A Wonder on Hearsay

No eyewitness account of the gardens has ever turned up. The earliest descriptions came from Greek and Roman writers who never set foot in Babylon and were repeating stories told centuries after the gardens supposedly stood.

Those classical accounts are vivid: terraced gardens fed by a clever water-lifting system, lush against the dry plain. But vivid is not the same as verified. With every detail passed down second-hand, the Wonder may exist only in the telling, which would make it the first famous tourist attraction that was never actually there.