<P> The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World as listed by Hellenic culture, described as a remarkable feat of engineering with an ascending series of tiered gardens containing a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and vines, resembling a large green mountain constructed of mud bricks, and said to have been built in the ancient city of Babylon, near present - day Hillah, Babil province, in Iraq . </P> <P> According to one legend, the Neo-Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled between 605 and 562 BC, built the Hanging Gardens, alongside a grand palace that came to be known as The Marvel of Mankind, for his Median wife, Queen Amytis, because she missed the green hills and valleys of her homeland; this is attested to by the Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in about 290 BC, and quoted later by Josephus . </P> <P> The Hanging Gardens are the only one of the Seven Wonders for which the location has not been definitively established . There are no extant Babylonian texts which mention the gardens, and no definitive archaeological evidence has been found in Babylon . Three theories have been suggested to account for this . One: 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 . Two: that they existed in Babylon, but were completely destroyed sometime around the first century AD . Three: that the legend refers to a well - documented garden that the Assyrian King Sennacherib (704--681 BC) built in his capital city of Nineveh on the River Tigris, near the modern city of Mosul . </P> <P> There are five principal writers whose descriptions of Babylon are extant in some form today . These writers concern themselves with the size of the Hanging Gardens, their overall design and means of irrigation, and why they were built . </P>

What is left of the hanging gardens of babylon