The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built about 2,500 years ago. It was built by Nebuchadnezzar II, to make his wife Amytis happy because she didn’t like the Babylonian desert. She had lived in Persia, which had many plants and fountains.

    The Hanging Gardens were known to be in Mesopotamia, near what is now Baghdad, Iraq. It was located by the Euphrates River.  It was about 350 feet tall and was covered with trees, flowers, lawns, plants, fountains, pools, and miniature water falls. It had every kind of plant available in the kingdom. It was made of mud brick and stone, a series of teracces, one on top of the other.  The plants couldn’t  survive without  water, so they had to pump water from the Euphrates River to flow down through channels to the plants.

 Artwork by Landry

    Writers didn’t write specifically about the Hanging Gardens, but they wrote about lots of other things in Babylon.  Herodotus was the first author to give a full description of the Hanging Gardens.

    In the early 1900’s German archaeologist, Robert Koldewey traced the area where the Hanging Gardens of Babylon had layed. Only crumbling mud brick can be seen today.