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The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is the only one whose location has not been definitively established.〔 The Hanging Gardens were a distinctive feature of ancient Babylon. They were a great source of pride to the people. Possibly built by King Nebuchadnezzar II in 600 BC, the gardens are believed to have been a remarkable feat of engineering: an ascending series of tiered gardens containing all manner of trees, shrubs, and vines. The gardens were said to have looked like a large green mountain constructed of mud bricks. 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 the 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.〔Finkel (1988) p. 58.〕〔Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour, ''Babylon: City of Wonders'', (London: British Museum Press, 2008), p. 52, ISBN 0-7141-1171-6.〕 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'. Because of the lack of evidence it has been suggested that the Hanging Gardens are 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.〔Finkel 2008〕 If it did indeed exist, it was destroyed sometime after the first century AD.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.seven-wonders-world.com/hanging_gardens_babylon.htm )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.unmuseum.org/hangg.htm )〕 Alternatively, the original garden may have been a well-documented one 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. ==Ancient texts== In ancient writings the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were first described by Berossus, a Babylonian priest of Marduk who wrote around 290 BC, although his books are known only from quotations by later authors (e.g., Flavius Josephus). There are five principal writers (including Berossus) whose descriptions of Babylon are extant in some form today. These writers concern themselves with the size of the Hanging Gardens, why and how they were built, and how the gardens were irrigated. Josephus (ca. 37–100 AD) quoted Berossus (writing ca. 290 BC), when he described the gardens.〔Finkel (1988) p. 41.〕 Berossus described the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, and is the only writer to credit that king with the construction of the Hanging Gardens.〔Finkel (2008) p. 108.〕 Diodorus Siculus (active ca. 60–30 BC) seems to have consulted the early 4th century BC texts of Ctesias of Cnidus for his description of the Hanging Gardens: Quintus Curtius Rufus (active 1st century AD) referred to the writings of Cleitarchus, a 4th-century BC historian of Alexander the Great, when writing his own ''History of Alexander the Great'': Strabo (ca. 64 BC – 21 AD) described of the Hanging Gardens as follows, in a passage that was thought to be based on the lost account of Onesicritus from the 4th century BC: Philo of Byzantium, "the Paradoxographer" (writing in the 4th–5th century AD), whose list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World we use today,〔This author is now thought to not be Philo the Engineer of Byzantium, but perhaps Philo the Paradoxographer of Byzantium, Stephanie Dalley, "More about the Hanging Gardens," in ''Of Pots and Pans: Papers on the Archaeology and History of Mesopotamia and Syria as presented to David Oates on his 75th Birthday'', Edited by L. al-Gailani-Werr, J.E. Curtis, H. Martin, A. McMahon, J. Oates and J.E. Reade, (London), pp. 67–73 ISBN 1-897750-62-5.〕 was credited with the following description: 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hanging Gardens of Babylon」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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