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A 2,500-Year-Old Mystery: The Hanging Gardens World Wonder

Scholars have no direct evidence of this ancient site in Babylon. Speculations vary about where it was located, how it looked and whether it actually existed among the seven wonders of the world.

ByJoshua Rapp Learn
Credit: picsbyst/Shutterstock

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Of the original Seven Wonders of the World, only one still survives today: the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The other six have all been destroyed since the 2nd century B.C.

Ruins of the Temple of Artemis can still be seen in Turkey today. Most, or parts, of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus survived for more than a millennium after the initial list of the seven wonders began to circulate. Otherwise, a number of relatively accurate drawings and depictions exist for many of the wonders, as a result.

But the most mysterious of the seven ancient wonders is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, rumored to have existed some 2,500 years ago. No preserved Babylonian writings from that time mention the gardens. Scholars today only speculate where they existed, and how they might have appeared, based on historians who later quoted eyewitness accounts.

Some researchers are ...

  • Joshua Rapp Learn

    Joshua Rapp Learn is an award-winning D.C.-based science journalist who frequently writes for Discover Magazine, covering topics about archaeology, wildlife, paleontology, space and other topics.

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