Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Hanging garden
Posted on 2:27 PM by Sriram Ganesh
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was located in the east bank of Euphrates, South of Baghdad in Iraq. King Hammurabi was the most famous king of the Babylonian kingdom. Under his rule, the entire kingdom flourished. His son Nebuchadnezzar was the one who built the Hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven marvels of world. Some stories have it that the Hanging Gardens went hundreds of feet into the air, but archaeological explorations have proved it wrong.
Babylon was an arid country and water from the Euphrates River had to be used to irrigate it. A chain pump was used to lift water to each level. A chain pump is two large wheels on top of each other. Buckets are hung on a chain that connects the wheels. The bucket goes into the water then comes up and goes into a new pool. The empty buckets go back into the water to be refilled. The water at the top is then emptied through into a channel gate that is like a artificial stream to water the gardens. Special care had to be taken while watering the garden because the garden ran the risk of collapsing if water were absorbed by the brick columns and foundation supporting the gardens.
However, the Greek historian Strabo had stated that the gardens were situated by the River Euphrates. So others argue that the site is too far from the Euphrates to support the theory since the Vaulted Building is several hundreds of meters away. They reconstructed the site of the palace and located the Gardens in the area stretching from the River to the Palace. On the river banks, recently discovered massive walls 25 m thick may have been stepped to form terraces... the ones described in Greek references.
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