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Assyro-Babilonian gardens

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

ASSYRO-BABILONIAN GARDENS
Famous were the ancient Assyrian gardens and particularly the Mesopotamian ones. This region had the most beautiful ones and, for what we read in the historians chronicles, their parks were really superb. The first of the Mesopotamian king to give us some news about one of his garden is Tiglat Pileser I (ca. 1100 B.C.). He was an Assyrian king that, after a victorious war, brought back with him two trees - the Lebanon’s cedars and the boxwood - as a precious part of his booty, and he proudly boasted that
“none of my ancestors ever owned such trees ”.
However this declaration shows us that, also without such fine varieties, their ancestors already had gardens, and that Tiglat Pileser’s was not the first of them to create one. However this is all that we know on this argument.
Much more we learn about the following centuries gardens and surely among the Assyrian kings who very much enjoyed them there was Sennacherib, Sargon’s son. He had always been very interested in botanic and he created magnificent parks. In their description the compiler of the text speaks as if he was the king in person. Thus the narrator writes:
“Having I erected an unequalled palace, near it I created a park, a splendid one just like the Amanus mountain. Here Chaldaean trees and spices grew and also all the hills’s varieties”
Then Sennacherib proclaimed that in another of his gardens he had also acclimated all kind of exotic plants, and he affirmed that he had done this for his subjects. That means that he was the first one to create a botanical garden and, what is more, also the first one who gave to the citizens a public park. Thus he speaks.
“I created a garden in the high sector of the town – he writes - and also in the lower one. In it I put all the plants of the nearby mountains and also the ones of the surrounding countries; all the spices of the Hittite’s land; myrrh (that grows better in my gardens than in its original one); vines from the hills; fruits from every parts of the country, and spices and sirdu trees. All these I planted for my subjects. What is even more I levelled all the mountains and the fields of the area that surrounds the Kisiri town pushing the works till Niniveh so that the plants could thrive. Then I also dug a canal from a distance of an hour and a half, and, to well irrigate my fields, in this canal I brought the waters of the river Chusur. In the garden I also created a pond to keep water in it and there I planted reeds.”
Obviously Sennacherib did not limit himself to the Royal parks or to the public ones, but he also created beautiful gardens for his gods. One of them was excavated and thus we now know the techniques used by the Assyrian to implant a garden on a rocky platforms. The park in question covered an area of 16000 square meters and on all its extent there were pits deep 1,50 m cut in the rock. A main canal, that fed many minor ones, irrigated the trees set all around the temple. Nearby there were three basins, also used as fishponds. It was amid this luxuriant park that stood the hall for the feasts of Assur, and it was here that on New Year Eve – for what the Assyrian believed - Assur hosted all the gods of his Pantheon.
It was certainly the proximity of the Mesopotamian plain’s rivers that made possible to create those delightful places and have all their luxuriant vegetation. Always these same conditions gave birth to the fabled beauty of the pensile gardens of Babilonia, popularly attributed to Semiramis, an Assyrian queen who. for the legends, lived in the IX cent. B.C.
However it is not even certain that this queen ever existed, and as a consequence it is not possible to attribute to her the creation of those gardens. For instance Diodorus Siculus, basing himself on what is said by Ctesias and Cleitarcus, affirms that they were created by another Assyrian king, of whom, however, he does not give the name. This powerful king - says Diodorus Siculus – had them built for one of his wives, a Persian young woman, who was pining for her beloved mountains. To alleviate her pain, the loving husband created these artificial hills covered by trees and greeneries. Berosus, more exact than Diodorus, gives a name to the royal lover and tells us that the author of those gardens was Nebuchadnezzar and assures that he made them for the love of a Median wife.
Strabo and Diodorus (I cent A.D.) tell how those paradises were made: due to the fact that the two reports differ a little one from the other, some scholars believe that probably those chroniclers are describing different pensile gardens and that there were many of them. However it rests to explain how come that, if they were speaking of two different gardens, the two chroniclers attributed to them the same rectangular plan and the same measurements telling us that the longer side was 480 m: half a kilometre.
Moreover, also if between the two historians there are some discrepancy; they are not many. For the rest the two historians agree on the fact that the structure was made by four superposed terraces, each smaller than the one under it. From their description we understand that the pensile gardens must have had much in common with the “ziggurat”.
Taking now Diodorus description we know that all around the platform rode an open air lane, 3.50 m wide, while on the interior large arches sustained the over hanging terrace and formed a circle of elegant rooms, that, lit by pits of light open in their ceilings, offered to their dwellers places where they could pause and enjoy the view of the river and the town. Of course the centre of the structure consisted of a solid nucleus made as a gigantic pylon that was crossed by galleries.
The top flour, the fourth one, was sustained by fifty cubits (25 m) high arches, and was entirely occupied by a garden. To avoid water infiltrations due to the irrigation the platform was built in a particular way. It stood on a stone ceiling, over which a layer of reeds and asphalt was laid. Then this was covered by cemented tiles and bricks and, to make it sure that not a drop of water could ooze down, the area was protected by a continuous sheet of lead. When all this had been done the terrace was covered with fertile soils in which the garden was implanted. The structure of the platform was heavy and sturdy and could well sustain all those charges and also the huge trees that thrived in this gardens.
Strabo’s description differs in some parts from Dioorus’s one, also if it is clear that he speaks of the same structure. The differences are not so much in the exterior appearance of the pensile gardens as in the technical solutions. For example while for Diodorus on the top terrace the trees were planted directly in the thick layer of soil that covered all the area, for Strabo they were set in big cement container filled with good humus and that spared the necessity to cover with it all the rest of the terrace.
Among the different versions reported by the two chroniclers there is how the pensile gardens were irrigated. For Diodorus on the top terrace there was a cistern, and he added that it was set just in the middle of it, but hidden to the view. Always for Diodorus the water was drawn from the nearby Euphrates by means of some machines set on the top arches, and collected in the cistern. Then, flowing in canals hidden to the view, it watered all part of the garden. For Strabo, instead, the water was taken from the river by slaves who used spiral pumps or norias.
However, both chroniclers agreed that the pensile gardens were near the Acropolis, surely another name of the Royal Palace, a residence that, for all we know, was set on the Euprates banks and on the west side of the river.
It was here that, later on, Alexander the great liked to stay. He had been fascinated by the beauty of the Babilonian gardens, and we know that he was interested in them to the point that in them he tried to acclimatize the ivy, a greenery very used in Macedonia, but that here could not take roots. However this tentative show how much he was interested in these paradises - as gardens were then called -. Here he liked to spend much of his time and, when, gravely ill, he felt that he was on the point of dying, he asked to be brought in the open air and there see his soldiers for he last time. Thus it was in this splendid park that all his army paraded before him and his brief and glorious existence ended in the shade of the beautiful trees that he so much loved, while the silence was only broken by the rhythmic march of the men who with him had fought and with him had gone to the end of the world.