THE MYSTERY

The Mysteries - The reason why the two alternate stories are popular is because there are some serious problems with the Usual Story. By itself, it just doesn’t add up, if you look more closely. These are the mysteries that continue to confuse us about the Hanging Gardens, and make people wonder which story is true.

 1. Were the Gardens built for love or for pity?

 This is the mystery I personally think is the most intriguing, and one which wasn’t in the reference books. It was something I began to wonder more about as I researched the life of King Nebuchadnezzar.

We don’t usually admire and reward people who are homesick. We pity them, we keep up with their weakness, but we don’t reward them with a truly grand and spectacular present to cure their sorrow. And King Nebuchadnezzar would never have done so. He was a boy about five years old when his father declared Babylon to be independent of the Assyrian Empire and named himself Babylon’s ruler. The Assyrian Empire promptly declared war on him and set out to put down this revolution. So young Nebuchadnezzar had to train to be a soldier, and as soon as he was skillful enough, he joined his father’s army and fought for Babylon’s freedom from Assyrian rule. He did not grow up in a palace and a life of luxury. He grew up on a battlefield, and fought for everything he possessed.

He came up through the ranks to finally be commander of the combined Babylonian and Median armies at Carchemish, defeating the Egyptians who still supported the dying Assyrian empire. And as a soldier and ultimately a leader of armies, he had to reward strength and accomplishment. If he ever rewarded anyone who was weak, pathetic, pitiful, or unhappy with something as trite as the scenery around their home, he would have lost the devotion of his armies who suffered without complaint on the battlefield and risked their lives for him. They didn’t like the scenery on the battlefields either, but they didn’t cry wishing to be home.

Homesickness is generally considered a weakness, a pitiful emotion. And Queen Amytis’ homesickness for Mede is generally described as why Nebuchadnezzar built the gardens. I simply can’t believe he’d build the Gardens if his queen Amytis was truly just a homesick girl. To reward her pitiful homesickness with such an incredible garden would destroy the morale of his army, which he needed to continue defending the Babylonian Empire. To earn the respect of his armies, he rewarded strength, courage, sacrifice, and success. Queen Amytis, as described, had none of these qualities. So something is wrong with the Usual Story in this respect. Something is missing.

2. Why didn’t the Babylonians ever write about their famous Gardens?

This mystery is the most logical and scientific reason to doubt the Usual Story. How could these incredible Gardens exist in Babylon for over 275 years and nobody in Babylon wrote about them? The most obvious example of this mystery is in a set of five tablets , commonly called “The Topography of Babylon”, which are essentially a city map describing streets, buildings, monuments, temples, etc. But these tablets say nothing about a wondrous Garden in the city. So, if you want to believe the Gardens really existed in Babylon, you have to explain why they aren’t on the city map which was written after the Gardens were believed to be built.

We do know occasionally governments and kings will hide something if it relates to an embarrassing event in their history that they’d rather the rest of the world forgot or didn’t know about. So that is a possible explanation. But it leads to another question: what was Nebuchadnezzar hiding, that would cause him to forbid mention of this monument to his great love for a wonderful queen?

3. Where in the city was it?

The third mystery is based on the fact that the ancient city of Babylon has been fairly extensively excavated. We can find the main street (The Processional Way), the old Southern Palace, the newer Northern Palace, the Western Citadel, etc. but we can’t find any place that could confidently be described as where the Gardens were.

There’s a curious structure in the north-eastern corner of the Southern Palace complex which is called “The Vaulted Rooms” because it’s foundation has lots of vaulted archways. Some people like to believe that’s where the Gardens were. And the Western Citadel on the Euphrates River has a truly massive foundation, which leads some people to believe the Gardens were built on this massive foundation. So those are generally the two best guesses as to where the Gardens were in Babylon. But nobody can say for sure, and so those who say it was in another city instead or say it just plain doesn’t exist point to this as further proof. If it was in Babylon, why can’t we figure out where in the city it was?

4. Who looked after the Gardens secretly for several hundred years?

The Gardens are generally believed to have been built very early in Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, like around 600 BC. The last seemingly reliable description of them was around 325 BC when Alexander the Great came to Babylon and saw the Gardens. If these are both true, the Gardens stood in beautiful condition for 275 years. Who took care of them?

If they were well known publicly, a national treasure that was well described and open to visitors, like the other Wonders of the World, the citizens of the city might reasonably keep the place well maintained so the city could continue to be proud of it’s famous monument. But it wasn’t a famous monument. It was a secret, hidden from most people. So why would citizens of a city devotedly care for and maintain a secret monument that the city officially pretends doesn’t exist. And we’re not just talking about one group of people. Generation after generation would have to keep up the maintenance, while maintaining the secrecy as well. This seems pretty strange.

5. What happened to the Gardens in the end?

There are Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. We know exactly what happened to six of them. One is still standing (the Great Pyramid at Giza), three were destroyed by earthquakes (The Lighthouse, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus), and two were trashed by invading armies after standing for hundreds of years (The Temple of Artemis and the Statue of Zeus).

Only one of the Seven ended it’s existence as mysteriously as it began. We know nothing about who or what destroyed the Hanging Gardens. The legend doesn’t even give us any clues. It just plain vanished! So the last mystery of the Hanging Gardens is, if indeed they were cared for devotedly for over 275 years by generations of Babylonian citizens, why did they stop taking care of the Gardens. Did a natural disaster ruin them? If so, their foundation and basic structure should still be there, and other parts of the city should have been similarly destroyed.

Or did somebody deliberately destroy the Gardens, just as Alexander and his armies destroyed the glorious Persian City of Persepolis? But even there, the ruins of Persepolis still stand today. Nothing stands today to suggest the Gardens were once in Babylon. So if somebody deliberately destroyed the Hanging Gardens, they did so with a vengeance, determined to leave nothing behind, not a trace, not a clue, nothing. Who would, and why?

These are the mysteries of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. If they existed, if the legend is true, we must explain these things and answer these questions. So far, nobody else has explained any one of these mysteries. In THE REVELATION, I have offered my answer to these mysteries, and my idea of what really happened in Babylon 2600 years ago.

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