Fount of all gardens

According to an Hellenic historian, Nebuchadnezzar built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the 6th century BC to make his wife, who was from a mountainous region of Iran, feel at home. In fact, he and other rulers of Mesopotamia before him (the first such gardens were probably at Nineveh) were seeking to impress a much wider audience, and the Babylon version made it on to the list of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The archeological evidence is limited, but these gardens very probably occupied a series of terraces of an enormous ziggurat that would have been visible from miles away. Stocked with exotic trees, plants and animals from the far-flung corners of the empire, given the paucity of rainfall they would have had to be irrigated with water raised from wells and the great rivers by devices such as the Archimedean Screw (which long predated the Greek scientist) and continuous chains of buckets.