Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [99]
West paused, an idea forming in his mind. ‘Unless. . . ’
‘What?’
‘The modern town of Hilla does indeed stand on the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon,’ he said. ‘But now that I look at it closely, our verse does not refer to “Babylon” at all. It mentions the Hanging Paradise of Old Babylonia. Old Babylon.’
‘Meaning?’ Pooh Bear asked.
‘Consider this,’ West said. ‘New York. New England. New Orleans. Today, many cities and regions are named in memory of older places. In some ancient texts, Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon is actually referred to as New Babylon. What if the Gardens were never in New Babylon, but were, rather, built in an older city also named “Babylon”, but built far from the newer city that adopted its name. The original Babylon.’
‘It would explain why Alexander the Great’s biographers never mentioned the Gardens when he passed through Babylon and why no-one has found them near Hilla,’ Stretch said. ‘They would only have seen New Babylon, not Old Babylon.’
‘Two Babylons. Two cities.’ Zaeed stroked his sharply-pointed chin. ‘This is a good theory. . . ’
Then suddenly his eyes lit up. ‘Of course! Of course! Why didn’t I think of it before?’
‘What?’
Zaeed dashed to his trunk and scrounged among the notebooks there.
As he did so, he spoke quickly, excitedly. ‘If I may take Captain West’s theory one step further. Modern logic assumes that the Tigris and the Euphrates follow the same courses today that they followed back in 570 BC. They flow down from Turkey, through Iraq, before joining at Qurna in the southern marshlands.
‘Now consider this. Mesopotamia is the birthplace of all flood myths. Why, the tale of Noah and his Ark is but a flimsy retelling of the story of Zisudra and his animal-carrying boat. Why is this so? Because Iraq’s flood myths stem from very real floods: of the Persian Gulf breaking its banks and flooding far inland, ripping apart eroded land formations and, on occasion, diverting the courses of the two great rivers of the region, the Tigris and Euphrates. A Westerner named Graham Hancock has written about this very convincingly in a marvellous book called Underworld. Ah-ha! Here it is!’
He produced a battered book, opened it to a page containing a map of Iraq. Prominent on the map were the two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, that joined in a V shape in the south of the country:
Zaeed had scribbled the locations of Hilla, Qurna and Basra on the map.
He explained. ‘Now. As we continue to do today, people back in ancient times built their towns on the banks of the two great rivers. But when the rivers diverted onto new courses due to flooding, it follows that those same people would have abandoned the old towns and built new ones, the ones we see on the banks of the rivers today.
‘Many years ago, in my search for lost documents relating to the Hanging Gardens, I mapped the locations of abandoned towns, towns that were once situated on the banks of the rivers, but which, once the rivers diverted, were simply deserted. From these locations, I was able to reconstruct the former courses of the two rivers.’
‘So where did they converge back then?’ West asked.
Zaeed grinned. ‘See, that was what I did not know—that their point of convergence was the all-important factor.’
With a flourish, Zaeed then flipped the page to reveal a second map of Iraq, only on this map, an additional dotted V had been drawn directly beneath the present-day one:
Zaeed pointed at this new river junction—it lay south of Qurna, roughly halfway between it and Basra.
‘The rivers,’ Zaeed said, ‘used to meet here, at the town of Haritha.’
The Halicarnassus shot into Iraq, heading for the southern village-town of Haritha.
As it did so, everyone prepared for their arrival—prepping guns, maps, helmets and tunnel gear.
Alone in his office, with Horus perched on his chair-back, West kept one eye on a laptop computer that Wizard had set up soon after their mission in Tunisia had gone to hell.
It was the microwave communications net he had instructed Wizard to create, to scan for any signals emanating from,