ABSTRACT
The Walls of Babylon, as well as its Hanging Gardens, were listed by Antipater and Philo as sights and wonders of their world. The Walls of Babylon fall into the same general category, readily understandable as a concept and attested by archaeology. The Walls of Babylon were real enough and survive as an archaeological entity, but the Gardens are by comparison a matter of near-total obscurity. The poetically-minded, as well as painstaking, first excavator of Babylon tried to believe that he had found archaeological evidence of the Hanging Gardens. In the end, the romantic idea of Hanging Gardens created for a beloved queen displaced the city walls as a wonder for people who were never going to actually see any of the wonders for themselves. Diodorus recounts that the terraces of the gardens were watered by some sort of invisible machinery, presumably having in mind something like the screws mentioned in Strabo.
