The Seven Wonders of The Ancient World

Although most people know that a list exists of the Seven World Wonders, only few can name them. The list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was originally compiled around the second century BC. The first reference to the idea is found in History of Herodotus. Decades later, Greek historians wrote about the greatest monuments at the time. Callimachus of Cyrene (305BC-240BC), Chief Librarian of the Alexandria Mouseion, wrote "A Collection of Wonders around the World". All we know about the collection is its title, for it was destroyed with the Alexandria Library.

The final list of the Seven Wonders was compiled during the Middle Ages. The list comprised the seven most impressive monuments of the Ancient World, some of which barely survived to the Middle Ages.

Today, archaeological evidence reveals some of the mysteries that surrounded the history of the Wonders for centuries. For their builders, the Seven Wonders were a celebration of religion, mythology, art, power, and science. For us, they reflect the ability of humans to change the surrounding landscape by building massive yet beautiful structures, one of which stood the test of time to this very day.

•  The Colossus of Rhodes
  •  The island of Rhodes, in the Eastern Mediterranean, was frequently attacked by navies of rival islands, and one siege by the Greeks in the end of the fourth century BC dragged on for a year before the Greeks finally abandoned their attack and left the citizens of Rhodes in peace. Wishing to celebrate this victory, the citizens of Rhodes chose to build a giant statue of Helos, their God of the Sun and protector.
  •  Using in part the bronze from weapons and hardware left by the Greeks, they commissioned a huge bronze sculpture, with a wooden structural support inside, that would stand over a hundred feet high. It was completed in 280 BC.
  •  We don't actually know exactly what it looked like, although we have some artifacts showing other sculptures of Helos and they sort of resemble our modern Statue of Liberty. We also don't know exactly where it stood, with several sites in Rhodes possible.
  •  Sadly, a mere 50 years after he was built, an earthquake toppled him. After nine hundred years of laying in the sand, he was dismantled by the conquering Syrians and his bronze panels were melted into other metal objects.
  •  Certainly the most popular myth of the Colossus was that he stood so tall, his legs straddled the harbor and ships sailed beneath him. But given he was only a bit more than a hundred feet tall, and the harbor was over a thousand feet wide, it was obviously impossible for him to do so. But even with this myth discounted, the Colossus of Rhodes easily remains one of history's most famous and fascinating sculptures of a human figure.
•  The Great Pyramids
  •  There are, of course, many pyramids in Egypt, but the uncontested great one is the Pyramid of Khufu (also known as Cheops) at Giza, where it stands today beside the pyramid of Khafre (also known as Chephren) and the smaller pyramid of Mykerinus. The pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) is the tallest of the three and generally regarded as the biggest single structure ever built by human endeavor.
  •  Each pyramid actually includes numerous related structures, smaller pyramids for wives or honored members of the Pharaoh's court, the boat pits that held the boats that would (theoretically) carry the Pharaoh to his destination in the afterlife, the mortuary temple close to the pyramid base, a long causeway (a passageway, essentially) and the Valley Temple on the banks of the Nile where boats could dock when the Nile was at high water.
  •  The great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) stood 481 feet high, measured 756 feet square at its base, and has been calculated to have been built with 5.4 million tons of stone. It was built over a twenty year period ending in 2570 BC.
  •  It stands today essentially intact (the only one of the Seven that does), lacking it's smoothed limestone face stones, which is why today its stonework looks like many steps or plateaus. In its glory, it was smooth-faced.
  •  Beside it is the Great Pyramid of Khafre, Khufu's son. Khafre chose to build his own pyramid ten feet smaller in height (out of respect for his father) but built it on ground twenty feet higher (out of respect to himself). So while the father's pyramid is bigger, the son's looks down on it still. The fabled Sphinx of Egypt is sitting beside the Valley Temple leading to Khafre's pyramid.
  •  The third Pyramid belongs to Khufu's grandson, Mykerinus, and is much smaller than the other two.
•  The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
  •  The fabled Hanging Gardens are definitely one of the more well known Wonders to us today, and yet in terms of archaeological record, they are the most mysterious and most poorly documented. So little is known about them that all we can really say is that we know something fabulous existed, but we know nothing of exactly what that "something" looked like.
  •  What we do know about the Hanging Gardens is that they were commissioned by Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of Babylon (modern day Iraq) to please his queen Amytis of Persia (modern day Iran). His queen came from the beautiful mountainous highlands of northern Persia, and was believed to be greatly unimpressed with the bland desert landscape of Babylon on the Euphrates river. She was homesick for the towering landscapes of her home, and the fabled Hanging Gardens were specifically built with towering structures and many terraced levels to suggest a mountainous terrain. The plants filling these terraces and rooftop gardens literally spilled over and down the sides on the terrace walls and the result was the "Hanging Gardens".
•  The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
  •  The town of Hallicarnassis (modern day Bodrum, Turkey) was once considered a part of Caria, a portion of the Persian Empire. From 377 to 353 BC, Caria's ruler was King Mausolus. As with many rulers of history, Mausolus contemplated his own death and wanted to build a memorial to himself while he was still alive to insure it would be a fitting tribute to his greatness. So he planned and commenced the construction of a great tower that would be his tomb and forever remind the people of the land of his greatness.
  •  Caria was a port of trade and Egyptian and Greek ships frequented the harbor. Indeed Caria almost seemed to be a melting pot of the three cultures (Carian, Egyptian, Greek) so Mausolus chose for his tomb design a structure that respected the three cultures. The stepped base was Carian, the column level was Greek (with Ionic columns), and the roof was a stepped pyramid suggestive of the Egyptian pyramids.
  •  The structure towered over everything else in the city, but King Mausolus never saw it finished. He died during its construction and his Queen Artemesia supervised the completion of it. It stood for eighteen hundred years, before being toppled by an earthquake in the 1400's AD.
  •  The tomb of Mausolus came to be called the Mausoleum, and even today the word "mausoleum" indicates a large, stately tomb of an important person.
  •  The size and structure are reasonably well documented. Several of the lion statues that circled the roof are now in museum collections. The four horses that pull the chariot on the rooftop are also well documented and parts of the horses are also in museum collections.
•  The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria
  •  The Lighthouse was built around 280 BC under the reign of Ptolemy II.
  •  Sadly, it seems that many of the Wonders were destroyed by earthquakes, and so it was the the Great Pharos too was toppled by an earthquake in the 14th century AD. Its foundation was cleared and a fort now stands today where the Pharos once stood.
•  The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
  •  Greek Mythology was filled with Gods and Goddesses, but Zeus was the boss, the father, the king of the gods. Olympia was where the Gods were believed to live, and the great athletic competitions honoring the Gods became known as the Olympics. So it sort of follows that the citizens of Olympia wanted the best temples honoring the Gods there, and the King of the Gods should have the most impressive temple. So, around 466 to 456 BC, they built the Temple of Zeus and fashioned a giant statue of ivory and gold to fill the interior. The sculptor Phidias was commissioned to design it and supervise its construction. The way it was designed, to be as big as possible, the sitting figure of Zeus was 43 feet tall, almost touching the ceiling of the temple.
  •  The statue stood for centuries, until the Christian Emperors of Rome banned the Olympic games and closed the temples. In the fifth century AD, the statue was dismantled and shipped to Constantinople. A massive earthquake triggered landslides that buried the temple ruins for a thousand years, but they have been excavated and studied in recent times. The building itself is reasonably well documented, but the statue itself exists only in historical descriptions.
•  The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
  •  The ancient Greeks are known for their temples and for their pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. Artemis (also called Diana by the Romans) was Goddess of the hunt, fertility, birth, the woodlands, and the creatures of the forests. In the rural areas of the Greek world, she was beloved by the common people who lived off the land and particularly revered in Ephesus. In the 6th century BC, King Croesus of Lydia, one of the richest rulers of the time, worshipped Artemis with particular devotion and chose to build a temple for her that demonstrated both his great wealth and his great respect for her honor.
  •  The resulting Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was undoubtedly one of the most spectacular accomplishments of the Golden Age of Greece. Most of us today, when asked to think of a Greek Temple, will think of the Parthenon still standing today at the Acropolis. But imagine a temple twice as high, eight times as large. That's what Croesus imagined, and his fabulous wealth afforded.
  •  The Temple of Artemis was finished around 560 BC, and stood for two hundred years before being burned to the ground by a deranged man named Herostratos, who (according to history) did this horrible act of vandalism for the sole purpose of becoming famous for having destroyed it.
  •  But Alexander The Great, believed to have been born on the day the temple was destroyed, grew to manhood and power enchanted by this lost wonder, and he finally ordered it rebuilt. It stood for another five hundred years, before being plundered in the third century AD. Today, the foundation still exists and one solitary column, broken at the top and extensively restored, still stands to remind modern visitors of the glory that once was.
  •  This Wonder is well documented in its design and many of its details. The exact size, number, and arrangement of its incredible columns is well known. The front row of columns had ornate relief sculptures around the base, depicting human subjects in festive poses. One of these relief column sculpture pieces is well preserved in the collection of the British Museum. The Goddess herself, Artemis, was represented by a statue in the center of the ceiling panel, and copies of that statue are in several museum collections.