Walls of Babylon belongs to the years before the Common Era — dated here to c. 575 BCE at Babylon. The date is a scholarly centre of gravity, not a foundation-stone timestamp.
Greek lists sometimes swapped the walls for the gardens: a double circuit of baked brick so wide that chariots could pass.
How it was made
Nebuchadnezzar’s inscriptions boast of walls like mountains. Moats drew the Euphrates into the defence.
Why it still counts as a wonder
It never needed a Greek list to be a wonder: the labour, the alignment, or the survival is enough.
What you walk today is a fragment and a reconstruction. The ancient boast was thickness, not pretty gates alone.
On dating
BCE in this series means years before the traditional birth of Christ, counted backward. A monument listed as c. 575 BCE may have been founded earlier, rebuilt later, or famous only in one phase. Where ancient writers disagree — as they do for Babylon’s gardens — we say so.
This is story 26 of 100 in The Trend Ledger’s illustrated desk on world wonders raised before the Common Era.