Babylon's most famous legendary garden may never actually have grown in Babylon at all, and its most recent physical damage came from a modern army parking heavy vehicles on top of the ruins.
A garden that might belong to a different city
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the traditional Seven Wonders of the ancient world, are not confirmed by any Babylonian archaeological or administrative record discovered at the site itself, leading some scholars to argue the gardens may actually have existed at Nineveh, under the Assyrian king Sennacherib, with the description later misattributed to Babylon by classical Greek writers working from secondhand and garbled sources.
Rebuilt with a ruler's name on the bricks
Saddam Hussein's government undertook a large-scale reconstruction of parts of Babylon in the 1980s, using modern bricks stamped with his own name in imitation of the ancient practice of Nebuchadnezzar II, a project widely criticised by archaeologists for imposing modern, historically inaccurate construction directly onto and over fragile ancient remains.
Damaged again by a military base
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, coalition forces established a military base directly on and around the ruins, and subsequent assessments documented damage from heavy vehicle movement, levelling and excavation for defensive works, adding a very recent chapter of harm to a site whose ancient fabric was already compromised by earlier reconstruction efforts.