It is believed to be, with a fair degree of certainty, in Nineveh. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in my mind, is like saying, the Great Wall of China. China is a big place.

And I can almost feel it, smell it. Imagine, on the shores of the Tigris (the ancient flow, not the modern one), by some means they hoisted water up the terraces of either the Ziggurat itself, or at an adjoining building. They classically sometimes call it Semirami’s Hanging Gardens, and I like to believe she was a queen or a queen-like figure that had some considerable power in her own right, and issued the order to build a terraced garden overlooking the (at that time, fairly green) desert, filled with flowers and plants and trees and animals, and she tended to her garden lovingly. I get this because I have met some of these ladies in my life, among them most distinguishedly my own mother, who lived for her gardens, and enjoyed them so much, and wanted everyone to enjoy them (I know how these Ladies function on a base level). She must have been very well off and in a position of royal or semi-royal power, and what she created was cited across Near Asia for its beauty and cunning engineering.

I like to believe something like that. Also I do not doubt for a fucking SECOND that it was real. If we had no evidence of the pyramids, and what little material survived told us about them, I’d be incredulous. But a royal garden, unsurpassed in beauty and exoticity, I can very easily see that, especially for these desert folk who would not have seen anything like that traveling all across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa (except the deepest parts, but in any case, being based in Mesopotamia at that time would still have been an arid existence for travelers, traders, soldiers and everyone else departing the river deltas).

I can go on for hours about this, I have a clue. Of course, we can but dream of the things thousands of years ago our ancestors saw and loved…