Hanging Gardens of Babylon: Coin of the Lost Wonder of the Ancient World (album)

The Seven Wonders of the World were compiled in the fourth century CE by Philo of Byzantium, known as ”the Paradoxographer,“ in his treatise called De septum mundi miraculis. Only one of the original seven—the Pyramids of Giza—still exists today. Another five of these attractions are well known to scholars of antiquity: the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and the Colossus of Rhodes. –The seventh wonder, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, is more mysterious. It is the only site listed by Philo that has not been located by archeologists. Ancient historians claim that the Gardens were built by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, as a gift to his wife, who hailed from a more lush land—but there is no contemporary record of the great and well-documented ruler doing so. This has led some to speculate that the Hanging Gardens never actually existed. A scholar at Cambridge University argues that the gardens were not in Babylon but at Nineveh, across the Tigris from the Iraqi city of Mosul, by the Assyrian king Sennacherib.–The field of numismatics offers another theory: that the Hanging Gardens were south and east of Babylon, in the ancient kingdom of Elam. Little is known about the people who lived five thousand years ago in what is today southern Iran, but the coins of their descendants, the Elymais, offer some clues. The Elymais, like their ancestors of the Old Babylonian period, held women in high esteem; ancient Elam was perhaps the most matriarchal of all contemporary societies. Women routinely appear on Elymais coins. The legend of the Hanging Gardens being constructed to please a queen would not be out of place in Elymais. –Then there is the matter of the ”pellets“—the strange dot-like markings on the reverse of the coins that have long puzzled historians and numismatists alike. The consensus is that these dots are bad approximations of Greek writing, rendered by illiterates working from worn original templates. A new theory suggests that these dots are not bad copies, but rather artistic renderings of the fruit grown on the trees of the Hanging Gardens. If this is true, these coins show that the Hanging Gardens were in Elam, not Babylon.

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