Hanging Gardens: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

Hanging gardens frequently occur throughout the history of the area and there are still the remains of an elaborate terrace garden of the type at Shiraz. The exact nature of the famous Babylonian garden is known with reasonable certainty. According to the best received view the garden was a rectangular artificial hill on a base a quarter of a mile square. From this base the terraces ascended like steps, each one built upon arches, so that beneath each terrace was a cool covered promenade or series of rooms. Terracing is the natural form of cultivation for the mountain dweller. Upon every terrace (the floor of which was the roof of the room below it) were planted trees and shrubs, their growth concealing the arched promenade which ran below the terrace next above. The whole effect was of a great tree-covered man-made mountain. The technical difficulty of planting trees upon roof tops was overcome by covering the stone of the structure with a layer of reeds and asphalt mixed with brick and gypsum, and over this a layer of lead which in turn supported the earth. So that there would be adequate depth for the larger trees the pillars of the terraces below were hollow and filled with soil through which the roots could reach down into the heart of the artificial mass of mould and masonry. What no doubt commended it to a wondering ancient world was the size and difficulty of the undertaking; to us perhaps the nostalgia of the Median girl is what stamps it on the memory. The great pyramidal mountain does not sound attractive. Stripped of their trees the hanging gardens are very like what we know of the towers of Babel, temples made in the plains for a mountain-dwelling god. Coupled with this propensity for making artificial hills, there developed also a kind of fortuitous man-made hill known as a tell which also encouraged the developing of terraced garden mounts. In much of this part of the world building is still carried out with mud bricks, as it has been for 6,000 years.