Over this is laid two courses of baked brick, bonded by cement and as a third layer a covering of lead, to the end that the moisture from the soil might not penetrate beneath.” These layers, according to Diodorus, rose in ascending tiers. Like Philo, he detailed an elaborate system of supporting “beams”: These consisted of “a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of bitumen. geographer Strabo and historian Diodorus Siculus both described the gardens as a “wonder.” Diodorus, a Greek author from Sicily, left one of the most detailed descriptions of the gardens as part of his monumental 40-volume history of the world, Bibliotheca historica. Historians can draw on a wealth of later classical writers who reference the gardens. This trellis of palm beams was covered with a thick layer of soil and planted with all kinds of trees and flowers, a “labor of cultivation suspended above the heads of the spectators.”Īside from its hanging appearance, the gardens’ wondrous nature lay, according to Philo, partly in their variety: “All kinds of flowers, whatever is the most delightful, agreeable and pleasant to the eyes, is there.” Their system of irrigation also inspired wonder: “Water, collected on high in numerous ample containers, reaches the whole garden.”
The ingenious Hanging Gardens, Philo writes, were laid out on a large platform of palm beams raised up on stone columns. ( Discover the true story of Semiramis, the legendary queen of Babylon.) Despite the expansion of Greek culture eastward into Central Asia with Alexander’s armies, Babylon and its famed monuments would have struck Philo’s readers as highly exotic and remote. When Philo wrote those words, Babylon, and the Persians, had been subdued a century before, by Alexander the Great, who had died in Babylon in 323 B.C. The Hanging Gardens, however, are an eastern outlier, “a long journey to the land of the Persians on the far side of the Euphrates.” The elusive gardensĪpart from Babylon, all the monuments on Philo’s bucket list lie in or near the eastern Mediterranean, well within the Hellenist sphere of influence. They are still debating what the term “hanging” might mean, what they might have looked like, how they were irrigated-in short, whether they even existed at all. The hunt for the gardens is one of the most tantalizing quests in Mesopotamian scholarship, and archaeologists are still puzzling out where such gardens may have been located in Babylon, or what was so special about them. No clue of such gardens has come to light in ruins, or in any reference in Babylonian sources. 605-561 B.C.), is the list’s great enigma. However, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, held by tradition to be the work of Babylon’s mighty King Nebuchadrezzar II (r. “No app or algorithm will be able to do what a GP does,” he said.Please be respectful of copyright.
In a representative sample of questions set by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) for its final exams to qualify as a family doctor, the Babylon app achieved an 81 percent success level, well ahead of the average pass mark over the last five years of 72 percent, the company said.īut Martin Marshall, vice chairman of the RCGP, said AI systems could not be compared to highly-trained medical professionals. It aims to offer health advice of family doctor quality by using AI delivered through a smartphone chatbot app - potentially a big saving for governments as they struggle to fund healthcare for growing and ageing populations. FILE PHOTO: A doctor holds her stethoscope in an outpatients ward at a hospital in west London April 4, 2011.REUTERS/Toby Melvilleīabylon, which was founded by entrepreneur Ali Parsa in 2013, is one of a number of start-ups tapping into the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) to help patients and doctors sift through symptoms to come up with a diagnosis.