The Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced
Dr. Stephanie Dalley
Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 7:00 PM
Oriental Institute, Breasted Hall
Babylon’s Hanging Garden is the only one of the original seven wonders to have been dismissed as imaginary. Neither archaeologists nor Assyriologists could find evidence for it, and the Greek sources describing it are centuries later than its supposed existence. An ingenious and detailed solution to the problem has been found at last, allowing a fact-based reconstruction of the garden, and an appreciation of the system of water management that qualified it as a world wonder.
Dr. Dalley is a Retired Research Fellow in Assyriology with the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford, and is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College and a member of the Common Room at Wolfson College. Her research interests are Akkadian literature and history, and her extensive publications include The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced (2013); she is currently working on A History of the City of Babylon (Cambridge University Press)
Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.
Contact: Petra Goedegebuure
(pgoedegebuure@uchicago.edu)
This Norton lecture is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, Chicago Society and named for Charles Eliot Norton, the founder and first President of the Archaeological Institute of America and former Professor of the History of Art at Harvard University.
