the rib of Adam; yet is there no rivality with garden contrivance and herbary; for if Paradise were planted the third day of the creation, as wiser divinity concludeth, the nativity thereof was too early for horoscopy: gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.
Of deeper doubt is its topography and local designation; yet being the primitive garden, and without much controversy[A 1] seated in the east, it is more than probable the first curiosity, and cultivation of plants, most flourished in those quarters. And since the ark of Noah first touched upon some mountains of Armenia, the planting art arose again in the east, and found its revolution not far from the place of its nativity, about the plains of those regions. And if Zoroaster were either Cham, Chus, or Mizraim, they were early proficients therein, who left, as Pliny delivereth, a work of agriculture.
However, the account of the pensile or hanging gardens of Babylon, if made by Semiramis, the third or fourth from Nimrod, is of no slender antiquity; which being not framed upon ordinary level of ground, but raised upon pillars, admitting under-passages, we cannot accept as the first Babylonian gardens,—but a more eminent progress and advancement in that art than any that went before it; somewhat answering or hinting the old opinion concerning Paradise itself, with many conceptions elevated above the plane of the earth.[B 1]
Nabuchodonosor (whom some will have to be the famous
- ↑ For some there is from the ambiguity of the word Mikedem, whether ab Oriente, or a principio.
- ↑ with some conceptions elevated, &c.] In MS. Sloan. 1847, I find the following passage, evidently intended for this work, which may be introduced here:—"We are unwilling to diminish or loose the credit of Paradise, or only pass it over with [the Hebrew word for] Eden, though the Greek be of a later name. In this excepted, we know not whether the ancient gardens do equal those of late times, or those at present in Europe. Of the gardens of Hesperies, we know nothing singular, but some golden apples. Of Alcinous his garden, we read nothing beyond figgs, apples, and olives; if we allow it to be any more than a fiction of Homer, unhappily placed in Corfu, where the sterility of the soil makes men believe there was no such thing at all. The gardens of Adonis were so empty that they afforded proverbial expression, and the principal part thereof was empty spaces, with herbs and flowers in pots, I think we little understand the pensile gardens of Semiramis, which made one of the wonders of it, [Babylon] wherein probably the structure exceeded the plants contained in them. The excellency thereof was probably in the trees, and if the descension of the roots be equal to the height of trees, it was not [absurd] of Strebæus to think the pillars were hollow that the roots might shoot into them."
