Sabtu, 19 November 2011

Garden of Babylon

Hanging Gardens Babylon is one heritage history ancient civilization babylonian. This site is one Seven Wonders Ancient World, located in Al-Hillah, 50 KM south of Baghdad, Iraq, and east of the River Euphrates. The term hanging garden does not mean hanging using a rope, only just its location on the mainland is a bit high. this garden area estimated 4 acres (1 acre = 4046.86 m). Its architecture is unique, because it is stratified. The park is planted with a variety of beautiful trees and equipped with irrigation systems to a height of 100 meters above ground level. From the top of this garden scene can view around the kingdom of Babylon. 

Like the Taj Mahal in Agra India, the hanging garden is also a form from the power of love. A very deep sense of love to his wife inspired the king Nebuchadnezzar II, give a gift a beautiful hanging garden. Hanging garden made ​​around the year 600 BC as a gift to his wife, Amyitis. Amytismiss the trees and fragrant plants such as in Persia. This park estimated destroyedaround 2 century BC. Then this hanging Parks documented by Greece historians such as Strabo and Diodorus Circulus. 

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built by King Nebuchadnezzar II about 600 BC, were a mountainlike series of planted terraces. Ancient historians report that Babylon at that time was dazzling in the splendor of its palace and temple buildings, fortification walls, and paved processional ways. The Hanging Gardens consisted of several tiers of platform terraces built upon arches and extending to a great height. Accounts of their height range from about 24 m (80 ft) to a less reliable estimate of more than 90 m (300 ft). Trees and colorful plants and flowers grew on the terraces, irrigated with water brought up from the Euphrates River. Archaeologists have discovered remains of walls along the Euphrates that may have belonged to the Hanging Gardens.

Nebuchadnezzar's conquests brought in much booty and tribute, creating an age of prosperity for Babylonia. He undertook an ambitious construction program, rebuilding the temples in the major cult cities and refurbishing his capital at Babylon with a splendid ziggurat (pyramid temple) as well as other shrines, palaces, fortification walls, and processional ways. Later legend credited him with building one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for his Median wife Amyitis. Nebuchadnezzar died in early October 562 bc and was succeeded by his son Amel-Marduk (the biblical Evil-Merodach) (626-539 bc).

The Babylonians, in coalition with the Medes and Scythians, defeated the Assyrians in 612 bc and sacked Nimrud and Nineveh. They did not establish a new style or iconography. Boundary stones depict old presentation scenes or the images of kings with symbols of the gods. Neo-Babylonian creativity manifested itself architecturally at Babylon, the capital. This huge city, destroyed (689 bc) by the Assyrian Sennacherib, was restored by Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar II. Divided by the Euphrates, it took 88 years to build and was surrounded by outer and inner walls. Its central feature was Esagila, the temple of Marduk, with its associated seven-story ziggurat Etemenanki, popularly known later as the Tower of Babel. The ziggurat reached 91 m (300 ft) in height and had at the uppermost stage a temple (a shrine) built of sun-dried bricks and faced with baked bricks.

From the temple of Marduk northward passed the processional way, its wall decorated with enamelled lions. Passing through the Ishtar Gate, it led to a small temple outside the city, where ceremonies for the New Year Festival were held. West of the Ishtar Gate were two palace complexes; east of the processional way lay, since the times of Hammurabi, a residential area. Like its famous Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, at the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, little of the city remains. The Ishtar Gate (575? bc) is one of the few surviving structures. The glazed-brick facade of the gate and the processional way that led up to it were excavated by German archaeologists and taken to Berlin, where the monument was reconstructed. The large complex, some 30 m (about 100 ft) long, is on display in the city's Vorderasiatische Museum. On the site of ancient Babylon, restoration of an earlier version of the Ishtar Gate, the processional way, and the palace complex, all constructed of unglazed brick, has been undertaken by the Iraq Department of Antiquities.


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