The Hanging Gardens

An Ancient Wonder of the World

The Ancient Wonders of the World included the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Great Pyramids of Giza, and even the Hanging Gardens, among others. The thing is that unbeknownst to many the Hanging Gardens weren’t actually in Babylon, they were really in Nineveh. In 1969 a CIA satellite captured images of the remnants of an ancient network of canals in northern Iraq, close to the borders of what are now Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Unfortunately, half a century of local habitation and cultivation has covered up much of what was there. To make matters worse ISIL has destroyed countless antiquities and historic sites. This has effectively erased much of the pre-Islamic past. So, to help counteract this, I have written some of the actual histories of the Fertile Crescent for posterity.

Circa 675 BCE a groundbreaking king named Sennacherib allowed Assyrian art to reach its peak. He was an absolutely amazing innovator and designer. King Sennacherib was also an excellent city planner. The layout of his capital included new streets and squares around an immense “Palace Without Rival”, that rose up 80 stories on the southwest corner of Kuyunjic Hill. More to the point, the total area of Nineveh comprised about 1,730 acres on the east bank of the Tigris. That was an incredibly vast stretch of land at the time. As Assyria outpaced Babylonia…