The biggest wonder about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? They weren’t in Babylon

Oxford historian gathers evidence that proves ancient marvel was located 300 miles away.

David Keys

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the  Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, weren’t in Babylon at all – but were instead located 300 miles to the north in Babylon’s greatest rival Nineveh, according to a leading Oxford-based historian.

After more than 20 years of research, Dr. Stephanie Dalley, of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute, has finally pieced together enough evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the famed gardens were built in Nineveh by the great Assyrian ruler Sennacherib  - and not,  as historians have always thought, by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.

Dr. Dalley first publicly proposed her idea that Nineveh, not Babylon, was the site of the gardens back in 1992, when her claim was reported in The Independent – but it’s taken a further two decades to find enough evidence to prove it.

Detective work  by Dr. Dalley  – due to be published  as a book by Oxford University Press later this month – has yielded four key pieces of evidence.

First, after studying later historical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens, she realized that a bas-relief from Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh actually portrayed trees growing on a roofed colonnade exactly as described in classical accounts of the gardens.

That crucial original bas-relief appears to have been lost in the mid 19 century.  When it was discovered by the British archaeologist, Austin Henry Layard, in the 1840s, it seems to have already been in such poor condition that its surface was, in all probability, rapidly crumbling away.

Alternatively, it may have been amongst a group of Layard’s UK- bound Nineveh carvings which were lost when the boat carrying them sank in the River Tigris. Luckily, however, an artist employed by Layard had already drawn the bass-relief – and that drawing, recently recognised by Dr. Dalley as portraying the garden, had been reproduced in Layard’s book about Nineveh published in London in 1853.

Further research by Dr. Dalley then suggested that, after Assyria had sacked and conquered Babylon in 689 BC, the Assyrian capital Nineveh may well have been regarded as the ‘New Babylon’ – thus creating the later belief that the Hanging Gardens were in fact  in Babylon itself. Her research revealed that at least one other town in  Mesopotamia  - a city called Borsippa – was being described as  “another Babylon”  as early as the 13 century BC, thus implying that in antiquity the name could be used to describe places other than the real Babylon.  A breakthrough occurred when she noticed  from earlier research  that after Sennacherib  had sacked and conquered  Babylon, he had actually renamed all the gates of Nineveh after the  names traditionally used for Babylon’s city gates. Babylon had always named its gates after its gods. After the Assyrians sacked Babylon, the Assyrian monarch simply renamed Nineveh’s city gates after those same gods. In terms of nomenclature, it was clear that Nineveh was in effect becoming a ‘New Babylon’.

Dr. Dalley then looked at the comparative  topography of Babylon and Nineveh and realized that the totally flat countryside around the real Babylon would have made it impossible to deliver sufficient water to maintain the sort of raised gardens  described in the classical sources. As her research proceeded it therefore became quite clear that the ‘Hanging Gardens’ as described could not have been built in Babylon.

Finally her research began to suggest that the original classical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens had been written by historians who had actually visited the Nineveh area.

Researching the post-Assyrian history of Nineveh, she realized that Alexander the Great had actually camped near the city in 331BC – just before he defeated the Persians at the famous battle of Gaugamela. It’s known that Alexander’s army actually camped by the side of one of the great aqueducts that carried water to what Dr. Dalley now believes was the site of the Hanging Gardens.

Alexander had on his staff several Greek historians including Callisthenes, Cleitarchos and Onesicritos, whose works have long been lost to posterity – but significantly those particular historians’ works were sometimes used as sources by the very authors who several centuries later described the gardens in works that have survived to this day.

“It’s taken many years to find the evidence to demonstrate that the gardens and associated system of aqueducts and canals were built by Sennacherib at Nineveh and not by Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. For the first time it can be shown that the Hanging Garden really did exist” said Dr. Dalley.

The Hanging Gardens were built as a roughly semi-circular theatre-shaped multi-tiered artificial hill some 25 metres high. At its base was a large pool fed by small streams of water flowing down its sides. Trees and flowers were planted in small artificial fields constructed on top of roofed colonnades. The entire garden was around 120 metres across and it’s estimated that it was irrigated with at least 35,000 litres of water brought by a canal and aqueduct system from up to 50 miles away.

Within the garden itself water was raised mechanically by large water-raising bronze screw-pumps.
The newly revealed builder of the Hanging Gardens, Sennacherib of Assyria - and   Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon who was traditionally associated with them - were both aggressive military leaders. Sennacherib’s campaign against Jerusalem  was immortalized some 2500 years later in a poem by Lord Byron describing how “the Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold,” his cohorts “gleaming in purple and gold.”

Both were also notorious for destroying iconic religious buildings.  Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and according to one much later tradition was temporarily turned into a beast for his sins against God. Sennacherib of Assyria destroyed the great temples of Babylon, an act which was said to have shocked the Mesopotamian world. Indeed tradition holds that when he was later murdered by two of his sons, it was divine retribution for his destruction of those temples.

Bizarrely it may be that the Hanging Gardens were the first of the seven ‘wonders’ of the world to be so described – for Sennacherib himself referred to his palace gardens, built in around 700BC or shortly after,  as “a wonder for all the peoples”. It’s only now however that the new research has finally  revealed that his palace gardens were indeed one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Some historians have thought that the Hanging Gardens may even have been purely legendary.  The new research finally demonstrates that they really did exist.

 

 

25 extraordinary places you won't believe exist--but they do

Pink lakes, purple fields, crazy caves and enchanted forests. No wonder traveling is one of the best forms of recreation – even looking at these pictures takes your mind to faraway places…

25 extraordinary places you won't believe exist--but they do

Life in the abyss

A Jovial Look!

Colin Barras - Reed Business Information - UK

Deep life: biology's final frontier

From Methuselah microbes to animals that survive without any oxygen, strange underground organisms are redefining what it means to be alive.

Deep life: the hunt for the intraterrestrials

Deep life: the journey to the centre of the Earth

The strange creatures that live in the deepest abysses of the Earth's crust are rewriting our understanding of life, from its origins to its dying days

SOUTH AFRICA'S gold mines are crawling with demons, each sporting a whip-like tail and a voracious appetite. Not that theminers are worried. These demons are barely visible to the naked eye.

They are big news for people studying life on Earth, though. "The discovery floored me," says Tullis Onstott, a geologist at Princeton University, who discovered these nematode worms swimming in the water-filled fissures of the Beatrix gold mine in 2011.

The fact is, complex organisms just shouldn't be able to live so far beneath the Earth's surface. The nourishment and oxygen that animals need to survive are in short supply just tens of metres below ground, let alone 1.3 kilometres down. Noting that the worms shunned light like a mythical devil, Onstott's team named them Halicephalobus mephisto, after Mephistopheles, the personal demon of Dr Faustus.

Travelling even deeper into South Africa's crust, they found more surprises. On a trek down into TauTona, the country's deepest gold mine, they came across another species of nematode worm at 3.6 kilometres below ground?- making it the deepest land animal found to date (Nature, vol 474, p 79).

In fact we now know that the depths of Earth's crust harbour isolated ecosystems whose inhabitants defy many established biological rules. There are microbes that metabolise so slowly they may be millions of years old; bacteria that survive without benefiting from the sun's energy; and animals that do what no animal should?- live their entire lives without oxygen. This strange menagerie might give us insights into where life originated and where it is heading. It may even help our search for life on other worlds.

That would be an ironic twist. For most of the 20th century, few suspected that Earth's interior could harbour any life, let alone writhing worms or scuttling bugs. Biologists were looking for signs of life on Mars long before they turned their gaze downwards. "The prevailing view was that the deep Earth was sterile," says Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a geologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, who also studies South Africa's goldmines.

It took the nuclear arms race to overturn that orthodoxy. By the 1980s, the US had taken to burying sealed containers of radioactive waste below itsnuclear processing facilities, and the Department of Energy was concerned that deep microbes, if they existed, might eat through the seals. In 1987, to ease the fears, theDoE sponsored a team to hunt for life in boreholes below the Savannah river facility in South Carolina. To general astonishment, they found bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea 500 metres below the surface.

It didn't take long to find out that deep life was not only possible, but extremely prevalent. In 1992, John Parkes, now at the University of Cardiff in the UK, found the sediment under the Sea of Japan to be teeming with life. Even at 500 metres below the sea floor, he found 11 million microbes in every cubic centimetre of dirt (Nature, vol 371, p 410).

The implications were extraordinary. Even when you consider that the heat emanating from the Earth's interior would kill anything deeper than 4 kilometres below the surface, there would be enough room to house a considerable portion of the planet's life. Estimates vary from less than 1 per cent of the world's biomass to 10 per cent, with a more thorough exploration of the Earth's crust needed to firm up that figure.

In the meantime, the focus has switched to answering some of the most pressing questions about the challenges facing organisms deep underground. Top of the list was the question of how they can feed in such barren regions. The microbes under the sea floor, for instance, must have originated on the seabed before being buried under sediment over thousands of years. Left with just small amounts of nutrients in the surrounding dirt, and without any new source of food, the microbes should have starved long ago. Indeed, given that the microbes are eerily still when viewed under a microscope, some sceptics argued that they were exquisitely preserved corpses of long-dead cells, rather than living organisms.

Yet that's not what Yuki Morono of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Nankoku found in 2011. His team took cells from 460,000-year-old sediments found 220 metres below the Pacific Ocean seabed near Japan, and exposed them to a plentiful food supply labelled with stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen. Two months later, Morono found traces of the isotopes in three-quarters of the cells (PNAS, vol 108, p18295). They were still alive?- although you could not tell from their behaviour.

"Their lives are so slow compared with ours,"says Morono. "It is really difficult to distinguish alive and dead cells." The key to their survival seems to be an incredibly slow metabolism, allowing the meagre food source to be rationed for thousands of years.

Methuselah microbes

If that lifestyle seems austere, it is nothing compared with the ecosystem discovered by Hans Ry at Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues. Beneath the Pacific Ocean, they found active bacteria and archaea in sediments deposited 86 million years ago?- 20million years before the dinosaurs went extinct. The cells' reduced metabolism suggests each has been on a very strict diet for the entire time. Under such tight constraints, populations are very sparse, with a mere 1000cells occupying every cubic centimetre of sediment (Science, vol 336, p 922).

Evolution may work very differently in these isolated pockets of sediment. "If there is barely enough energy to meet the requirements of a single cell, it is suicide for that cell to divide," says Ry. Microbes in these ancient sediments might focus their efforts on repairing their own machinery rather than bothering with the activity that most other organisms live for: reproduction.

If these ideas are right, then some of these organisms could be among the oldest creatures on the planet. "Cells in these environments could be millions of years old for all we know," says Katrina Edwards at the University of Southern California.

As strange as they are, the Methuselah microbes living beneath the sea are pretty conventional compared with some of the organisms found below Earth's continents. Consider one species of bacteria living down South Africa's Mponeng gold mine, whose food chain begins with the radioactive decay of minerals in the surrounding rocks.

Just reaching these microbes can be physically exhausting, says Sherwood Lollar, who helped discover the bacteria. "You may go down in the cages with a mining shift crew at 7am, and not actually reach your site until 10.30am," she says. With temperatures and humidity almost unbearably high, the researchers have a few hours at most to collect samples from water-filled fissures in the mine's boreholes. "Then you turn around and make the trek back up."

At first sight, the crystalline rocks down there appear to be an even more desolate home than ocean sediment; formed deep in prehistory, they have received next to no organic matter, even in the distant past. It would seem impossible to find food down here, yet bacteria manage to eke out a meagre existence. Their secret? Uranium. As this element decays, the resulting radiation splits water molecules, releasing free hydrogen, through a process called radiolysis. The bacteria then combine the hydrogen with sulphate ions from the rock, producing enough energy to sustain life (Science, vol 314, p 479).

Powering their cells in this way, these bacteria are part of a select club of species that survive without any input from the sun (see "Where the sun don't shine", right). "I would say the energy sources are all independent from photosynthetic sources," says Li-Hung Lin at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, who led the team that discovered the bacteria.

While such discoveries extended the known boundaries of life on Earth, for a long time it seemed that deep-dwelling organisms would be limited to simple, single-celled life forms: bacteria, archaea and a few slightly more sophisticated fungi and amoebas. While they are all fascinating organisms in their own right, they are not very lively.

Then Onstott's demon worms showed that animals can live kilometres below the surface. They may be only half a millimetre long, but that still makes them hundreds of times bigger, and far more complex, than other deep dwellers. "The diversity in the crust is greater than I ever imagined," says Onstott.

The demon worms probably arrived in the mine relatively recently, though. Isotopic dating of the surrounding water suggests they reached the depths perhaps only 12,000 years ago, probably riding in groundwater that trickled into Earth's interior. Importantly, this water still contains oxygen from when it was last in contact with the atmosphere. Once that oxygen is used up, the worms will die, making it a fleeting stay in evolutionary terms.

But some animals have evolved to survive these suffocating conditions for the long haul,if one discovery from deep under the Mediterranean Sea is anything to go by. Found in 2010, these unusual Loricifera resemble tiny, dead houseplants?- complete with pots. The 250-micrometre-long animals each have avase-shaped armoured case, or lorica, and a straggly mess of tentacle-like projections emerging from its opening.

It isn't their appearance that makes them a showstopper for biologists, though. Antonio Pusceddu at the Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy, and colleagues have found these Loricifera have evolved a unique method of metabolism that does not rely on oxygen, unlike that of all other animals. Indeed, their cells completely lack mitochondria, the organelles that power other animals. Instead, they generate energy from hydrogen sulphide using organelles called hydrogenosomes (BMC Biology, vol 8, p 30).

No oxygen, no problem

For William Martin at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany, the Loricifera are evidence that oxygen is not the key to complex animal life. However, he points out that their sluggish behaviour has caused some sceptics to question the find - just as some critics had believed the inactive underground microbes to be dead. "Some researchers would like to see independent corroboration that the   Loricifera are really alive," he says.

If that verification comes, it would raise hopes that deep life may be far more sophisticated than anyone had imagined. That would bode well for two new projects?- the Census of Deep Life and the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations?- that are setto catalogue underground life in the next few years.

Besides giving us a better understanding of life on Earth today, the results may also give us a glimpse back in time to our early origins. At the very least, South Africa's radiolysis-powered bacteria may give us a new viewpoint on the molecular machinery that allowed life to thrive before photosynthesis reshaped the planet. Some go even further, suggesting that life itself began deep underground.

"There were tumultuous geological processes going on at the time life appeared," says Sherwood Lollar. "There's a strong argument to consider that life arose in a warm little fracture where it might have been protected from heavy asteroid bombardments or the lethal ultraviolet light that bathed early Earth." It is by no means a mainstream theory: most believe hydrothermal vents in the ocean to have been the cradle of life.

But even if these fissures within the crust didn't witness the birth of the first life forms, they will almost certainly be the last refuge for organisms at the end of our planet's life. Last year, Jack O'Malley-James at the University of St Andrews, UK, and his colleagues modelled the likely fate of life on Earth as the ageing sun makes conditions increasingly hostile (see diagram, left). The model suggests that about a billion years from now the oceans will begin to evaporate, and the only life to survive will be microbes deep below the Earth's surface, where they might hold on for another billion years (International Journal of Astrobiology, doi.org/ktf). For all the grandeur of rainforests, savannahs and coral reefs, deep life is probably a more persistent feature of our planet.

The same may also be true of other worlds. "The results from the deep biosphere are completely changing the exploration strategy for life on other planets," says Sherwood Lollar. "The Viking expeditions to Mars in the 1970s were looking for life on the surface. Now we know that signs of life are much more likely to be found in the subsurface." And following the discovery of the Loricifera, there are renewed hopes for complex life forms.

For the moment, though, many eyes are gazing downwards. "This is the last unexplored part of our planet," says Pusceddu. "We can expect even more exciting discoveries of animals and unicellular organisms in future." It seems we have barely scratched the surface.

Loricifera are so sluggish some doubt they are even alive.

Where the sun don't shine

Thirty metres beneath the surface of southern Romania there is a secret crypt known as Movile cave that has been locked away from the rest of the Earth for millions of years. The shrimp-like crustaceans and spiders that live in its dark, damp recesses may resemble their cousins outside the cave, but their ecosystem is built on entirely different foundations.

While most life relies in some way on the sun's energy, the animals in Movile cave are almost completely locked away from its influence. Not only do they live in pitch blackness, but virtually none of the nutrients created on the surface filter through the rocks into the cave.

Instead, bacteria scavenge hydrogen sulphide released into the aquifer from the surrounding rocks, using it to produce life-giving energy. They are then the prey of many other creatures, creating a complex food web with no input from photosynthesis.

Such "chemosynthesis" has long been known to power life around hydrothermal vents in the ocean, where tectonic activity releases minerals from the rocks. But Movile cave shows that it is not limited to the deep sea. Similar mechanisms could also fuel complex ecosystems deep within the Earth's crust, hundreds of kilometres below our feet.

Egypt: Source of the first secret society?

Naming the first secret society that's similar to those in the current era is a difficult task. The Egyptians had innumerable secret fraternities - most having to do with their complex and ritual-drenched religion. But one secret society wasn't quite as much a priesthood as the others. The society grew up out of one of the first figures in history who wasn't a pharaoh or a king. His name was Imhotep, and he was the chancellor, or grand vizier, for the pharaoh Zoser (also spelled "Djoser") in the Third Dynasty of the Old Kingdom.

Apart from being a master builder of the first recognizable Egyptian pyramid, Imhotep was also a physician, the father of Egyptian medicine. And as if these laurels weren't enough, he was an astronomer, a sculptor, a poet, and a philosopher whose sayings were cherished 20 centuries after his death. Later, Imhotep was made a god, with a highly imaginative lineage from a mating between a mortal woman and the god Ptah. But for the men of the cult of Imhotep that developed in the city of Memphis, he wasn't a god but a man, and was revered as such.

This cult had an inner secret society, a Brotherhood of Imhotep, that worshipped his ability as a builder and that created a metaphor for god as an architect, making for a striking similarity with the Freemasons who don't come along for at least another 4,000 years.

The ageless everyman: Count de St. Germain

St. Germain: An alchemist used the Philosopher's Stone – TV Series Warehouse 13

Just in case you think sightings of the "walking dead" are purely a modern phenomenon, consider this: In 1742, a curious man appeared in Europe. He claimed he had just arrived from Persia, and he seemed to be well acquainted with the customs of the East. He also claimed to be an alchemist, who'd learned the art of fusing jewels like diamonds to make larger stones. To all who met him, he looked to be in his 40s, and he was fluent in the major European languages, as well as Sanskrit, Latin, Arabic, and Chinese. He was a virtuoso violinist, a painter, and he seemed to possess incredible wealth, with no real source for his endless funds. He was known in social circles as the Count de Saint- Germain, and many believe that he discovered the secret elixir to eternal life.

Many sources claim that St. Germain was hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. Voltaire said he was "a man who never dies and who knows everything," and the legendary Casanova overheard the Count say that he was more than 300 years old. Variously, he's been identified as a high priest of Atlantis; the biblical character Samuel; the Greek philosopher Plato; Joseph, husband of Mary and father of Jesus; St. Alban, fourth-century English martyr; Merlin the Magician; Christen Rosenkreuz, legendary founder of Rosicrucianism; Christopher Columbus; and Francis Bacon.

During the Enlightenment period of the 18th and 19th centuries, he became a world-famous alchemist. Some have claimed that he was a secret advisor to Freemasons George Washington and Benjamin Franklin during the formative years of the founding of the United States, and it's been said that he tended to Franklin's painful gout while the aging diplomat was in Paris. Today, he's a regular figure in fantasy novels, frequently appearing as a vampire.

In the 1740s, St. Germain became a diplomat to France's King Louis XV. In the 1760s, he was in Russia as part of a plot to install Catherine the Great on the throne. And after warning France's Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of the impending French Revolution nearly 15 years before it occurred, he managed to traipse in and out of Paris during the Terror in the 1790s without losing his head.

Some records claim that he died in Germany in 1784. Yet, France's Comtesse d'Adhémar saw him many times between 1789 and the 1820s, and he never looked older than his 40s. Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky claimed to know him in the 1870s, and French singer Emma Calve said she knew him as late as 1897.

A French magician named Richard Chanfray appeared in Paris in 1972, claiming to be the ageless Count, and briefly made a name for himself on television by transmuting lead into gold. Money troubles led him and his girlfriend to take massive amounts of drugs and lock themselves into a garage with their car running in 1983, so questions about this suicidal final appearance of the Count throw questions on his immortality.