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The case for interpolation, however, is weak. Nebuchadnezzar’s Iranian wife Amyitis is mentioned elsewhere in the Babyloniaca (BNJ 680 F 7d), which makes it difficult to remove her and her garden from Berossos’s account of Nebuchadnezzar’s building works. Moreover, Josephus, who quotes the decisive passage, had no obvious interest in connecting Nebuchadnezzar with the Hanging Garden. Stephanie Dalley therefore introduces an unknown intermediary whom she thinks responsible for the interpolation (Dalley 2013a: 36). However, we have no evidence that such a figure ever existed. In order to tackle the issue of the Hanging Garden, and indeed other issues of interpretation, we need to broaden the framework of analysis, and ask how Berossos operated.

The Greek historians Herodotus and Ctesias cast world history as a succession of three major empires, those of the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians (Haubold 2013a: 78–98). This scheme became popular among Greek readers, thanks in large measure to the success of Ctesias’s Persica. One consequence was that the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar disappeared from the historical record: it did not feature in Herodotus or Ctesias, and classical Greeks were hardly aware of it. For Berossos that was a problem, as indeed it was for his Seleucid patrons: we know that the Seleucid kings claimed Nebuchadnezzar as an important forerunner.⁵ The work of introducing him to the Greeks had started as soon as the empire was formed, with the Greek historian Megasthenes (BNJ 715 F 1a). However, it was Berossos who properly established Nebuchadnezzar in the Greek historical imagination, and in so doing replaced the inherited succession of Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, with the sequence Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. And this is where Queen Amyitis and her Hanging Garden becomes important.