The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Andre Willers

12 Dec 2014

Synopsis :

The Hanging Gardens Of Babylon  was why the city was built . A huge , fortified , vertical farm . The whole city was the garden . And that was the wonder of it . They actually were in advance of anything existing today .

Discussion :

The closest image I can find on the web . A far cry from today .

1.A quick calculation :

Size of Babylon : 900 hectares . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon

This is 3000 m x 3000 m.

2.The walls at every 10 m and 20 m high .

This gives surface area of walls of 

A=(3000/10)^2 x2x2x20 sq m

  = 540 000 000 sqm

  =133 437 acres .

3.One person requires

http://gardening.stackexchange.com/questions/1433/how-large-a-cultivation-area-to-feed-one-person

1.    0.07 ha / 0.17 acre

Meyers, N. 1999 The Next Green Revolution: Its Environmental Underpinnings. Current Science 76: 507-513

The minimum amount of arable land required to sustainably support one person is 0.07 of a hectare. This assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no farmland degradation or water shortages, virtually no post- harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc.

Thus  , Babylon could support 133437/0.17 = 784 923 persons from it’s vertical farms alone .

4.Babylon’s population :

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history

Babylon about 200 000  .

This leaves a huge surplus , used in projection of power throughout the region .

 

5.Babylon exported food . Amazing !

The rural areas did not feed the city !

But it had to keep control of the waterworks . Hence the continual large military presence .

Empire in self-defense .

6.Copycats :

Niniveh .

They did it better .

7.Destruction :

No wonder the cities never recovered .

The walls and irrigation works were deliberately destroyed , and with it the foundation of the power of Babylon and Niniveh

http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2014/11/skyscrapers-of-ancient-persopolis.html

See how the Persians retained some remnants of the city-wide air-conditioning and intensive agriculture .

8.How on earth did this develop ?

After the collapse of the Bronze age and really bad droughts in the region and volkewanderung reivers

(See , http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2005/09/collapse-of-civilizations.html )

Former agricultural societies depopulated , and was forced to grow food inside fortified compounds .

This naturally evolved into vertical farms and some very good farmers .

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon .

The whole city was one big ,air-conditioned  hanging garden , with aerosols of water cascading from above .

Cool .

Eat your hearts out , greens .

See http://www.naturalnews.com/039692_urban_gardening_vertical_farming_aquaponics.html

9. Something similar is happening today in the Greening of Inner Cities . A sure sign of collapse .

10. The Tower of Babel.

An extravagance of learning , enabling large trees in terraces .

The trees came first , then , because it was elitist , the academics followed .

Scholars from everywhere , all talking different languages .

The original inspiration for Plato’s Academe of trees .

11. Vertical farming in the middle East was deliberately destroyed by local powers for short term gain , as was the quanat system later by the Mongols .

The result is the desert of today .

Typical of the Tragedy of The Commons .

See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2011/10/ostrum-game.html

Grow up or die .

http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2014/09/prodigies-update-i.html

Andre .

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