One of the “Wonders” of the ancient world was th famous “hanging gardens”. No acurate pictureof the gardens exist-most writers assume it was some kind of ziggurat, with gardens on the terraces. My question: if there was any appreciable height to the terraces, water would have to be carried up. Is there any explanation of how this was done? I don’t think the ancient babylonians had umps.
take a look here:
suggests that a system of many archimedes screws might have been used?
Archimedes - Wikipedia’_screw
The Hanging Gardens may also never have existed at all. The evidence for it is minimal.
Which explains why there’s no record of who won the Sumerian - Babylonian playoffs.
I feel certain I read a Scientific American article about this, perhaps when the Gardens were first built (I’m that old.) If I recall, they was a lot of manpower involved in raising the water.
“designed by King Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BCE) to please his wife. These gardens were fed by an elaborate system of irrigation on raised terraces, on which trees from faraway places were planted.” Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, p. 256 of Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. I don’t see any reason to doubt their existence: we know that gardens were highly valued and high-status, and we know that by that point kings were capable of overseeing elaborate works of construction. It’s a marvel of scale as much as technology.
Few people realize that an early form of pest control was employed to protect the valuable and exotic plants: slaves carrying smoldering pots of pitch would walk sloly through the gardens, the acrid smoke serving to drive off rodents and insect pests. Unfortunately, the slaves tended to die young, this being the first evidence that smoking ziggurats may be harmful to your health. 
Can I nominate this for worst pun of the month.
Surely there was at least a Hanging Basket of Babylon.
Much as I love Poly, it’s not even close. elucidator’s “minion/minyan” pun over here is much worse than that.
You’re thousands of years old? :eek:
I saw one of those ‘hanging baskets’ once. It was at this place in Bangkok…
I think you stepped into the wrong bar…
It may have been as simple as large numbers of slaves carrying buckets of water to fill a central tank, from which channels carried water to the various parts of the gardens. The “elaborate system of irrigation” may be a reference to a complex distribution system, rather than a complex system for getting water into the tank.
What made the Hanging Gardens wonderous was the fact that to maintain it, it would have had to have been extremely labor intensive.
It’s cast into question because there are lots of samples of Nebuchadnezzar writing about all of his great accomplishments, but no writtings attributed to him have ever been found in which he mentions the gardens.
We let this guy back in just so he could do this to us?
Bravo.
Sounds like the right one to me.
I’ll probably spell it wrong, but I think they used something called a shadoof (well, that’s how it sounds…too lazy to look it up). It’s basically a bucket on a long pole with a weight at one end…you fill it with water, then lean on the weighted end to cause the lever to bring up a bucket full of water, then dump the bucket into a trough, and Bob’s your Uncle, instant (well, time consuming and a lot of work) water. But, if you have a lot of man power it works pretty well…they use them a lot in Egypt even today.
-XT
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A couple mechanical marvels. And the rest done by the usual slave labor.
I think I’d choose scantily clad women. It wasn’t politically incorrect, then.