Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Garden of Babylon Was Actually In Rival King's Land 300 Miles Away

The Hanging Garden of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, maybe in due for a name change as the wonder was not actually in Babylon, but at a site 300 miles north of the ancient kingdom, according to a British academic.

No traces of the verdant Hanging Garden has ever been found in Babylon, the ancient kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar which lies in what is now central Iraq. But according to Stephanie Dalley, a Research Fellow at Oxford's Somerville College, there is evidence the Garden was built in Ninevah, which is near what's today called Mosul in northern Iraq. The Assyrian civilization of Nineveh was ruled by King Sennacherib, and Dalley thinks the Hanging Garden has been incorrectly attributed as an achievement of Sennacherib's rival Nebuchadnezzar.

Dalley, who is an ancient Middle Eastern languages expert, based her work off years' worth of analyzing ancient Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman texts as well as the work of German archaeologists who spent nearly two decades excavating the Babylon site without finding sufficient evidence that the gardens were ever there. 

"To their dismay, they could not find any possible location with enough space in the vicinity of the palaces, nor did they dig out any written confirmation from the many texts they unearthed," the Telegraph quoted Dalley writing of the German archaeologists, 

In her research Dalley found written evidence of "a complex system of canals, dams and aqueducts to bring mountain water from streams 50 miles away to the citadel of Nineveh and the hanging garden," The Guardian reports.

Dalley's research is culminated in a book titled "The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon," which Oxford University Press publishes later this month. 

According to The Guardian, "Recent excavations have found traces of aqueducts. One near Nineveh was so vast that Dalley said its remains looked like a stretch of motorway from the air, and it bore a crucial inscription: 'Sennacherib king of the world ... Over a great distance I had a watercourse directed to the environs of Nineveh ...'."