<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> <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>

The purpose of the hanging gardens of babylon
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