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In this palace, Nebuchadnezzar built high stone terraces and made them look very similar in appearance to mountain ranges. And planting them with various different kinds of trees he built and equipped the so-called Hanging Garden because his wife had grown up in Media and was longing for a mountainous scenery.

This section of Berossos’s account departs from his Babylonian source text in spectacular fashion. True, Nebuchadnezzar himself reported that he used stone to build his palace, and he also claimed to have erected a building “like a mountain” (Nebukadnezar Nr. 15 col. IX.22–28, with discussion in Rollinger 2013: 151–155). But Nebuchadnezzar said nothing about a Hanging Garden, and indeed no such structure can be found anywhere in cuneiform literature, or in the archaeological record. Some scholars have therefore dismissed this part of Berossos’s description as a later interpolation, added by a Greek reader keen to make the connection with a popular orientalizing myth (Dalley 1994; Dalley 2013a: 35–36).