The earliest known writing about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is from Josephus, in the first century after Christ. He referenced Berossus, a Babylonian writer, astronomer and priest of Marduk. Marduk was a Mesopotamian god whose fortunes rose and fell with those of Babylon, as he was the patron deity of the city. Berossus wrote about Nebuchadnezzar building gardens, and Josephus says “in this palace he erected very high walls, supported by stone pillars; and by planting what was called a pensile paradise, and replenishing it with all sorts of trees, he rendered the prospect an exact resemblance of a mountainous country. This he did to gratify his queen, because she had been brought up in Media, and was fond of a mountainous situation” His queen was called Amytis, and she was a Mede, from what is now Northern Iran, set between the southern border of the Caspian Sea and the Alborz mountains. But it’s all second hand, and there are no contemporary accounts of the gardens. Each account adds more detail to the story, but none of it can be verified, and we don’t really know if the Gardens existed, and if they did, where they were.

This is the story of the Tower of Babel, from the Book of Genesis in the Christian Bible. Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. It’s a bit like the Creationist argument about dinosaurs, that they were led, two by two, onto the Ark, for to get out of the rain. Not quite sure how Noah’s family managed to wrangle a pair of Brontosaurus along with two Tyrannosaurus Rex, but maybe they were in the part of the Ark that held the unicorns. Or maybe God created fossils as some kind of weird backstory to justify stuff that he’d done earlier but appeared later in the timeline - a bit like the prequel to Game of Thrones, or the Marvel Mulitverse. I’m not sure we should believe in a God like that, but live and let live.

My mother died peacefully, well, relatively peacefully, following a stroke. It wasn’t traumatic, she was nearly 86, and she left quite detailed instructions about the things she cared about, and no instructions at all for the things she didn’t, I guess . The truth is genuinely that she fell asleep, and didn’t wake up. She’d left a very clear Do Not Resuscitate instruction, and an even clearer “I’m not going in a home” instruction, so in the end, while she wasn’t in control of when it happened, she was in control of how. Anyway, it was a calm end, especially given the deep trauma that affected so many people and families during Covid, but luckily not mine. A few weeks later, I found myself in her house, waiting for the man to arrive to clear what was left of her belongings - we gave away some stuff, we kept her photos, and I hope everyone who wanted a keepsake took one, but there was a lot of stuff we couldn’t give away. And I sat there thinking “I’m just throwing her whole life into landfill”. So I went home and wrote some music, and felt better. But that’s what archaeology is, isn’t it? The scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture turns out to be wading through layers and layers of lives previously thrown into the land. And even when you know those significant dates and events, and see the content of someone’s life, and even the context, none of it tells you what they were like, what they wanted, hoped, feared, who they loved and who they missed or who’ll miss them, which, if it catches me wrong, I feel profoundly sad about. My mum would say “but not everyone wants to hear it, Kimmie”.

There’s no proof that the Gardens of Babylon even existed. But the other 6 wonders of the ancient world all did exist, so maybe Nebuchadnezzar did love his Amytis that much. Maybe we’ve never found it because his garden is buried amongst the layers of too many other lives.

Noah. Ark. God reboots the world. Or maybe not.  Because there's a lot of flood stories.  Atra-Hasis from Akkadia, almost 4000 years ago.  The Hindu text Shatapatha Brahmana , written between 800 and 600 BCE has a flood story involving Matsya, the fish avatar of Vishnu.  And Noah appears in both Christian bible and Islamic texts.  The Great Flood of Gun-Yu appears in Chinese mythology, and seems to date around 2300 to 2200 BCE, although there is physical evidence of outburst flooding from the Huang He river 400 years later.  And, of course, there's the Epic of Gllgamesh - tablet XI has a flood story probably adapted from the earlier Atra-Hasis version - there's a boat sealed with bitumen and loaded with "all the living beings that I had" and there's also a dove that returns to the boat having assumedly not found any land.  Apart from the flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh there’s also a Creation myth. These are Babylonian texts written in Akkadian thousands of years ago which seem to inform many modern religions with stories syncretised, absorbed and stolen across the ages. Babylon Makes The Rules indeed. But there’s no mention of any dinosaurs in the stories, unless you wrap them into “All the living beings that I had” statement. And mankind survives in all these stories. I’ve never been in an actual flood, but I’ve been in the Pacific Ocean so I know the power of the waves, and how insignificant we are. For me, sometimes it would be good if the water won in these stories, as I’m sure it must have. There are so many floods, so many boats, so many gods. Perhaps Noah’s God, the God of Babel who gave us languages to confuse us, who created fossils simply to test the faith of his people, guessed he would be found out eventually, stealing stories from other gods.

When my granddaughter was six, she asked me about Heaven. She said “I don’t think you know the answer to this Bampi, but can I ask you a question?” I said “Of course, darling, let’s see”. She said “You know Heaven? I know you don’t believe in Heaven but the people that do believe in it, they think everything that has been alive and died is there, right? All the people who died, and the animals?” I said, “Well, yes, darling. I think that lots of the people who believe in Heaven believe that, and I think it makes them feel better.” She said, “So Marley Cat is up there? And your Dad?” I said, “That’s what they believe, darling”. Marley Cat was her pet cat who’d died, and she knew that my Dad had passed a long time ago. She said, “What about dinosaurs? Are they there, with all the other animals and peoples?” I said, “I don’t know sweetie, I suppose they are”. She thought about that for a moment, then she said, “They must have separate sections, mustn’t they?”.