Gardens

Though the story went that Babylonia's King Nebuchadnezzar constructed the gardens to appease his homesick wife, Dalley asserts that it was instead Assyria's King Sennacherib behind them. Using her expertise in the region's ancient language, Dalley translated a number of Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman texts, and found what the Independent describes as "four key pieces of evidence." Among them: indications that Nineveh may have been seen as a "new Babylon" after the Assyrians conquered the Babylonians in 689 BC, studies of the topography near the respective locations, and signs that the historians who wrote about the gardens a few centuries later actually visited locations near Nineveh. The Guardianalso reports that, by Dalley's translation, a 7th-century BC Assyrian inscription that had been woefully deciphered about a century ago revealed Nineveh was home to an intricate system of waterways that would have transported water 50 miles to the gardens. Recent digs have uncovered signs these aqueducts existed, notes the Guardian, which says the dangerous nature of the area has prevented much exploration of it.