a talk on ancient Near Eastern gardens, and I could find nothing to say about them. How extraordinary, I thought, and I reckoned it was worth trying to find out the reasons. Things one does not understand are often more intriguing than things that are obvious. What sets the Gardens apart from the other ancient wonders of the world for you? The Hanging Garden is far further east than the others, and it was the only one that remained a mystery – it could not be found in Babylonian texts and archaeology. Some of my colleagues thought it must be a fictional wonder, which seemed likely to be wrong. It is stimulating to disagree! Can you share a bit about your background and your work today at Oxford? When I left school, I went to help on a dig in northern Iraq directed by a friend of my parents. I discovered that one could dig up literature that had not been read for 4,000 years. I wondered why I had never heard about it before, and wondered why so few people study the subject – and I still wonder! I loved working in Middle Eastern countries, and I am very sad about what has happened in Iraq, and in Syria – where I have also worked. So it was a great chance to go to Iraqi Kurdistan to make the documentary. By the way, Iraqi Kurdistan is a very safe country, unlike some other parts of Iraq. I have retired from teaching Babylonian and Assyrian language, literature and history, so I am free to do more research. I have much more time for reading now. How did you begin to develop your ability to decipher cuneiform? I studied Assyriology for a BA at Cambridge University, and then at SOAS London for a PhD. For my thesis I worked on a royal archive written on clay nearly 4,000 years ago, which I helped to dig up in northern Iraq. Being faced with new texts fresh from the ground is hugely exciting, and it was a great opportunity at that stage of life. You recently published a book about your research into the Gardens, but how and when did the filming for PBS come about? My publisher, Oxford University Press, put me in touch with Bedlam Productions in London, which researched how to present the discovery, and eventually managed to raise enough money to make the film, and to find the producer, Nick Green. When you were filming in Iraq, were there moments or locations you felt particularly moved or connected to the past? Particularly fearful? It was very moving to visit the sites of the canal and of the aqueduct, to see the sculptures of Sennacherib on the rock at Bavian, and the inscription at Jerwan. it was not at all frightening. If I had gone in person to Nineveh by Mosul, outside Kurdistan, however, I would have been scared, and I was glad that we found a very satisfactory alternative. What has been the biggest challenge for you, and for other scholars, in fully understanding these legendary gardens? Do you think we’ll ever have a complete picture? There was a cluster of problems, each one needing to be pinpointed, and then requiring a new approach to try and solve it. Sometimes I got stuck on a difficulty, wondered occasionally if I was on the right track, and put the work aside until an opportunity arose to pursue it. I had many other pieces of work in between, and I like to work on more than one subject. We will never have a complete picture – that’s impossible with such ancient history, but one always hopes that new material will turn up to throw new light. ``` ### E4. National Geographic News, 31 May 2013 — Dalley's quoted statements (extract) Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/130531-babylon-hanging-gardens-nineveh-seven-wonders ``` A man stands near the massive walls of Nineveh. The Hanging Gardens of … Nineveh? Blame it on a bad translation. This ancient wonder may not have been in Babylon. The legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon are exactly that: legendary. And they may not have been located in Babylon. The gardens, famous as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, were, according to Stephanie Dalley, an Oxford University Assyriologist, located some 340 miles north of ancient Babylon in Nineveh, on the Tigris River by Mosul in modern Iraq. Dalley, whose book The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon will be published later this summer, writes that earlier sources were translated incorrectly, leading to the confusion. The misinterpretation also explains why years of excavations never yielded any credible evidence of the fabled gardens in Babylon, the capital city of Babylonia on the Euphrates River. Historians have questioned their existence for some time. ``` ### E5. CSMC Hamburg, Mesopotamian Bulletins, 30 January 2018 — FULL TEXT (a report of the thesis, with the author's translations of the Sennacherib passages) Source: https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/2018-01-30.html ``` The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were at … Nineveh! 30 January 2018 The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, vaunted by the Greek-speaking authors, for a long time intrigued both scholars of cuneiform texts and the archaeologists who had the opportunity to excavate the ancient site, because neither of them found any evidence that the gardens actually existed. Some work carried out by the British Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley suggests that we were misled by the Greeks, and that the famous gardens were in fact located at Nineveh. In the third volume of his Babyloniaca , a tale recounted in Greek that brought to the attention of Antiochus I what was known of the Babylonian civilisation at the beginning of the third century BCE, Berosus, a priest of the Babylonian god Bel Marduk, attributed the construction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to Nabuchodonosor II. The king commanded the creation of some sumptuous terraced gardens for his wife. The subject was taken up again and added to by Diodorus of Sicily in the first century BCE, and subsequently by Flavius Josephus who, quoting Berosus, wrote ( Contre Apion, XIX, 140-141 ): After having fortified the city in a remarkable way and adorning its gates in a manner that befits their sanctity, (Nabuchodonosor) built close to his father’s palace a second palace adjoining the first […] In this royal residence he built terraces of stone, verily giving them the look of hills; he then planted on them all manner of trees, and set up what one calls hanging gardens, because his wife, who grew up in the Median lands, had a taste for mountainous landscapes. The description of these ‘hanging gardens’ has fascinated generations of artists who have given free rein to their imagination when depicting them in their works. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon , a woodblock print by Sidnet Barclay, reproduced in Augé de Lassus, Voyage aux Sept merveilles du monde , 1880 However, no trace remains of these celebrated gardens. R. Koldewey, who explored the site of ancient Babylon between 1899 and 1917, hypothesised that they were situated on the roof of a vaulted building that constituted part of the southern palace. But this hypothesis has not been supported by all the scholars who have followed in his footsteps. The Babylonian royal inscriptions do not offer any descriptions which could relate to these mysterious gardens, interpreted as monumental planted terraces. In 2013, Stephanie Dalley published an enthralling investigation in which she suggested that the gardens were in fact located at Nineveh, where they were set up by King Sennacherib at the beginning of the seventh century BCE. [1] This conclusion is above all based on a series of observations. The gardens are not mentioned in the writings of Herodotus, yet he described at length the lives of the people of Babylon. The gardens only appear in writings of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Now, the Greeks often confused the two ancient metropolises of Babylon and Nineveh, the respective capitals of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. In his inscriptions, Sennacherib (704–681 BCE), the king of the Neo-Assyrian empire, alludes to his new residence, the ‘Palace Without Rival’, as well as the gardens that surrounded it: I have planted around its sides a botanic garden, a replica of Mount Amanus, which contains all sorts of aromatic plants (and) fruit trees […] To promote the luxuriance of these cultivated areas, I have had dug with pickaxes a straight canal that cuts through the mountain and the valley, beginning at the city limits and running up to the plain of Nineveh. I have released an inexhaustible flow of water for a distance of one kilometre and a half from the River Husur (and) I have made it so (water) gushes through the garden carried by feeder channels. Bas-relief from the palace of Nineveh The bas-reliefs at Sennacherib’s palace offer a depiction of these gardens planted with trees and equipped with an aqueduct and a system of channels that made it possible to supply elevated irrigation. In his inscriptions, the king fittingly mentioned the invention of a lifting device that made it possible to raise water using a system that was a precursor of the famous ‘Archimedes’ screw’: I had ropes made, and cables and chains of bronze. Instead of pivots (i.e. shadoofs ), I had tree trunks put in place and some large copper helicoids ( alamittu ) positioned above the wells. If from now on we must suppose that the famous ‘Hanging Gardens’ were actually located in Nineveh, it is only thanks to Babylon’s fabled walls that it can retain a place on the list of Wonders of the World! [1] Dalley, Stephanie (2013), The Mystery of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced, Oxford: OUP Oxford. ``` ### E6. ISAC Chicago lecture, 28 October 2015 — abstract Source: https://isac.uchicago.edu/article/lecture-stephanie-dalley-hanging-garden-babylon-elusive-world-wonder-traced ``` October 19, 2015 The Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced Dr. Stephanie Dalley Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 7:00 PM Oriental Institute, Breasted Hall Babylon’s Hanging Garden is the only one of the original seven wonders to have been dismissed as imaginary. Neither archaeologists nor Assyriologists could find evidence for it, and the Greek sources describing it are centuries later than its supposed existence. An ingenious and detailed solution to the problem has been found at last, allowing a fact-based reconstruction of the garden, and an appreciation of the system of water management that qualified it as a world wonder. Dr. Dalley is a Retired Research Fellow in Assyriology with the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford, and is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College and a member of the Common Room at Wolfson College. Her research interests are Akkadian literature and history, and her extensive publications include The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced (2013); she is currently working on A History of the City of Babylon (Cambridge University Press) Free and open to the public. Reception to follow. Contact: Petra Goedegebuure ( pgoedegebuure@uchicago.edu ) This Norton lecture is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, Chicago Society and named for Charles Eliot Norton, the founder and first President of the Archaeological Institute of America and former Professor of the History of Art at Harvard University. Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures The University of Chicago 1155 E 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637 ISAC Museum Hours: Tuesday–Thursday, Saturday–Sunday 10:00am–4:00pm Friday 10:00am–8:00pm Visitor Information mail facebook twitter youtube rss © 2026 The University of Chicago ``` ### E7. Yale NELC Rosenthal Lecture, 8 April 2016 — listing (no abstract) Source: https://nelc.yale.edu/event/hanging-garden-babylon-solution-old-problem ``` The Hanging Garden of Babylon: The Solution to an Old Problem Event time: Friday, April 8, 2016 - 4:30pm Event description: Spring 2016 Rosenthal Lecture Stephanie Dalley University of Oxford The Hanging Garden of Babylon: The Soluition to an old problem Location: HGS 211 Reception to follow Type: Rosenthal Lectures Free Open to: General Public ``` --- ## F. Reviews of the 2013 book ### F1. Ariel M. Bagg, Bibliotheca Orientalis 71/3-4 (2014), cols. 485-492 — FULL TEXT Source: Peeters Online Journals, 'Boekbesprekingen — Assyriologie' section of BiOr 71/3-4, open access (https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3062124; PDF fetched through secure/POJ/purchaseform.php -> downloaded.php -> downloadpdf.php). Text extracted with PyMuPDF from raw_F/bior71_3062124.pdf; column numbers inserted as [col. N]; the PDF text layer drops spaces inside some italic titles. ``` DALLEY S. — The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Bab- ylon. An elusive world wonder traced. Oxford Univer- sity Press, Oxford, 2013. (22 cm, XVIII, 279). ISBN 978-0-19-966226-5. £ 25.00. In Antiquity, the Hanging Garden of Babylon (Philo, Dio- dorus and Strabo used the singular) was considered one of the seven World Wonders. The fact that no archaeological remains of such a garden, described in different ways in the Classical sources, were found in situ, explains the variety of reconstructions and locations (within the city) proposed by different scholars. Furthermore, as Nebuchadnezzar, accord- ing to the Classical texts the builder of the Hanging Garden, does not mention any spectacular garden in his inscriptions, even the real existence of this World Wonder was put in question. This book intends to unravel the “mystery” by transplanting the garden from Babylon to Nineveh and attrib- uting it to Sennacherib, the alleged inventor of the Archime- dean screw, by means of which the Hanging Garden was watered, so say the Classical sources. The book begins with an Introduction (pp. 1–11) in which the author presents first herself and then a general overview of the World Wonders. In Chapter 1 (Drawing a Blank in Babylon, pp. 13–27) Dalley briefly describes the archaeo- logical situation in Babylon and lists some of the proposed locations for the Hanging Garden. Nebuchadnezzar is indeed [col. 488] LXXI N° 3-4, mei-augustus 2014 488 named as its builder, but only by Josephus (quoting from Berossus). Dalley stresses the negative evidence, namely that the other Classical authors do not mention the builder by name, that the Hanging Garden is not attested in indigenous Babylonian sources, and that Herodotus did not mention this World Wonder when speaking about Babylon. Chapter 2 (Classical Writers and their Testimony, pp. 29–41) is an overview of the main Greek and Latin sources, which are quoted in translation, following the respective editions. Diodorus Siculus (1st cent. BC), who quotes Ctesias (5th cent. BC), and Strabo (1st cent. BC/1st cent. AD) are two of the earliest authors to deal with the Hanging Garden. Dalley points out that, according to Diodorus, the water-raising mechanism was not visible and that Strabo explicitly men- tions watering by means of Archimedean screws. Quoting Berossus, a priest of Marduk who lived in Babylon in the 3rd cent. BC, Josephus (1st cent. AD) attributed the Hanging Gar- den to Nebuchadnezzar. According to Dalley “Berossus him- self may not have mentioned Nebuchadnezzar in connection with the garden, but rather that passage was probably added to his original text by one of the authors who quoted from him in the two centuries that separate Berossus from Jose- phus” (p. 35). Further Classical authors are Quintus Curtius Rufus (late 1st cent. AD) and Philo of Byzantium, who, according to Dalley, was not the Greek engineer of the 3rd cent. BC but a much later homonymous writer called the Paradoxographer (4th–5th cent. AD, p. 39). Dalley con- cludes that the Classical texts give a useful description of the Hanging Garden, which was located beside the king’s palace in a citadel, shaped as a Greek theatre, watered by screws, and inspired by a homesick queen. In Chapter 3 (Three Pictures, and Archimedes, pp. 45–59) Dalley presents on the one hand three — well-known — Assyrian wall reliefs from the palaces of Sargon in Dūr- Šarrukēn (fig. 11), and of Sennacherib (fig. 13) and Ashur- banipal (fig. 14) in Nineveh depicting gardens. On the other hand, she gives an overview of the sources which attribute the invention of the screw to Archimedes and questions the reliability of those sources. Dalley sees Sennacherib as the inventor of the Archimedean screw, a subject dealt with in Chapter 4 (Sennacherib’s Great Invention, pp. 61–82). She interprets two terms in a passage of Sennacherib’s inscrip- tions describing a new water-lifting device, gišmaḫḫu (tree- trunks used as columns or beams) and alamittu (palm-tree), as the hollow cylinder and the helical surface of an Archime- dean screw, respectively. The same components are men- tioned in a previous passage of the same inscription among those objects which were made of bronze by means of an innovative casting method using clay moulds. She mentions also that replications of Sennacherib’s bronze screws were cast for the television programme Secrets of the Ancients. Chapter 5 (Engineering for Water Management, pp. 83–105) offers a description of Sennacherib’s hydraulic projects for the water-supply of Nineveh, the old city that was enlarged and converted into the new Assyrian capital. In Chapter 6 (Confusion of Names, pp. 107–126) Dalley tries to explain the confusion between Nineveh and Babylon in some Clas- sical sources on the background of the cuneiform sources, alleging for instance that, in reshaping Nineveh, Sennach- erib imitated Babylon (p. 111). She finds further evidence in the “Toledo tables” of the medieval astronomer Azarqiel (around 1070 AD), who gives geographical coordinates for different Babylons, one of them located in Assyria. [col. 489] 489 BOEKBESPREKINGEN The construction of Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace in Nineveh, the so-called “Palace Without Rival”, which is described in detail in several royal inscriptions and which has partially been excavated, is the main subject of Chapter 7 (The Unrivalled Palace, the Queen and the Garden, pp. 127– 151). Dalley sees Tašmētu-šarrat, Sennacherib’s first wife, as the “Syrian Queen” of Diodorus’ account (“Median Queen” in Josephus), for whom the Hanging Garden was built, when the king dedicated a section of his palace to her. At the end of the chapter two reconstruction drawings of Sennacherib’s palace garden in Nineveh are shown and commented. Chap- ter 8 (Symbolism and Imitators, pp. 153–178) considers the Assyrian tradition of royal gardens with exotic flora initiated by Tiglath-Pileser I. According to Dalley, the “World Won- der created by Sennacherib” was imitated by famous kings like Hezekiah (8th cent. BC) and Herod the Great (1st cent. BC) and may have inspired the description of the garden of Alcinous in the Odyssey. Chapter 9 (Defeat and Revival, pp. 179–202) deals with Nineveh’s survival as a city after the conquest in 612 BC. The city was not completely destroyed and, although it suf- fered a severe decline, was still partially populated in Hel- lenistic and later times. Even if “the Hanging Garden itself was not necessarily still visible and visited”, the palaces and some of the wall plates depicting gardens “could still be vis- ited at least in part” (p. 202). All the arguments of Dalley’s thesis are once more presented in the Conclusions (pp. 203– 208) beginning with the following asseveration: “This book has shown that the Hanging Garden was built at Nineveh, not Babylon, by Sennacherib, not Nebuchadnezzar or Semir- amis” (p. 203). Furthermore, “the correct decipherment of a 7th-century BC Assyrian inscription gives a match with the crucial elements in descriptions of later Greek authors” (loc. cit.). The pertinent passages of the Assyrian inscription are presented in an Appendix (pp. 209–213). Notes to the chap- ters (pp. 215–244), a Bibliography (p. 245–268), and an Index (pp. 269–279) complete the book. S. Dalley presented the thesis of the Hanging Garden of Nineveh already at the 39th Rencontre Assyriologique held at Heidelberg (Germany) in July 1992, and since then she has written many articles related to this subject: “Nineveh, Bab- ylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled”, Iraq 56, 1994, 45–58, “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon at Nineveh”, HSAO 6, 1997, 19–24, “Waterworks in the time of Hezekiah and Judaean princesses in Assyria”, Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 18, 2000, 119–121, “Water management in Assyria from the ninth to the seventh centuries BC”, ARAM 13/14, 2001–2002, 443–460, “More about the Hanging Gardens”, in: Al-Gailani et al. (ed.), Of Pots and Plans, Papers on the Archaeology and History of Mesopotamia and Syria pre- sented to David Oates in Honour of his 75th Birthday, Lon- don, 2002, 67–73, “Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw. The Context of Invention in the Ancient World”, in: Technology and Culture 44, 2003, 1–26 (together with J. P. Oleson), and “Water supply for cities in the late eighth and seventh centuries BC: Assyria and Urartu 2”, in: A. Çilingiroğlu/G. Darbyshire (ed.), Anatolian Iron Ages 5, Ankara, 2005, 39–43. The book is largely based on these articles. Furthermore, the description of Sennacherib’s hydraulic projects (Chap. 5) has profited a lot from the works of D. Oates (Studies in the Ancient History of Northern Iraq, London, 1968), J. E. Reade [col. 490] N — ASSYRIOLOGIE 490 (“Studies in Assyrian geography, Part I: Sennacherib and the waters of Nineveh”, RA 72, 1978, 47–72 and 157–175), A. M. Bagg (Assyrische Wasserbauten, Mainz, 2000), and J. Ur (“Sennacherib’s northern Assyrian canals: new insights from satellite imagery and aerial photography”, Iraq 67/1, 2005, 317–345). The account of Sennacherib’s palace (Chap. 7), also a well-studied subject, bases mainly on the works of J. M. Russell (Sennacherib’s Palace Without Rival at Nineveh, Chicago, 1991) and J. E. Reade (“Nineveh”, in: RlA 9, 388–433). Dalley’s thesis — and consequently the content of her book — is not only already known but has also been contested. The principal pillar of her thesis, namely that Sennacherib invented the Archimedean screw was chal- lenged by A. M. Bagg (op. cit., 198–204). Dalley tried to refute his counter-arguments, but without substantial evi- dence (AfO 48/49, 2001/2002, 212–216) and ignored the criticism in her publications after 2000. Furthermore, the whole thesis was completely demolished by R. Bichler and R. Rollinger in their article “Die Hängenden Gärten zu Nin- ive — Die Lösung eines Rätsels?” (in: R. Rollinger [ed.], Von Sumer bis Homer, Festschrift für Manfred Schretten zur 60. Geburtstag am 25. Februar 2004, Münster, 2005, 153– 218), where they present and extensively discuss the Classi- cal sources and refute every one of Dalley’s arguments convincingly. Bichler’s and Rollinger’s criticism was alto- gether ignored by Dalley. It is not my aim to repeat what has already been written in the above-mentioned critical publica- tions, but some comments seem necessary, and I will con- centrate on the principal aspects of Dalley’s thesis. First of all there is a severe methodological problem. Dalley’s argumentation rests on a selective and biased use of the available sources. She takes from the Classical sources whatever fits her thesis, disqualifying or leaving aside con- trary information. She presents her thesis as a solid building of irrefutable arguments, that are in fact nothing but a chain of speculations without a single concrete proof. How can such a castle in the air be presented as a coherent argumenta- tion? The answer is simple: The assumed thesis determines the use and interpretation of the sources as well as the outcome. In his review of Dalley’s book The Legacy of Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1998), M. Stol already noticed “the most speculative ideas”, regarded some alleged links as “very thin, if not non-existent”, and considered that “some lessons in method” were necessary (BiOr 55, 1998, 805). Dalley’s chain of thought can be summarized as follows: 1) the Classical sources mention a Hanging Garden in Baby- lon, which was watered by screws and built by Nebuchadn- ezzar; 2) such a World Wonder has neither been found in Babylon nor is it mentioned in Nebuchadnezzar’s inscrip- tions; 3) Sennacherib built a royal park in Nineveh watered by screws which he had invented; 4) the Classical sources confuse Babylon with Nineveh. Ergo: The Hanging Garden was Sennacherib’s palace garden in Nineveh. To assume the reliability of the Classical sources notwithstanding their (strongly differing!) descriptions of the Hanging Garden, and furthermore to consider the remaining information as cor- rupted, is a highly questionable method. The accounts of the Classical authors span a period between 400/500 and 600/700 years (according to Dalley between 600/700 and 1100/1200, as she identifies Philo with the so-called Paradoxographer) after the time of Nebuchadnezzar/Sennacherib, and they quote secondary or tertiary sources. Therefore, to discern [col. 491] 491 BIBLIOTHECA ORIENTALIS between real data, corrupted information and fantasy is a dif- ficult task demanding a stringent methodology and much caution. A central point in Dalley’s thesis is her belief that the Hanging Garden was watered by means of Archimedean screws, as this is the only link to Sennacherib. Strabo and Philo, two men who lived between 600 and — according to Dalley — 1100 years after Sennacherib, do mention screws (Greek kochlías), but most probably because this was a usual water-lifting device at their time. Furthermore, nothing in Sennacherib’s description of a new device for drawing water points to an Archimedean screw (CT 26, vii, 45–49 and fur- ther texts, A. M. Bagg, op. cit., 203 with note 315 and text No 38 on pp. 339f.) or to the new method of casting (CT 26, vi, 89 — vii, 19 and further texts, A. M. Bagg, op. cit., text No 41, pp. 342–344). The terms gišmaḫḫu and alamittu refer to the main parts or structure of the device, probably its pillars and crossbeam(s); the interpretation as the hollow cylinder and the helical part of a screw is mere speculation without any philological or technical basis, but it is necessary for the whole thesis. Dalley leaves aside that the inscription mentions chains and ropes that may allude to a kind of chain of buckets but are incompatible with a screw. Also, the device stood over wells, and it is not possible to draw water from a well with a screw (nor from a cistern, as Dalley translates būru). With the help of the reconstructed screws Dalley aims to prove that it was possible to build them in the 7th century BC. But, leaving aside that there is no evidence for screws in the cuneiform sources and that, at least up to Roman times, screws were made of wood, it is indeed possible to construct many objects using ancient techniques and the materials then available, but the objects did not necessarily exist in Antiquity. As Sennach- erib did not invent the Archimedean screw, there is no link to the Hanging Garden, and Dalley’s theory collapses (“All the arguments to be found in this book stem from the better understanding of an original Assyrian text”, p. 204). Assyrian wall reliefs depicting gardens, especially the plate from Ashurbanipal’s palace (BM 124939, fig. 14 on p. 52), have, in Dalley’s view, many matches with the Clas- sical accounts about the Hanging Garden (p. 54). The plate matches with the description of an Assyrian royal park (kirimaḫḫu) that we know from the written sources, but noth- ing points to a shape like a Greek theatre. The reconstruction drawings on pp. 148f. are conditioned by the assumed thesis and are not supported by the iconographic, written or archae- ological evidence. Furthermore it is probable but not certain that the depicted garden was Sennacherib’s palace garden in Nineveh. Still more hazardous is Dalley’s proposal that the reliefs were accessible centuries after 612 BC. That Nineveh was not completely destroyed but survived as a minor settle- ment up to the Parthian period, is generally accepted. That centuries after an important destruction, Sennacherib’s and Ashurbanipal’s palaces and their reliefs were still accessible, in particular the room with the plate showing the irrigated garden in a good state of preservation, is improbable. Furthermore, if visitors in Antiquity saw the wall relief in Nineveh and identified the depicted garden with a garden no longer existing there, why would any of the Classical sources mention a Hanging Garden in Nineveh? According to Dalley, no Hanging Garden was found in Babylon because this World Wonder never existed there. She does not consider that, like in the case of Babylon, no Hang- ing Garden has ever been found in Nineveh, and without the [col. 492] LXXI N° 3-4, mei-augustus 2014 492 written and iconographic evidence we would never have known about a royal garden in that city. The problem remains that Nebuchadnezzar’s inscriptions do not mention any Hanging Garden, but the garden may not have been espe- cially impressive or only a part of another structure men- tioned in the texts or it may even have been built later in the Persian period (R. Bichler/R. Rollinger, op. cit., 202–206). These are not definite but at least alternative explanations. Another great problem of Dalley’s thesis is the fact that all Classical sources locate the Hanging Garden in Babylon. If, as she postulates, reliable cuneiform sources as well as scholars who could read them, were still available when the Classical accounts were written, how is it possible that all sources without exception mention Babylon instead of Nineveh? Among all Classical accounts about the Hanging Garden Josephus is the least unreliable, as he quotes from Berossus, a priest of Marduk who lived in Babylon. He, too, locates the Hanging Garden in Babylon and attributes it to Nebuchadnezzar. This is a real crux for Dalley’s argumenta- tion, and she eliminates it by means of an ingenious magic trick: Berossus’ reliability is not to be doubted, but Josephus used a corrupted version containing later additions. Further- more, most of the Classical accounts refer to the Hanging Garden after having mentioned Babylon’s city wall. Is it a mere coincidence that two World Wonders are mentioned side by side and in relation with the same city? If the location of the Hanging Garden in Babylon is wrong, why is the loca- tion of the city wall reliable? The construction of a monu- mental double city wall by Nebuchadnezzar is attested in his inscriptions. But also Sennacherib built a colossal city wall, which is attested in written and in archaeological sources… For a detailed refutation of Dalley’s argumentation concern- ing the Classical sources, see R. Bichler/R. Rollinger, op. cit. About the Assyrian palace gardens we are well informed from cuneiform and iconographic sources. If a garden did exist in Babylon as is mentioned in much later Classical sources, we do not know where it was located and what it looked like. In science there are no mysteries, but only yet unsolved problems, because the sources are few, difficult to interpret, fragmentary, contradictory, or of questionable reliability. New, even provocative ideas may open new ways and are always welcome, if they are compatible with the available data. The removal of the Hanging Garden from Babylon to Nineveh may appear as an ingenious solution, but it implies to contradict all available sources (R. Bichler/ R. Rollinger, op. cit., 206). The Hanging Garden of Babylon remains an unsolved problem, but only one among many, and certainly not the most relevant one. Heidelberg, January 2014 Ariel M. BAGG ``` ### F2. Timothy Potts, "Looking for the Hanging Gardens", New York Review of Books, 26 September 2013 — FULL TEXT Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/09/26/looking-hanging-gardens/ (raw_D/nyrb_potts_2013.txt). Footnotes 1-21 follow the text. ``` Before the mid-nineteenth century, when the British explorer Austen Henry Layard unearthed the spectacular Assyrian palaces of Nineveh (modern Mosul), the ancient empires of Mesopotamia could be glimpsed only through the lens of classical and biblical writings. These were almost uniformly hostile and understandably so, for the Assyrians and Babylonians (occupying roughly northern and southern Iraq, respectively) had brought only grief to ancient Israel, culminating in Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. In this as in much else, the Old Testament is history written by the losers—probably by Judean refugees living in Babylon itself—and it shows in the portrayal of that city as a cesspit of idolatry and sin, and of King Nebuchadnezzar in particular as a despotic, cruel, and ultimately mad ruler. As for the Greeks, they too had faced eastern invaders: Persians, who they reviled as oriental despots, epitomizing the arbitrary rule of kings and a servitude fundamentally corrupting of man’s character. The Babylonians and Assyrians were known to be no better, and stories of their cruelty and unmanly luxury were commonplace from Herodotus on. The New Testament takes things further, transforming Babylon from a geographical particular into a place and state of mind, a general image for imperial corruption, idolatry, and decadence—and even a code name for Rome, the oppressor of the new religion of Christ: I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. The title was written on her forehead: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH . I saw the woman was drunk with the blood of saints, the blood of those who bore witness to Jesus. (Revelation 17:3–6) Our image of Babylon has never fully recovered from these early indictments, as we hear still today in Bob Marley’s lyrics reviling the generic Babylon as the paragon of exploitative, establishment power. In pre-Christian times, however, there was another myth that put Babylon at the center of everyone’s world and the language they spoke: the Tower of Babel. As Genesis has it, Babel was so called “because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world” and scattered peoples over the face of the earth. Josephus, writing in the first century AD , is more explicit: The place where they built the tower is now called Babylon from the confusion of that primitive speech once intelligible to all, for the Hebrews call confusion “Babel.” 1 The truth of course is the reverse: the city-name Babel (Babylonian bab-ili , “gateway of the gods”) came first. God’s foiling of its “tower that reaches to heaven”—now known to have been the city’s great ziggurat or stepped tower—and his linguistic divide-and-conquer of its builders followed after. But the facts have not really mattered: the Bible’s dubbing of polyglot confusion as “babel” has proved Babylon’s most potent myth. The account in Genesis was almost certainly fashioned during the Babylonian captivity, when the Jews would have seen firsthand the city’s giant ziggurat being rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar. Its name, Etemenanki, “foundation platform of heaven and earth,” and huge scale (300 x 300 feet in plan and approximately the same height) certainly had all of the hubris to offend Yahweh. The temple of Babylon’s chief god, Marduk, on the topmost of its seven levels, “suspended between heaven and earth,” was clad in blue-glazed bricks and Herodotus reports that a sacred marriage rite took place there each year in which the great god (his chief priest?) lay with one of his priestesses. Babylonian texts describe two beds in the temple, so this may not be idle gossip. Genesis does not explicitly refer to the tower’s destruction, though this certainly would have suited the Old Testament’s narrative. Josephus does add this detail and indeed by his time the tower was no more—destroyed not by any apocalypse but as punishment by the Persians for an attempted revolt. Alexander the Great—always keen to play the local hero—intended to rebuild it but got only as far as clearing away most of the old ruins; by the third century BC his successors had razed it to the ground. But the rebuilding never came and today one of the most monumental buildings of the ancient world (some fifty miles south of modern Baghdad) is marked by a void of brackish water. The Neo-Babylonian empire was born of Assyria’s demise in the late seventh century BC . 2 As rivals and neighbors these two peoples spoke dialects of the same language, worshiped versions of the same pantheon, and were in almost all other respects close cousins. But there was never any doubt that in cultural matters—especially the ancient scholarly-literary tradition going back to the Sumerians—Babylon was the source and mother lode of Mesopotamian civilization. 3 Advertisement Politics was another matter. For much of the previous three hundred years Assyria’s military machine had dominated the Near East, including their southern neighbor. Not unnaturally, Babylon was a restive and resentful vassal, and its attempts to break loose led in 689 BC to a brutal sacking of the city by the Assyrian king Sennacherib. So the temperature was very high when Babylon saw its chance to form an alliance with the Medes of western Iran and strike back, which it did between 615 and 612 BC . Torching the Assyrian palaces and shattering its empire, Babylon was quick to fill the vacuum and soon became the new superpower of the Near East. By far the most important figure in this regime change and the cultural revival that followed was the second king of the dynasty, Nebuchadnezzar—or, as he was known to his subjects, Nabu-kudurri-usur, “(God) Nabu, protect my child!”—who ruled from 604 to 562 BC , more than half of the empire’s mere sixty-six years. It was to be Babylon’s short but splendid golden age, a last great indigenous hurrah before a succession of foreign powers absorbed it into even larger empires. Nebuchadnezzar spent his early reign reasserting sovereignty over Babylon’s vassals, including the rebellious kingdom of Judah—a minor event to the king, but one that has haunted his reputation through the ages. Jerusalem was captured and a first wave of exiles deported in 597 BC . Despite the prophet Jeremiah’s warnings, a decade later Judah revolted again, with even more dire results. After an eighteen-month siege, in 587 BC the Babylonians sacked the city, bringing the Davidic royal line to an end, and—even more devastating—destroying Solomon’s temple. Much more of Judean society was now deported to Babylon, swelling what has come to be known as the Babylonian Captivity. Painful as it was, this episode of exile and longing stimulated a profound soul-searching about the divine and worldly causes of the Jews’ plight, and a heightened sense of their identity generally, which bore fruit in the writing down of significant parts of their chronicle—the Hebrew Bible. It is no accident that this took place while the Jews were immersed in what was the most historically literate court of the ancient world. 4 Having secured his throne, Nebuchadnezzar began a campaign of rebuilding and civic glorification that made Babylon the most spectacular city of its day. The city walls were extended and redoubled (including the famous Ishtar Gate, lined with colorful, glazed images of dragons, bulls, and lions, now in Berlin); the ziggurat and temples were refurbished; and, if the classical accounts are to be believed, the famous Hanging Gardens were built for one of Nebuchadnezzar’s wives. Babylon was, then, full of architectural marvels and no less than three of them were included in early lists of the seven wonders of the world. (No other city boasted more than one.) 5 Two of these are not quite what we might expect: the massive city walls (more bulk than artistry) and an otherwise unknown obelisk said to have been erected by the semi-mythical ninth-century Assyrian queen Semiramis. 6 The third and only one to become a fixture on the list was the now most famous, exotic, and enigmatic of all—the Hanging Gardens. All three are long since destroyed (except for remnants of the walls) but this has only enhanced their fascination to later generations. Almost all that we know of the seven wonders comes from Roman-period writers (mostly still writing in Greek) of the first centuries BC and AD , between the lifetimes of Julius Caesar and the Emperor Nero. It is no accident that this was the period when Rome was master of the entire Mediterranean littoral, within which all but one of the extant wonders were to be found and could be visited. 7 The exception was Babylon, which had been lost to the Parthians a century earlier. It was therefore the one host city that lay outside Roman rule and for which authors had to rely upon the testimony of earlier writers. If they were going to make mistakes, this is where we would expect them to do so. The Roman sources are a very mixed bag and much of what one believes about the gardens depends on vexed questions of authorial credibility and textual transmission. Their descriptions of the gardens are based in turn on Greek writers who lived three or four hundred years earlier, roughly a century either side of Alexander. 8 We can only guess at how much these primary accounts may have been corrupted by overzealous editors and encyclopedists before ending up in the hands of the Romans. And it is virtually impossible to know whether the latter are quoting what they read directly (Greek knows no quotation marks) or paraphrasing or adapting the text to their own purposes. Advertisement This crisis of credibility becomes very real as soon as we ask who built the gardens. Some ancients apparently attributed them to the Assyrian queen Semiramis, already a magnet for all manner of epic-romantic deeds. Others credited them to an unspecified “later Assyrian (‘Syrian’) king.” 9 But it is the attribution to Nebuchadnezzar by one source that is traditionally given precedence because of his unique credentials: this writer is Berossus (circa 350 to after 281 BC ), who was himself a Babylonian and indeed a scholar-priest of Marduk in Babylon under the Greek Seleucid regime that followed Alexander. Berossus clearly had direct access to original Babylonian records and was deeply versed in the history and culture of his homeland, on which he wrote a treatise in Greek, the Babyloniaca . If the gardens still existed in Berossus’ day there is no doubt that he would have known about them and probably have seen them. Even if they had been destroyed, he would have had access to any contemporary or later accounts of them that survived in temple or palace archives. As quoted by Josephus (the author’s own text is not preserved), Berossus’ account of the gardens is frustratingly brief, but contains the critical (and sole ancient) attribution to Nebuchadnezzar: British Museum, London/Paul Goodhead A hillside landscape watered by an aqueduct that was probably built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who Stephanie Dalley argues built the Hanging Garden in Nineveh; reconstructed coloring of a sculptured relief from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh, circa 645–635 BC In this palace [a new one erected by Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon] he built high stone terraces and made them appear very similar to mountains, planting them with all kinds of trees, thus constructing and arranging the so-called Hanging Garden, because his wife, who had been raised in the region of Media, longed for a mountainous scenery. 10 Despite disagreeing on their builder, all sources give the gardens’ location as Babylon. 11 They are also broadly consistent in describing the structure itself, a number of them in much more detail than Berossus: a gravity-defying series of terraces rising to the height of the city walls, planted with exotic trees up to fifty feet high, and watered from the Euphrates by a system of mechanized screw pumps. Here is Diodorus Siculus (first century BC ): The park extended four plethra [about four hundred feet] on each side, and since the approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from one another tier on tier, the appearance of the whole resembled that of a theater. When the ascending terraces had been built, there had been constructed beneath them galleries which carried the entire weight of the planted garden and rose little by little one above the other along the approach; and the uppermost gallery, which was fifty cubits high, bore the highest surface of the park…. And the ground, when leveled off, was thickly planted with trees of every kind that, by their great size or any other charm, could give pleasure to the beholder. And since the galleries, each projecting beyond another, all received light, they contained many royal lodgings of every description; and there was one gallery which contained openings leading from the topmost surface and machines for supplying the garden with water, the machines raising the water in great abundance from the river, although no-one outside could see it being done. Strabo gives more detail on the water-raising mechanism, clearly one of the gardens’ most remarkable features, which has been convincingly reconstructed as a rotatable cylinder containing an integral screw (presumably turned by animal or manual traction): “alongside these stairs there were screws, through which the water was continually drawn up into the garden from the Euphrates” 12 Many have thought that these screws must be an anachronism inserted by a later editor, but like a number of inventions traditionally credited to the Greeks (this one to Archimedes) there is now good evidence for them being Mesopotamian. As Berossus reports, the motive for this gigantic folly—over-the-top even by Babylonian standards—was apparently to make Nebuchadnezzar’s Median wife feel more at home in the pancake-flat Babylonian plain. Romantic anecdotes of this kind are often bogus (and this one has often been questioned) but the story is no more implausible than the gardens themselves. 13 Archaeological proof of the gardens has been much more elusive. Early visitors to Babylon assumed that some remnants of so huge an edifice must surely be visible on the ground, but all they found was a lone tamarisk tree. Archaeological excavations undertaken at the site by the Germans in 1899–1917 paid close attention to the classical sources, which describe the gardens as lying alongside the Euphrates River, in or beside the palace. But none of the excavated architectural remains so far proposed can today be endorsed with any degree of confidence. 14 Not surprisingly, some archaeologists have thrown up their hands and declared the whole thing a romantic fiction, pointing out that, in addition to drawing an archaeological blank, there is no mention of the Hanging Gardens in any of Nebuchadnezzar’s numerous cuneiform inscriptions. Nor do they feature in Herodotus, the earliest Greek writer to describe the city (mid-fifth century BC ), though he spends pages on the city’s massive defensive walls. It is far from certain that he visited the city himself but the absence from his account of such an exotic curiosity—just to Herodotus’ taste!—remains striking. This is where Stephanie Dalley comes in. Over the past twenty years, in a series of articles, she has proposed the radical view that the Hanging Gardens were not built by Nebuchadnezzar or any other Babylonian king, nor even were they in Babylon. Rather, they were the work of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (the same who destroyed Babylon) at his capital Nineveh, far to the north. Her book is a much-expanded and extremely thorough statement of this theory that aims both to persuade scholars and to reposition the gardens in public awareness—and in the process to rehabilitate the Assyrians, who are too often typecast as militaristic and uncultured: the Sparta to Babylon’s Athens. But how is it possible that the ancients could make such a glaring mistake—assigning the gardens to the wrong city, the wrong century, and the wrong builder? And how could all of them, writing over nearly a millennium, fall into the very same trap? In a nutshell her answer is that there is an alternative to Nebuchadnezzar that gets around the lack of evidence in Babylon itself and that can explain how and why the classical writers were duped. The first part of this story—that Sennacherib a century earlier built a magnificent garden that resembles in much of its design and engineering what we are told of the Hanging Gardens—takes up most of the book, but is for the most part not in dispute and is not the nub of the problem. The second part—explaining how the sources could have erred in the ways they did—is much more problematic. Although not famous today, Sennacherib’s garden certainly existed and is well known to scholars from his own inscriptions describing the “palace without rival” that he built at Nineveh in the years after 700 BC . The section on the garden starts with how it was watered: In order to draw water up all day long, I had ropes, bronze wire, and bronze chains made. And instead of a shaduf [bucket attached to a pole atop a pivot] I set up the great cylinders and alamittu -screws over cisterns. I made those royal pavilions look just right. I raised the height of the surroundings of the palace to be a wonder for all peoples. I gave it the name “Incomparable Palace.” A park imitating the Amanus mountains I laid out next to it with all kinds of aromatic plants, orchard fruit trees, trees that sustain the mountains and Chaldaea [southern Babylonia], as well as trees that bear wool [i.e., cotton], planted within it. Two relief sculptures from Nineveh, one each from Sennacherib’s palace and that of his grandson Ashurbanipal, preserve what are almost certainly views of this garden. One shows a wooded hillside fronting onto a large pond and, high up on the adjacent panel, two or three columns bearing an architrave upon which stands a row of trees. The other shows a stone-built aqueduct with pointed arches debouching water into a wooded landscape in which stands a porticoed pavilion (see illustration on page 78). Remarkably, extensive archaeological evidence of the network of rock-cut canals, sluices, reservoirs, and aqueducts constructed by Sennacherib to water Nineveh have been found, together with rock-cut reliefs and inscriptions of the king near their headwaters. Most spectacular of all are the remains of an aqueduct that crossed a stream at Jerwan. Nine meters high and twenty-two meters wide, just this short 280-meter stretch of aqueduct required over two million blocks of squared limestone, which were assembled into massive piers forming corbeled arches. The longest canal delivered water ninety kilometers from its headwaters in the mountains. Details of Dalley’s interpretation of Sennacherib’s text (the reading of the key words for “screws” and “cylinders” are new) 15 and of the images on his reliefs may be disputed. But she is clearly right that Sennacherib’s elevated plantings of trees, columned walkways and porticoes, and complex feats of hydraulic engineering bear close comparison to what we are told of the Hanging Gardens. Having established this key point, Dalley trawls widely for every possible piece of further evidence. The Assyrians called their royal gardens the equivalent of “wonders” 16 ; and for them also the number seven had a magical significance. After destroying Babylon itself, Sennacherib saw his city of Nineveh, in some sense, as a new “Babylon,” a center of the universe where kingship and godhead connected; this is reflected in his naming of Nineveh’s gates (as were Babylon’s) after major gods. In one inscription he dedicates his new palace (presumably including the garden) to his beloved first wife, Tashmetu-sharrat, thus paralleling Nebuchadnezzar’s construction of the Hanging Gardens for his Median wife. As for the tradition that the gardens were built by Semiramis, rather than seeing this as pure muddle she cites historical evidence that Sennacherib’s second wife, Naqia, imitated and associated herself with the legacy of the real Semiramis (Sammu-ramat)—which could explain why the latter was mistakenly credited with the palace built by Naqia’s husband. Pulling together the evidence of scattered occupation at Nineveh between its destruction by the Babylonians in 612 BC and its revival under the Seleucids more than three centuries later, Dalley argues that there is enough continuity for memory of its gardens to have survived in local folklore till the Greeks passed by in the fourth century BC . 17 Add to all this a heavy dose of Greek confusion over the difference between Assyrians and Babylonians and the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers and you begin to see how they might have transferred Sennacherib’s garden from the Assyrian “Babylon” (Nineveh) to the real one. The combined effect of all this (and I have left a lot out) is close to overwhelming, and may well shift the onus of proof onto the traditionalists. Has Dalley, then, “uncovered at last the reality behind the legend of the Hanging Garden of Babylon,” as her introduction claims? Possibly, but it is far from proven. First there is a point of logic. Dalley writes as if all evidence for Sennacherib’s garden in Nineveh is evidence against Nebuchadnezzar’s in Babylon. It is not: both Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar can have built wondrous “hanging gardens,” and the many similarities between the two can equally be taken as showing that Nebuchadnezzar emulated the Assyrian’s achievement even more closely than we thought. A Hanging Garden in Babylon would not be an anomaly: previous Babylonian kings had boasted of other splendid gardens. Dalley rightly points out that these are not mountain-style wooded affairs, but then none of those kings had Median queens to mollify. These are quibbles compared to Dalley’s real problem: her account of how the fourth- and third-century BC Greeks could have transferred the site of the gardens from Nineveh to Babylon. Confusion over the location of an Assyrian capital that had been destroyed centuries before Greeks started traveling to Mesopotamia is one thing. Getting muddled over the location of Babylon, still in Alexander’s day the bustling megacity of the East, or attributing to it a famous monument that simply was not there, is quite another. The Babylon that Alexander the Great captured in 331 BC , to which he returned seven years later for Hephaestion’s funeral and where he himself died soon after in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace (in June 323 BC ), was one of the principal capitals of the Persian empire and probably still the most spectacular city in the world. 18 Alexander, his court (including a number of chroniclers), and the many thousands in his army had ample time to take in Babylon’s glories and to marvel at its incomparable city walls, ziggurat, temples, and other monuments. The king’s inner circle saw all this for themselves, and the Alexandrian writers who followed would have had no shortage of eyewitnesses. There can be little doubt therefore that to the Greeks of the early Hellenistic period there was only one Babylon that mattered and that in situating the Hanging Gardens there these authors can only have intended that city. 19 How, if Dalley is right and the gardens were really in Nineveh, are we to account for all of them making the same glaring error? Dalley addresses this issue for Berossus, her most explicit and authoritative obstacle, by adopting a recent view that his description of the gardens is all later interpolation and not to be trusted. The experts are divided, but she is not alone in this view. 20 Otherwise, however, for the many other Greek sources she only gestures at an explanation and it is difficult to see the details falling into place. She points to cuneiform texts in which other Babylonian (not Assyrian) cities receive the epithet “another/second Babylon”: but this goes no way to proving an awareness of this esoteric trope in classical times. Neither do Sennacherib’s vague allusions to Nineveh being a new “Babylon-like” capital in texts that no classical author could have read or probably even known aboutt. 21 So how might the confusion have arisen? “One might posit,” she says, that all the details of the construction and appearance [of Nineveh’s gardens] became known to Alexander’s men in 331 BC by local knowledge at Jerwan [Sennacherib’s aqueduct] and Gaugamela [the nearby site of Alexander’s famous battle], but with legends already proliferating over whether an Assyrian king, or Semiramis, or Nebuchadnezzar, was the builder. Even granting this scenario, it is hardly possible to imagine that these same Greeks, who were soon to march into Babylon itself, would later have recorded what they learned about Jerwan/Nineveh by saying that there once was a spectacular ancient garden in Babylon . If this is discounted, there seem to be only two options. Either we may suppose that in recording what they learned of Nineveh’s gardens these writers made reference to the Assyrian remains (or perhaps gave no suggestion of location) but that their texts were somehow later edited to read “Babylon.” The problem with this is that it requires all the Greek sources to have been corrupted in exactly the same way, which is hardly credible; or that one such corruption acquired canonical status and infected all the others, for which there is no evidence. Alternatively, avoiding speculation on textual tampering, we can draw the commonsense if unspectacular conclusion that the Hellenistic writers knew the Hanging Gardens were in Babylon and said so in their accounts, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there had been a remarkable precedent at Nineveh. Dalley has done a magnificent job of bringing that precedent into focus. This Issue September 26, 2013 Peter Beinart The American Jewish Cocoon Tim Flannery They’re Taking Over! Elizabeth Drew Stranglehold on Washington All Contents Subscribe to our Newsletters Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest Email Address Continue More by Timothy Potts Buried Between the Rivers September 25, 2003 issue September 25, 2003 issue Visit us on Facebook! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Twitter! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page More by Timothy Potts Buried Between the Rivers September 25, 2003 issue September 25, 2003 issue Timothy Potts Timothy Potts is Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. He is the author of Mesopotamia and the East .
 (September 2013) This Issue September 26, 2013 Peter Beinart The American Jewish Cocoon Tim Flannery They’re Taking Over! Elizabeth Drew Stranglehold on Washington All Contents 1 Jewish Antiquities I, 118.   ↩ 2 The label “Neo-Babylonian” distinguishes this empire from earlier periods of Babylonian greatness under Hammurabi and others.   ↩ 3 This is clearly manifested in the huge library of clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) scripts found in the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s palace at Nineveh, which was largely stocked with Babylonian compositions.   ↩ 4 The exiled Judean king Jehoiachin himself resided in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, as cuneiform records from there have shown, and other Judeans, including the prophet Daniel, are said in the Old Testament (Daniel 1) to have been trained in Babylonian court culture.   ↩ 5 The tradition of seven spectacular “sights”—later “wonders”—of the world emerges in the wake of Alexander the Great, whose conquest of the Near East in 334–323 BC extended the knowable world enormously and made travel to its more exotic reaches feasible. Among the earliest evidence of this tradition is the title of a now lost Collection of Wonders in Lands Throughout the World Ordered According to Places by the Alexandrian scholar Callimachus of Cyrene (circa 305–240 BC ). A poet, Antipater, writing about 140 BC , provides the first known listing of precisely seven monuments (the same as our wonders except for having Babylon’s walls instead of the Pharos), so we may take it that the concept of a septet was then in place. (This poet is usually identified as Antipater of Sidon; Dalley accepts an alternative identification of him as the late-first-century- BC Antipater of Thessalonica.) The selection of wonders by different authors remained fluid throughout antiquity—there was no Guinness Book of Wonders —and later eras tried, but ultimately failed, to add their own to the canon, such as Santa Sophia in Constantinople. Today’s list—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos (lighthouse) of Alexandria—was not fully fixed until the Renaissance.   ↩ 6 Semiramis was almost certainly based on a real individual (Sammu-ramat, wife of the ninth-century- BC king Shamsh-Adad V) but by Greek times had become a mytho-heroic compilation of misattribution and fabrication. On her celebrated afterlife as a warrior-princess see Babylon, Myth and Reality, edited by I.L. Finkel and M.J. Seymour (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 118–123.   ↩ 7 The Colossus of Rhodes had collapsed in an earthquake around 226 BC .   ↩ 8 For the Hanging Gardens the main accounts from the Roman period are by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Josephus, and Philo of Byzantium. The primary Greek sources quoted by them are Ctesias of Cnidus (court physician to Persian king Artaxerxes II), Callisthenes and Onesicritus (both fellow travelers and chroniclers of Alexander), Cleitarchus (a slightly later historian of Alexander), and Berossus (discussed below).   ↩ 9 Diodorus Siculus II,10,1; Q. Curtius Rufus V.1.31–35.   ↩ 10 Jewish Antiquities , X,11; Against Apion, 1,19. Translation after R. Rollinger in The World of Berossos (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), p. 148. Other translations here are as quoted by Dalley.   ↩ 11 Strabo does not explicitly state the city’s name but it is clear from the context and other monuments he discusses that he is referring to Babylon.   ↩ 12 Strabo, XVI.1.5; see also Philo of Byzantium (fourth–fifth century AD ): “partly they allow the flow [of water] to run straight downhill, and partly they force it up, running backwards, by means of a screw; by mechanical pressure they force it round and round the spiral of the machines.”   ↩ 13 In another fragment of Berossus quoted by Eusebius (Chronicle 46), the wife is named Amytis, and (in a context unrelated to the gardens) is said to have been married to Nebuchadnezzar as crown prince to cement an alliance with the Medes against Assyria—which makes historical sense. Diodorus says the wife was “Persian”; as with the Babylonians and Assyrians, Greek writers are often looser than we would wish in distinguishing these two closely related Iranian peoples.   ↩ 14 The German excavator, Robert Koldewey, proposed a series of vaults in the northeast corner of the Southern Palace but this is probably too far from the river and more now favor the “Western Outwork,” a massively walled building between the palace and the river. Both proposals, however, fall foul of Berossus’ clear statement that the garden was in (beside?) not the southern palace but the new one Nebuchadnezzar built immediately to the north, beyond the inner city wall. Unfortunately the area between that palace and the river is much denuded and largely unexcavated.   ↩ 15 The primary meaning of alamittu , which she translates here as “screws,” is “date palm” (the connection being the spiral pattern on the palm’s trunk). However, as she states, it appears in lexical lists only in the section on date palms; and this sense reasserts itself earlier in Sennacherib’s text where it is followed by the epithet “tree of riches.”   ↩ 16 Sennacherib’s was only the last and most spectacular in a four-hundred-year tradition going back through his father Sargon II, and Ashurnasirpal II, to Tiglath-Pileser I (circa 1100 BC ).   ↩ 17 This does not change the fact that most of the palaces seem to have remained buried under a burnt destruction layer until excavated by Layard in the nineteenth century; and that we cannot know that the specific reliefs showing the gardens were among those that, as Dalley speculates, remained visible. A later date for some of the destruction debris has been suggested for some areas of the site (which Dalley endorses) but there can be little doubt that most of what Layard cleared was from the sack of 612 BC .   ↩ 18 Apart from Xerxes’ partial dismantling of the ziggurat of Marduk after a Babylonian revolt in 484 BC , the Persians had maintained the city well, as did the Seleucid rulers who inherited it from Alexander. See T. Boiy, Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon (Leuven: Peters, 2004).   ↩ 19 Diodorus (I.56.2–4) and Strabo (XVII.1.30) refer to an otherwise unknown “Babylon” in Egypt, apparently a small settlement occupied by Babylonian rebels; this is clearly not at issue.   ↩ 20 The argument for interpolation is based on the fact that Berossus’ description of Nebuchadnezzar’s other building works largely paraphrases the king’s own cuneiform inscriptions which we know from archaeological discoveries; yet there is no reference in those sources to the Hanging Gardens (see Studies in Ancient Near Eastern World View and Society , edited by R.J. van der Spek (CDL, 2008), pp. 277–318, suggesting insertion by Alexander Polyhistor). Perhaps, but there are other options. Berossus might himself have added this description precisely to compensate for a gap in the king’s official records. And this gap might simply reflect the fact that a private garden constructed for the king’s wife did not qualify for inclusion in official inscriptions, a genre that tends to focus on public edifices. Berossus’ authorship of the passage has recently been upheld by Rollinger (above note 10), p. 151 and A. George in Babylon, Myth and Reality , who suggests: “There is no Babylonian account of it [the Gardens, in Nebuchadnezzar’s inscriptions] because no outsider ever glimpsed it, even from the city-walls. It would not do to have soldiers leering at the ladies of the harem” (p. 59).   ↩ 21 As Dalley admits, “There is no direct evidence for [the use of bab-ili as an epithet of other cities] in any Assyrian inscriptions from the time of Sargon and Sennacherib onwards.”  ↩ ``` ### F3. Tom Holland, "By the Rivers of Nineveh", Literary Review 410 (June 2013) — OPENING ONLY (paywalled) Source: https://literaryreview.co.uk/by-the-rivers-of-nineveh. OUP quotes the review as calling the book a "learned and never less than gripping study". ``` In the early, heroic days of archaeology, it was invariably the ambition of those who headed out to the Levant, armed with pick and shovel, to track down wonders that they had read about in classical literature or the Bible. We tend to remember the successes. To this day the paradigm remains Heinrich Schliemann, whose faith in the historicity of the Trojan War led him to identify the walls of Troy and to gaze on what he described as the face of Agamemnon. Less well remembered are the failures. In 1898, when a German archaeologist named Robert Koldewey arrived in Babylon, he was keen to emulate Schliemann and secure further funding for his excavations by bringing to light the city’s long-lost landmarks. Of these, the most famous and romantic proved the most elusive as well. Despite almost two decades of searching, Koldewey and his team never succeeded in identifying the location of any hanging garden in Babylon. Nor has anyone since. The disappointment has never quite lifted. The Hanging Garden was perhaps the most wondrous of all the seven wonders identified by classical writers as global must-sees. Shimmering on the easterly extremity of Greek and Roman horizons, it was a marvel fashioned as much out of flowers and foliage as stone, ``` ### F4. R. J. van der Spek, "Hangende Tuin van Babylon in Ninevé?", Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 126/4 (2013) 580-581 — NOT OBTAINED DOI 10.5117/TVGESCH2013.4.B4 (Amsterdam University Press). https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/10.5117/TVGESCH2013.4.B4 answers with a Cloudflare challenge (HTTP 403) to every fetch attempted; Wayback 'id_' fetches of the aup-online and aup.nl URLs were reset by the proxy tunnel (three attempts). Only the title (with its question mark) and pages are known, via Crossref. ### F5. Bichler & Rollinger 2005 (the principal scholarly critique; written before the book) Full text raw_D/bichler_rollinger_2005.txt; all 45 footnotes citing Dalley 1994 with the sentences they support are in raw_F/br2005_dalley1994_citations.txt and reproduced in F_dalley_1994.txt Part 4. Verdict (p. 206, quoted by Bagg): removing the Hanging Garden from Babylon to Nineveh "implies to contradict all available sources". ### F6. Publisher-quoted notices and a blog review * OUP product page (Wayback 2016, raw_F/wb_oup_global.html), "Reviews and Awards": Robin Lane Fox, Financial Times: "A bold, clear and immensely interesting new book"; Tom Holland, Literary Review: "learned and never less than gripping study"; Kirkus Reviews: "Deeply researched and rigorously argued—and certain to raise both hopes and objections." * Choice Reviews 51-4596 (March 2014), DOI 10.5860/choice.51-4596 — not read (subscription). * itsmoreofacomment.com, 19 May 2023, "Book review: The mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon by S. Dalley" (non-specialist blog; included only because it was found in the sweep): ``` The Hanging Gardens of Babylon is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. However, its existence has always been a mystery – until Stephanie Dalley’s book. In “The mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon,” Dalley presents a compelling argument for the garden’s location in Nineveh and not Babylon. Her book is a must-read for anyone interested in history, architecture, and archaeology. The Garden’s Location Dalley argues that the Hanging Gardens were located in Nineveh, not Babylon. She provides evidence from ancient texts and archaeological discoveries to support her claim. According to Dalley, the gardens were built by King Sennacherib for his wife. The garden was designed to remind her of her homeland, which was known for its lush vegetation. There are many reasons why the gardens were located in Babylon through the writings of ancient authors, but Dalley takes us with her arguments, that it actually was not. It is a nice to read detective story, combining various sources and ideas into one big reveal: The gardens were build in Niniveh and were indeed a wonder to behold. The Garden’s Creation Dalley explains that the Hanging Gardens were not actually hanging, but rather terraced. The garden was constructed using a system of aqueducts and screws that brought water from the nearby river to the top of the terraces. Irrigation used a series of channels that ran along each terrace. The garden featured exotic plants and trees from around the world. Dalley suggests that it was a symbol of the power and wealth of the Assyrian Empire. The garden was also a testament to the ingenuity and engineering skills of the ancient world. The Garden’s Legacy The Hanging Gardens have captured the imagination of people for thousands of years. Many artists have tried to recreate the garden in their works. However, the garden’s true legacy is its impact on the world of architecture and engineering. Dalley’s book is a fascinating read that sheds new light on one of the world’s greatest mysteries. Her research and analysis are good to follow, and her writing is engaging and accessible. Whether you are a history buff or simply curious about the world’s wonders, “The mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon” is a must-read book, not only for archaeologists. Stephanie Mary Dalley is a British Assyriologist and scholar of the Ancient Near East. Cover of the book “The mystery of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon” by Stephanie Dalley. 3642216 {3642216:7TKZRC8D} 1 chicago-author-date 50 default 2318 https://itsmoreofacomment.com/wp-content/plugins/zotpress/ %7B%22status%22%3A%22success%22%2C%22updateneeded%22%3Afalse%2C%22instance%22%3Afalse%2C%22meta%22%3A%7B%22request_last%22%3A0%2C%22request_next%22%3A0%2C%22used_cache%22%3Atrue%7D%2C%22data%22%3A%5B%7B%22key%22%3A%227TKZRC8D%22%2C%22library%22%3A%7B%22id%22%3A3642216%7D%2C%22meta%22%3A%7B%22creatorSummary%22%3A%22Dalley%22%2C%22parsedDate%22%3A%222015%22%2C%22numChildren%22%3A0%7D%2C%22bib%22%3A%22%26lt%3Bdiv%20class%3D%26quot%3Bcsl-bib-body%26quot%3B%20style%3D%26quot%3Bline-height%3A%201.35%3B%20padding-left%3A%201em%3B%20text-indent%3A-1em%3B%26quot%3B%26gt%3B%5Cn%20%20%26lt%3Bdiv%20class%3D%26quot%3Bcsl-entry%26quot%3B%26gt%3BDalley%2C%20Stephanie.%202015.%20%26lt%3Bi%26gt%3BThe%20Mystery%20of%20the%20Hanging%20Garden%20of%20Babylon%3A%20An%20Elusive%20World%20Wonder%20Traced%26lt%3B%5C%2Fi%26gt%3B.%20Oxford%20University%20Press.%20Privatbibliothek.%26lt%3B%5C%2Fdiv%26gt%3B%5Cn%26lt%3B%5C%2Fdiv%26gt%3B%22%2C%22data%22%3A%7B%22itemType%22%3A%22book%22%2C%22title%22%3A%22The%20Mystery%20of%20the%20Hanging%20Garden%20of%20Babylon%3A%20An%20Elusive%20World%20Wonder%20Traced%22%2C%22creators%22%3A%5B%7B%22creatorType%22%3A%22author%22%2C%22firstName%22%3A%22Stephanie%22%2C%22lastName%22%3A%22Dalley%22%7D%5D%2C%22abstractNote%22%3A%22%22%2C%22date%22%3A%222015%22%2C%22originalDate%22%3A%22%22%2C%22originalPublisher%22%3A%22%22%2C%22originalPlace%22%3A%22%22%2C%22format%22%3A%22%22%2C%22ISBN%22%3A%22978-0-19-872884-9%22%2C%22DOI%22%3A%22%22%2C%22citationKey%22%3A%22%22%2C%22url%22%3A%22%22%2C%22ISSN%22%3A%22%22%2C%22language%22%3A%22English%22%2C%22collections%22%3A%5B%5D%2C%22dateModified%22%3A%222023-02-02T07%3A53%3A11Z%22%7D%7D%5D%7D Dalley, Stephanie. 2015. The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced . Oxford University Press. Privatbibliothek. ``` --- ## H. Reade 2000, "Alexander the Great and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon", Iraq 62: 195-217 — EXTRACT AND REFERENCES ONLY Cambridge Core page https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/abs/alexander-the-great-and-the-hanging-gardens-of-babylon/6D7FD83FF93A9BCF77A0F852C430E7C2 (via https://doi.org/10.2307/4200490); JSTOR 4200490 (Wayback 2021 capture: 23 pages). The PDF is closed; Unpaywall/Semantic Scholar/CORE/fatcat report no open copy; no Wayback capture of the PDF. citation_title: Alexander the Great and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon citation_author: Julian Reade citation_publication_date: 2000/01 citation_volume: 62 citation_firstpage: 195 citation_lastpage: 217 citation_pdf_url: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/6D7FD83FF93A9BCF77A0F852C430E7C2/S0021088900006318a.pdf/div-class-title-alexander-the-great-and-the-hanging-gardens-of-babylon-div.pdf citation_doi: 10.2307/4200490 Extract (verbatim, = opening of the article, p. 195): When Alexander the Great was a boy in the 340s, entertaining Persian ambassadors at his father's court, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Mysteries of the Orient, not yet a Wonder of the World but the kind of thing about which he might have been expected to enquire. Instead, according to Plutarch ( Moralia 342B), he asked about roads and the military organization of the Persian empire. Plutarch was writing in the first or second century AD, but maybe the story is true. We all know how Alexander used such information; it carried him to Babylon and his death. According to Greco-Roman writers, the gardens were located at Babylon (Fig. 1) on a high structure in or beside a palace. They were the gift of one of the kings of Babylon to his Median or Persian wife Amyitis, who was homesick for mountain scenery. No remains of any such structure have yet been confidently identified at Babylon. We are free to speculate on their location, since brick-robbing continued at Babylon for thousands of years and removed all but the foundations of many major buildings. Some nineteenth-century travellers liked to see a relic of the gardens in a solitary evergreen tree which grew near the summit of the Kasr mound, close to its north-eastern corner (Figs. 2 and 12). In 1765, as Niebuhr recounts (1774–8: 289), there had been more than one such tree here and there among the ruins, and the species was different from any that he had observed between Kerbela and the Gulf. Niebuhr already remarked on the great age of these trees. Footnotes (0): Reference list as given by Cambridge Core (62 items): Ainsworth, W. F. 1888. A Personal Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition II. London (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co). Battini, L. 1997. Les systèmes défensifs à Babylone. Akkadica 104 –5: 24 – 57. Beaulieu, P.-A. 1998. Ba'u-asitu and Kaššaya, daughters of Nebuchadnezzar II. Orientalia (NS) 67 / 2: 173 – 201. Bergamini, G. 1977. Levels of Babylon reconsidered. Mesopotamia 12: 111 –52. Böhl, F. M. T. de L. 1962. Die babylonischen Prätendenten zur Zeit des Xerxes. Bibliotheca Orientalis 19 (3 /4): 110 –14. Börker-Klähn, J. 1982. Altvorderasiatische Bildstelen und vergleichbare Felsreliefs (Baghdader Forschungen 4). 2 vols. Mainz am Rhein (Verlag Philipp von Zabern). Boyd, T. D. 1978. The arch and the vault in Greek architecture. American Journal of Archaeology 82: 83 – 100. Brandenstein, W., and Mayrhofer, M. 1964. Handbuch des Altpersischen. Wiesbaden (Harrassowitz). Buckingham, J. S. 1827. Travels in Mesopotamia … London (Henry Colburn). Budge, E. A. W. 1920. By Nile and Tigris … I. London (John Murray). Burstein, S. M. 1978. The Babyloniaca of Berossus (Sources from the Ancient Near East 1/5). Malibu. Crönert, G. 1903. Memoria Graeca Herculanensis. Leipzig (B. G. Teubner). Dalley, S. 1994. Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: cuneiform and classical sources reconciled. Iraq 56: 45 – 58. Damerji, M. S. 1981. Where are the Hanging Gardens? Sumer 37 (Arabic section): 56 – 61. Dandamayev, M. A. 1984. Royal paradeisoi in Babylonia. Acta Iranica 23 (Orientalia J. Duchesne-Guillemin Emerito Oblata): 113 –17. George, A. R. 1992. Babylonian Topographical Texts (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 40). Leuven (Peeters). Guest, E. (ed.) 1966. Flora of Iraq I: Introduction. Baghdad (Ministry of Agriculture). Haerinck, E. 1973. Le palais achemenide de Babylone. Iranica Antiqua 10: 108 –32. Hallock, R. T. 1969. Persepolis Fortification Tablets (University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications XCII). Chicago. Heinrich, E. 1984. Die Paläste im alten Mesopotamien (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut: Denkmäler antiker Architektur 15). Berlin (Verlag Walter de Gruyter & Co). Hepper, F. N. 1996. Timber trees of western Asia. In Herrmann, G. (ed.), The Furniture of Western Asia, Ancient and Traditional (Papers of the Conference held at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 06 28 to 30, 1993): 1 – 12. Mainz (Verlag Philipp von Zabern). Hrouda, B. 1985. Some remarks on the topography of Babylon. Sumer 41: 14 – 15. ‘Alwan, Kamil 1979. The vaulted structures of the so-called Hanging Gardens. Sumer 35: 127 –36. Keppel, G. 1827. Personal Narrative of a Journey from India to England … I. London (Henry Colburn). Koldewey, R. 1914. The Excavations at Babylon. London (Macmillan). Koldewey, R. 1931. Die Königsburgen von Babylon I. Die Südburg (Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 54). Edited by Wetzel, F.. Osnabrück (Otto Zeller Verlag). Koldewey, R. 1932. Die Königsburgen von Babylon II. Die Hauptburg und die Sommerpalast Nebukadnezars im Hügel Babil (Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 55). Edited by Wetzel, F.. Osnabrück (Otto Zeller Verlag). Kuhrt, A. 1990. Achaemenid Babylonia: sources and problems. In Sancisi-Weerdenburg, H. and Kuhrt, A. (eds.), Achaemenid History IV: Centre and Periphery (Proceedings of the Groningen 1986 Achaemenid History Workshop): 177 –94. Leiden (Nederlands Instituut voor het nabije Oosten). Kuhrt, A., and White, S. Sherwin 1987. Xerxes' destruction of Babylonian temples. In Sancisi-Weerdenburg, H. and Kuhrt, A. (eds.), Achaemenid History II: The Greek Sources (Proceedings of the Groningen 1984 Achaemenid History Workshop): 69 – 78. Leiden (Nederlands Instituut voor het nabije Oosten). Lane Fox, R., 1986. Alexander the Great. Cited from Penguin edition. Langdon, S. 1912. Die neubabylonischen Königsinschriften (Vorderasiatische Bibliothek 4). Leipzig (J. C. Hinrichs). Layard, A. H. 1853. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. London (John Murray). Lecoq, P. 1997. Les inscriptions de la Perse achéménide … Paris (Gallimard). MacGinnis, J. 1986. Herodotus' description of Babylon. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 33: 67 – 86. London. Nasir, Mohammad 1979. The so-called Summer Palace (Nebuchadnezzar's Life Palace). Sumer 35: 150 –9. Myers, P. V. N. 1874. Remains of Lost Empires. New York (Harper & Brothers). Nagel, W. 1979. Where were the “Hanging Gardens” located in Babylon? Sumer 35: 240 –1. Niebuhr, C. 1774 – 1778. Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern … II. Kopenhagen (Nicolaus Möller). Oppenheimer, A. 1983. Babylonia Judaica in the Talmudic Period (Beihefte zum Tubinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe B [Geisteswissenschaften] 47). Wiesbaden (Ludwig Reichert). Oppert, J. 1863. Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie I: Relation du voyage et résultats de l'expédition. Paris (Imprimerie Impériale). Ouseley, W. 1800. The Oriental Geography of Ebn Haukal, an Arabian Traveller of the Tenth Century. London (T. Cadell and W. Davies). Peek, W. 1955. Griechische Vers-Inschriften I: Grab-Epigramme. Berlin (Akademie-Verlag). Peters, J. P. 1897. Nippur … I. New York and London (G. P. Putnam's Sons). Rassam, H. 1885. Recent discoveries of ancient Babylonian cities. Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 8: 172 –97. Paper read March 1883. Rassam, H. 1897. Asshur and the Land of Nimrod. New York (Eaton & Mains), Cincinnati (Curts & Jennings). Ravn, O. E. 1942. Herodotus' description of Babylon. Copenhagen (Nyt Nordisk Forlag. Arnold Busck). Rawlinson, G. 1865. The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World … III. London (John Murray). Reade, J. E. 1998. Assyrian illustrations of Nineveh. Iranica Antiqua 32: 81 – 94. Reade, J. E. 2000 (forthcoming). Early British excavations at Babylon. In Renger, J. (ed.), Colloquien der Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft 2. Rich, C. J. 1839. Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon … edited by his widow. London (Duncan and Malcolm). Schachermeyr, F. 1970. Alexander in Babylon und die Reichsordnung nach seinem Tode (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse: Sitzungsberichte 268, Abhandlung 3). Wien (Hermann Bohlaus Nachf.) and Wien/Köln/Graz (Kommissionsverlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften). Sherwin-White, S. M. 1982. A Greek ostrakon from Babylon of the early third century B.C. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 47: 51 – 70. Sherwin-White, S. M. 1983. Babylonian chronicle fragments as a source for Seleucid history. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 42: 265 –70. Stevenson, D. W. W. 1992. A proposal for the irrigation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Iraq 54: 35 – 55. Stolper, M. W. 1990. The Kasr archive. In Sancisi-Weerdenburg, H. and Kuhrt, A. (eds.), Achaemenid History IV: Centre and Periphery (Proceedings of the Groningen 1986 Achaemenid History Workshop): 195 – 205. Leiden (Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten). Stronach, D. 1989. The royal garden at Parsagadae: evolution and legacy. In de Meyer, L. and Haerinck, E. (eds.), Archaeologia Iranica et Orientalis: Miscellanea in Honorem Louis Vanden Berghe: 475 –95. 2 vols. Gent. della Valle, P. 1670. Les fameux voyages de Pietro della Valle II (Lettre 17). 2nd edn. Paris (Gervais Clouzier). Weidner, E. F. 1939. Jojachin, König von Juda, in babylonischen Keilschrifttexten. In Mélanges syriens offerts à Monsieur René Dussaud … (Bibliothèque Archéologique et Historique 30) II: 923 –35. Paris (Paul Geuthner). Wetzel, F. 1930. Die Stadtmauern von Babylon (Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 48). Osnabrück (Otto Zeller). Wetzel, F., Schmidt, E. and Mallwitz, A. 1957. Das Babylon der Spätzeit (Wissenschaftliche Veroffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 62). Berlin (Verlag Gebr. Mann). Wilson, S. 1810. Extract from a Journal kept during a Journey to the Ruins of Babylon. Unpublished. British Library Add. Ms. 26602: 99 – 103. Wiseman, D. J. 1985. Nebuchadrezzar and Babylon (The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 1983). Oxford (University Press, for the British Academy).