<P> The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a term given by the ancient Hellenic culture . The Hanging Gardens were described as a remarkable feat of engineering with an ascending series of tiered gardens containing a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and vines . The gardens were said to have looked like a large green mountain constructed of mud bricks . </P> <P> The Hanging Gardens is the only one of the seven ancient wonders for which the location has not been definitively established . Traditionally they were said to have been built in the ancient city of Babylon, near present - day Hillah, Babil province, in Iraq . The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in about 290 BC and quoted later by Josephus, attributed the gardens to Neo-Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled between 605 and 562 BC . There are no extant Babylonian texts which mention the gardens, and no definitive archaeological evidence has been found in Babylon . </P> <P> Because no physical evidence for the Hanging Gardens has been found at Babylon, two theories have been suggested . One is that they were purely mythical, and the descriptions found in ancient Greek and Roman writers including Strabo, Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius Rufus represent a romantic ideal of an eastern garden . If it did indeed exist, it was destroyed sometime after the first century AD . The other theory is that they were actually in the city of Nineveh, constructed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib . </P> <P> According to one legend, Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens for his Median wife, Queen Amytis, because she missed the green hills and valleys of her homeland . He also built a grand palace that came to be known as "The Marvel of the Mankind". Stephanie Dalley suggests that the original garden may have been a well - documented one that Assyrian King Sennacherib (704--681 BC) built in his capital city of Nineveh on the River Tigris, near the modern city of Mosul . </P>

When was the hanging garden of babylon built