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The gardens were built around 2500 to 2600 B. C Stories say the Hanging Gardens stood hundreds of feet high, but archaeologists say that they were not quite that high. Standing at around 320 feet, the outer walls were 80 feet thick and reached an amazing length of 56 miles! Wow, that's long. Inside, were temples containing statues made of solid gold! Cha ching. King Nebuchadnezzar built the gardens for his homesick wife Amyitis. Amyitis was the daughter of the king of Medes. Amyitis was married to King Nebuchadnezzar to form an alliance. She came from a green land and was getting homesick for the green landscapes. Exactly how big were the hanging gardens, you may ask? One account says they were about 400 feet wide by 400 feet long and more than 80 feet high. It is said that if you stacked all of the bricks used to build the gardens side by side, long ways, they would reach from the earth to the moon, or wrap around the earth 15 times at the widest spot. Wow! Babylon had a low percentage of rainfall, and for the gardens to survive they had to be irrigated by the nearby Euphrates River. To water the gardens the Babylonians most likely used a chain pump. A chain pump consists of two large wheels. The first wheel is above the other. A chain linked the two wheels together. Buckets were hung on the chains. Under the lower wheel was a pool holding the water. When the wheel turned the buckets dipped down and scooped up the water. Then the chains lifted the buckets to the top wheel, where they poured into another pool, called the upper pool. The empty buckets were then carried back down to be refilled. The upper pool was released from gates into channels which were like man made rivers used to water the garden. The slaves worked the contraptions by turning a handle on the lower wheel. The gardens aren't standing anymore but that doesn't mean that they didn't exist. They were located in Babylon , which is in Iran. Babylon caught fire.( So did four other wonders.) I thought that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were the most interesting of the wonders so I hope you feel the same way.
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