ANCIENT LANDSCAPE

Sampriti Saha
Shailendra Zadon
Divya R
TIMELINE
Gardens
A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation and enjoyment of plants
and other forms of nature. The garden can incorporate both natural and man-made materials.

Robert Herst's Forest Garden in Shropshire, England

Requirement of Gardens:
• Cooperation with nature
• Observation of nature
• Relaxation
• Growing produce
• Religious
Egyptian inscription depicting cultivation

Sanctuary of Venus at Pompeii surrounding a sacred grove Garden of Eden, Mesopotamia

Relief of King Ashurbanipal Reposing with His Queen in the
Royal Garden
Neolithic Age:
• Man was hunter-gatherers who followed
migration pattern of animals and ripening of fruits
• 20,000 years ago, had begun the slow trial-and-
error process of domesticating wild plants and
animals. Neolithic age:
• Over thousands of years, our ancestors changed
their life style from nomadic food collection to
settled food production.
Illustrations showing migration of man

Egyptian Agriculture Sickle Blade fron Ohalo II, Israel

This Assyrian relief from
Nineveh (now housed at the
British Museum) shows trees
hanging
Ancient city of
mesopotamia
Mesopotamian Gardens
• Mesopotamia - the "land between the
Rivers" Tigris and Euphrates - comprises a
hilly and mountainous northern area and a
flat, alluvial south.
• Evidence for their gardens comes from
written texts, pictorial sculpture and
archaeology. In western tradition
Mesopotamia was the location of the
Garden of Eden and the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon.

Map showing the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers

Courtyard Gardens
• The courtyard garden was enclosed by the walls of a palace, or on a larger scale was a cultivated
place inside the city walls.

Nebuchadnezzar II's palace courtyard

• At Mari on the Middle Euphrates (c 1,800BC) one of the huge palace courtyards was called the Court of the
Palms in contemporary written records. It is crossed by raised walkways of baked brick; the king and his
entourage would dine there.

Artistic reconstruction of Mesopotamia - Palace of Mari

• At Ugarit (c1,400BC) there was a stone water basin, not located centrally as in later Persian gardens, for the central
feature was probably a tree (date palm or tamarisk).

Courtyard at Ugarit palace

 Royal Hunting Parks
• On a larger scale royal hunting parks were established to hold the exotic animals and plants which the
king had acquired on his foreign campaigns. King Tiglath-Pileser I (c 1,000BC) lists horses, oxen, asses,
deer of two types, gazelle and ibex, boasting "I numbered them like flocks of sheep."
 City Garden
• From around 1,000 BC the Assyrian kings developed a
style of city garden incorporating a naturalistic layout,
running water supplied from river headwaters, and
exotic plants from their foreign campaigns.

View of ancient Ninevahe

• It is almost certain that the slopes, an artificial lake, and a pavilion shown on the monumental relief sculptures of
Sargon were contrived to give a more interesting landscape
• A finely built altar here graces the top of a hill surrounded by a grove of fragrant pines; at the foot of the hill.

Garden of Sargon II at his new capital Dur-Sharrukin

• The city garden reached its zenith with the palace design of Sennacherib (704-681BC) whose water
system stretched for 50 km into the hills, whose garden was higher and more ornate than any others,
and who boasted of the complex technologies he deployed, calling his palace and garden "a Wonder for
all Peoples".
• This was later postulated to be a prototype of the Hanging Garden of Babylon

Nineveh- Senacherib's City

 Temple Garden
• Sennacherib also built a temple of the New Year Festival within a garden, outside the walls of Assur, the
traditional capital of Assyria on the middle Tigris. Thanks to careful excavation of the root-pits, the
layout of trees or bushes was discovered by a German expedition, although the type of plant could not
be established.
• Within the central courtyard of the simple, rectangular building, as well as outside it on all four sides,
trees or shrubs had been planted very neatly in regular rows.
• Lands were cultivated as small-holdings that took turns to provide offerings to the cult, especially dates,
pomegranates and figs.
• Major temples in ancient Mesopotamia have been found
decorated with semiengaged columns imitating the trunks
of date palms and the spiral-patterned trunks of a palm
with inedible fruit, perhaps Chamaerophs umilis

Horticultural relief on columns

Hanging Gardens
Hanging gardens considered one of the
Seven Wonders of the World and
thought to be located near the royal
palace in Babylon. By the beginning of
the 21st century, the site of the
Hanging Gardens had not yet been
conclusively established Gardens, Royal
Gardens Design

Artist's re-creation of the Hanging Gardens of

Babylon, constructed c. 8th–6th century BCE.
Brown Brothers
Contradicting theories for the Hanging Gardens:
• Theory, popularized by of British
archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley,
suggested that the gardens did not
actually “hang” but were instead “up
in the air”; that is, they were roof
gardens laid out on a series of
ziggurat terraces that were irrigated
by pumps from the Euphrates River.

• Traditionally, they were thought to be

the work of King Nebuchadrezzar II
(reigned c. 605–c. 561 BCE), who built
them to console his Median wife,
Amytis, because she missed the
mountains and greenery of her
homeland.

Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 3-D reconstruction.

• Though some sources
disagreed on who built
them, a number of
descriptions concurred that
the gardens were located
near the royal palace and
were set upon vaulted
terraces.

Vaulted Building as the Hanging

Gardens. However, the Greek
historian Strabo had stated
• They were also described as having been watered by an exceptional system of irrigation and roofed with stone
balconies on which were layered various materials, such as reeds, bitumen, and lead, so that the irrigation water
would not seep through the terraces.

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

• Although no certain traces of the Hanging
Gardens have been found, a German
archaeologist, Robert Koldewey, did
uncover an unusual series of foundation
chambers and vaults in the northeastern
corner of the palace at Babylon. A well in
one of the vaults may have been used in
conjunction with a chain pump and thus
was thought perhaps to be part of the
substructure of the once towering Hanging
Gardens.
• A later theory
postulated that, the
Hanging Gardens
might well have been
those constructed by
Sennacherib
(705/704–681 BCE) at
Nineveh.

Garden of Sennacherib, Relief in the

British Museum
• This research suggested that the gardens were laid out on a sloping construct designed to imitate a natural mountain
landscape and were watered by a novel system of irrigation, perhaps making early use of what would eventually be
known as the Archimedes screw.

Archimedes screw pump

Egyptian village - Ramses II
 Egyptian Gardens:
• Gardens were kept both for
secular purposes and
attached to temple
compounds.
• Gardens in private homes
were mostly used for growing
vegetables and located close
to a canal or the river.
The rich people could afford
gardens lined with :

• Sheltering trees
• Decorative pools with fish
and waterfowl.
• Wooden structures
forming pergolas to
support vines of grapes
• Elaborate stone kiosks for
ornamental reasons
• Sacred groves and ornamental trees
were planted in front of or near both
cult temples and mortuary temples.
• Avenues leading up to the entrance
could be lined with trees,
courtyards could hold small gardens
and between temple buildings
gardens with trees, vineyards,
flowers and ponds were maintained.

Rectangular fishpond with ducks and lotus planted round

with date palms and fruit trees, in a fresco from the Tomb
of Nebamun, Thebes, 18th Dynasty
• Due to the arid climate of Egypt, tending gardens
meant constant attention and depended on irrigation.
Skilled gardeners were employed by temples and
households of the wealthy. Duties included planting,
weeding, watering by means of a shaduf, pruning of
fruit trees, digging the ground, harvesting the fruit
etc.

A funerary model of a garden, dating to the Eleventh dynasty of Egypt,

c. 2009–1998 BC. Made of painted and gessoed wood, originally from
Thebes.
• The ancient Egyptian garden would have looked different from a modern garden. It would have seemed
more like a collection of herbs or a patch of wild flowers, lacking the specially bred flowers of today. Formal
boquets seem to have been composed of mandrake, poppy, cornflower and or lotus and papyrus.

The Date Palm, used The Sycamore tree was The Acacia tree was Egyptian Blue Lotus
by Egyptians for food planted for shades. Its associated with lusaaset.
and wine wood was used for and egyptian goddess
making coffins

The Persia indica tree,

The Tamarisk tree used Pomegranate introduces
same as avocado family, Cyperus paparus was used
for shade during New Kingdom
once comon in Egypt has for writing, making boat
vanished now was used as medicine
and also as food
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