Predecessor

I have often wondered if I was totally bonkers.....

Surely someone, somewhere, must have seen what, to my eyes, is blindingly obvious.


Then I came across this, written 100 years ago.


"The building of walls for terraces came in advance of walls for houses or towns"

"That the masterpieces of Megalithic art have hitherto been described as fortresses instead of as gardens only shows how far our race is from appreciating the devotion of the ancient people to their agricultural pursuits."

Hanging Gardens of Babylon?

Dr Dalley directed her own research further north after decoding an ancient “cuneiform” text - a script from the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires - that led her to believe the gardens had been attributed to the wrong location, the wrong man and wrong period.

The researcher - one of a handful of people in the world who can read cuneiform - came across a prism at the British Museum with cuneiform text which describes the life of Sennacherib; who lived 100 years before Nebuchadnezzar and reigned over an empire stretching from southern Turkey to modern day Israel, which describes a palace that he built and a garden that he built alongside calling them a “Wonder for all people”.

Further support for the theory comes from a bas-relief, removed from Nineveh and brought to the British Museum, showing his palace complex and a garden featuring trees hanging in the air on terraces and plants suspended on arches.

Because Ninevah is so far from Babylon, this evidence has previously been overlooked. However, Dr Dalley has found that the Assyrians conquered Babylon and their capital became known as “New Babylon”, possibly accounting for the confusion over the names.

Her research, which features in a Channel 4 documentary ..., Finding Babylon’s Hanging Garden, has led her to establish that the gardens were built in a series of terraces, buit up like an amphitheatre, with a lake at the bottom. Water was bought to the city and surrounding areas via a 60 mile long canal.

Evidence of this structure, 300ft wide and 60ft deep at some points, remains on the landscape and can be seen on now de-classified photographs taken by US spy satellites and analysed by Dr Dalley. The greenery would have required around 300 tonnes of water a day. An inscription found by the academic describes how this was achieved, with water from the lake was raised up onto the terraces by device using the same principles as the Archimedes’ screw - some four centuries before it was thought to have been invented.



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/e ... bylon.html

Video link:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1nonf ... _lifestyle

Boreades wrote:Hanging Gardens of Babylon?

"The hanging gardens of Babylon have long been reckoned as one of the wonders of the oriental world: yet they were a mere transient toy...."

Yet they were an advanced example of what may have been much more mundane and commonplace? i.e. growing vegetables/whatever in steep-sided valleys with a plentiful supply of water via irrigation canals.

The Inca were at this sort of thing as well. This illustration from wiki is similar to the one in the video in having a circular depression at the bottom.





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incan_agriculture

And confirming Mr Harper's theory of desertification and where does rain actually come from we have this statement.

' Hiram Bingham, the American explorer who found the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911, wrote:

No less striking than the remarkable system of highways were the irrigation ditches which ran for scores of miles in the Central Andes. The height of the mountains, often rising to 18,000 or 20,000 feet, forces the moisture-laden winds coming from the east across the humid basin of the Amazon to deposit their burden in heavy rains on the eastern slopes of the great Andean chain. Little rain ever falls on the western slopes. On fact, one of the greatest deserts in the world is the two-thousand-mile coastal strip extending from central Chile to Ecuador.'

Taken from - http://incas.homestead.com/inca_irrigat ... achay.html

Yes, Orator Cook appears the founding father of the scientific study of megalithic terraces. There is more in the article by Cook than you get in many books.

Who's Orator Cook?

Have just found this, dating from 2012, with a lot more details on the work of Dr Stephanie Dalley and many others:
Assyrian Agricultural Technology
https://gatesofnineveh.wordpress.com/20 ... echnology/

Da-da-da da-daaaa!

Breaking News! Doggerland Forests Found!

Diver finds 10,000-year-old forest which originally stretched as far as Europe hidden under the North Sea.

A shocked diver has found an incredible 10,000-year-old pre-historic forest under the North Sea and experts believe it could have once stretched as far as Europe. Diver Dawn Watson, 45, discovered the remarkable 'lost forest' when she was diving just 300 metres off the coast of Cley next the Sea, Norfolk. She found complete oak trees with branches measuring eight metres long under the sea and experts believe they have been hidden off the coast of Norfolk since the Ice Age. The forest is believed to have become exposed following the stormy weather last winter. Ms Watson said she was 'absolutely thrilled' with find off Cley next the Sea.

Ms Watson, who has been diving in the North Sea for about 16 years, said the trees are thought to have formed part of a huge forest, measuring thousands of acres. But it is believed the forest was drowned when the ice caps melted and the sea level rose 120 metres. The fallen trees are now lying on the ground where they have formed a natural reef, which is teaming with colourful fish, plants and wildlife


Not a shock for us, of course, as we expected Dogger things like this to be discovered eventually.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... urope.html



Nice three minute video on BBC news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-30905267