The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Fragrance Named After Them

Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, only one has never been located. The Great Pyramid still stands. The others left foundations, rubble, inscriptions, something. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon left nothing at all.

They are the wonder that exists entirely in description — and that, as it happens, is also a reasonable definition of a fragrance.

What the gardens were supposed to be

The accounts come from Greek and Roman writers, none of whom claimed to have seen them, and all of whom were writing centuries after the gardens were supposedly built.

The story most often repeated is that Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon in the sixth century BC, built them for his wife, who missed the green mountains of her homeland and could not settle in the flat, dry plain between the rivers. So he built her a mountain: terrace upon terrace of trees and flowering plants rising above the city, watered by some mechanism that lifted water up from the Euphrates.

The engineering is the part that makes classical writers marvel. Babylon sits in a hot, arid plain. Keeping several storeys of vegetation alive there would have required moving an enormous volume of water upwards, continuously, in the heat.

Why nobody can find them

Here is where it gets interesting. Babylon has been excavated extensively. The Ishtar Gate was found and reconstructed. The walls, the ziggurat foundations, the street plans — all documented.

No gardens.

More tellingly, Babylonian sources are silent. Nebuchadnezzar left detailed inscriptions boasting about his building works, and he does not mention a garden. For a king who recorded his achievements at length, that is a conspicuous gap.

Several explanations are argued over by scholars. One is that the gardens were in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, built by Sennacherib a century earlier — there is Assyrian evidence for an elaborate irrigated garden there, including a water-screw system, and later writers may have attached the story to the more famous city. Another is that the accounts are an embellishment of ordinary palace gardens. Another is that they existed and the evidence is simply gone.

What is certain is that the Hanging Gardens have been famous for two thousand years without anyone producing a single brick.

A wonder made of description

That is a strange kind of fame, and it is worth sitting with.

The gardens are not remembered because of what they were. They are remembered because of how they were described — terraces of green against a hot sky, an impossible mountain of plants in a place that had none, water climbing upwards against the heat. That image has survived every other fact about them.

Fragrance works the same way. You cannot photograph it, you cannot hold it, and nobody can pass you their experience of it. It exists in the moment of wearing and then in memory and language, which is why fragrance descriptions read the way they do.

A fragrance named after the Hanging Gardens is naming this problem honestly. It is not claiming to recreate a garden. It is claiming kinship with a thing that only ever existed as an impression.

Babylon, as a real place

Underneath the legend is a city that was entirely real. Babylon stood on the Euphrates in what is now Iraq, and for long stretches of the first and second millennia BC it was one of the largest cities on earth. It gave us astronomical records, legal codes and a body of literature. The Ishtar Gate is in a museum in Berlin. You can go and look at it.

The collection this fragrance belongs to is named across that geography — Tigris and Euphratia for the two rivers, Hanging Gardens for the wonder, and Babylon itself for the house. Alongside them sit the Chaldean names: Shimsha, "the sun", and Sipya, "pure".

This is not a theme chosen because it sounds impressive. Babylon Parfums is based in Troy, Michigan, and Metro Detroit is home to the largest Chaldean population in the United States — a community with a continuous connection to the region and the language these names come from.

The fragrance

Hanging Gardens is $150, and the house describes it in four words: Babylon's summer guilty pleasure.

That is a small amount of information and we are not going to pad it out with a note pyramid we cannot source. What it tells you honestly: it is a warm-weather fragrance, it is on the indulgent side rather than the austere side, and it is the most expensive bottle in the range after Blue Incense.

A fuller breakdown of the composition is coming. Until then, the sensible way to meet it is the way you would meet any fragrance — on skin, for a full day.

How to try it

The Build Your Own 5-Piece Discovery Set is $39.99 for any five fragrances from the collection as 2 mL samples, Hanging Gardens included. That is roughly twenty sprays each, which is enough to form a real opinion rather than a first impression.

Given that this is a $150 bottle described in four words, sampling first is not caution. It is just sense.