Were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon real, or were they in Nineveh?

Nobody knows for sure, and that is the story. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, described as an ascending series of tiered gardens full of trees, shrubs and vines, like a green mountain built of mud bricks. They are the only one of the Seven Wonders whose location has not been definitively established. No surviving Babylonian text mentions them, and no definitive archaeological evidence has been found in Babylon.

The famous legend says that King Nebuchadnezzar II built them for his Median wife Amytis because she missed the green hills of her homeland. That version goes back to the Babylonian priest Berossus around 290 BC, and he is the earliest known mention of the gardens and the only source to credit Nebuchadnezzar. Yet Nebuchadnezzar left many inscriptions about his building works, and none of them mentions any garden.

Historians offer three theories. The first is that the gardens were purely mythical, a romantic ideal of an eastern garden written by Greek and Roman authors. The second is that they existed in Babylon and were destroyed around the first century AD. The third is that the legend refers to a well-documented garden that the Assyrian king Sennacherib built at his capital, Nineveh.

The third theory is the work of Oxford scholar Stephanie Dalley. She proposes that over the centuries the two sites became confused, and that the famous gardens were the gardens at Sennacherib's palace. Excavations have found traces of a vast aqueduct system attributed to him by an inscription, and he says he made screws to raise water to his garden. The question stays open.