Not all historians are fond of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. First devised by 'father of history' Herodotus in the 5th century BC and constantly revised by other classical authors, some experts consider them a gimmick – an arbitrary list that's spawned countless imitations. But although only one survives today and uncertainties surround all seven, it's still easy to see why these extraordinary monuments to human ingenuity enchanted antique travellers as much as they do modern readers.
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Alexander the Great founded Alexandria after conquering Egypt in 332 BC – naming the city after himself in typically modest fashion – and on his death both city and country fell to Ptolemy, one of his top generals. He was the first of 15 Ptolemies to sit on the Egyptian throne, and quickly set about building a capital worthy of such a mighty dynasty. He created the Library of Alexandria, supposedly meant to house the sum of all knowledge. He had a magnificent tomb built for Alexander's body, which he squirrelled away from its resting place in Persia under the noses of his fellow generals. And he commissioned the towering Lighthouse of Alexandria, rising from the island of Pharos opposite the city.
Ptolemy probably died before he could see the project completed, but his son and successor, Ptolemy II, is thought to have finished the job. Around 350 feet (107m) high – though that is very much an estimate – the lighthouse was probably built in three stone tiers, the first square, the second octagonal and the third round. It was a guide for visitors coming into the harbour – and a splendid tourist attraction once they had docked. A cultural, economic and intellectual symbol of the city, the lighthouse later appeared on Alexandria's coins. Writing 400 years later, Roman historian Pliny the Elder recorded that its construction cost 800 talents of silver, equivalent to around £2.4m ($3m) today.
Egypt's barren coastline was notoriously inhospitable to ships, and the conquering armies of the Romans, Byzantines and Arabs all relied on the Pharos beacon to steer their navies to shore. For some 1,500 years the lighthouse endured earthquakes, waves and neglect – until the 14th century AD brought one earthquake too many. Some of its hallowed stones were reconstituted into the Qaitbay Citadel that still stands on the site. Others fell into the Mediterranean where they remain today, disturbed only by the occasional archaeological survey.
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The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are a hard subject to summarise. Ancient historians describe a series of vaulted terraces almost obscured by sumptuous greenery, fed water directly from the Euphrates River via a complex system of pumps and channels. They often attribute the gardens to biblical Babylonian baddie Nebuchadnezzar II, notorious in Jewish and Christian scripture for destroying the Temple of Jerusalem and enslaving the city's Jewish population. But modern historians aren't convinced the gardens were hanging, query whether they were located in Babylon, and even question whether they existed at all.
The gardens are attested in Greek and Roman sources but none that are first hand, and there's no evidence for them in any surviving Babylonian inscriptions or in the archaeological record. Given how easily misinformation spreads in today's interconnected world, it's easy to imagine classical authors concocting myth and rumour into a long-lasting legend. It's equally possible that the gardens are a work of typical ancient exaggeration – that they did technically exist, but were no more than a few desert flowers and a whole lot of wishful thinking.
Some historians have a different explanation – that there's no evidence of the gardens because they weren't in Babylon at all. After 18 years of research, British academic Stephanie Dalley suggested in 2013 that the gardens were not a Babylonian creation but were constructed 300 miles (483km) north in the city of Nineveh by their sworn enemies the Assyrians. She argues that Assyrian king Sennacherib's better-attested gardens – "magnificent in conception, spectacular in engineering and brilliant in artistry" – fit the bill nicely. Whatever the truth, it's easy to see how the prospect of a fantastical, gravity-defying oasis in the desert is just as appealing to modern historians as it was to Roman ones.
A building so influential that it gave us the word we now use to refer to it, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was built for the Persian governor Mausolus, who ruled both city and region in the 4th century BC. A great military leader who carved out an impressive chunk of what is now western Turkey, Mausolus's ambition was matched only by his vanity, and he commissioned for himself a grand funerary monument that loomed above the city. The building was unprecedented in scale but not in style, and took design tips from the Nereid Monument of Xanthos in nearby Lycia.
According to Pliny the Elder, the mausoleum was built using marble from Athens, and boasted a 36-column colonnade supporting a statue of Mausolus riding a four-horse chariot, depicting him as the Greek hero of heroes Hercules. The building's four sides were decorated with elaborate statues and facades created by four leading Greek artists, while its sloping roof apparently reached up to 148 feet (45m) in height.
The designs were perhaps too elaborate, as when Mausolus died his intended tomb was not yet ready to receive him, and his wife Artemisia II had to ensure that the building was finished. To modern eyes, Mausolus and Artemisia had an eyebrow-raising relationship. She was his sister as well as his wife, and one admittedly questionable legend holds that she was so grief-stricken at his passing that she drank his ashes mixed with water. The Mausoleum was almost completely destroyed by a series of earthquakes between the 11th and 15th centuries AD.
Supposedly funded by the famously wealthy King Croesus, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus was built to be the biggest, grandest temple in the Greek world. The king never saw his creation – it took more than 100 years to complete – but when it was finally finished in the 6th century BC its 127 Ionic columns and burnished facades took the ancient world by storm. Pliny the Elder called it "the most wonderful monument of Graecian magnificence", and wrote that the temple measured 425 feet (130m) by 225 feet (69m) – almost twice the size of the Parthenon.
So good they burned it twice, the temple was destroyed, rebuilt and then destroyed again. The first conflagration was an act of petty vandalism, supposedly on the same night Alexander the Great was born. Plutarch writes that the monument was unguarded, as the goddess Artemis was away assisting with Alexander's birth. Sources say that the temple was set alight by an arsonist named Herostratus, who did the deed solely for fame and notoriety and was executed for his crimes. The Greeks instituted a law forbidding anyone to speak or write his name to deny him the recognition he craved, but, 2,000 years later, it clearly hasn't worked.
The rebuilt temple was just as glorified, and in his seminal book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon writes that "successive empires, the Persian, the Macedonian and the Roman had revered its sanctity and enriched its splendour". The Goths were less impressed, and burned the temple again in AD 262, after which it presumably lay derelict until it closed in the 4th century. Today only a single column stands forlornly on the site of one of antiquity's greatest triumphs, assembled from excavated remnants in 1972. Another section of column from the temple can be found in the British Museum in London.
Standing symbolically astride Rhodes Harbour, so that visiting ships had no option but to pass beneath its mighty form, the Colossus of Rhodes looks like the ancient world's biggest flex in this 18th-century engraving. It seems more like something out of a fantasy novel than a history textbook, and unfortunately this popular image is a little too good to be true. The belief that the colossus straddled the port, with one leg either side of the channel, is a medieval invention that’s been widely dismissed by historians, and it more likely greeted sailors with legs closed and one arm outstretched.
It did exist, though – at least we assume it did – and it was pretty big. Built in the early 3rd century BC by Chares of Lindos to celebrate Rhodes successfully surviving a siege, the statue took 12 years to make and was cast completely of bronze. Standing an estimated 105 feet (32m) tall – according to Pliny – it depicted the sun god Helios, who was long associated with Rhodes and its people. "Few men can clasp the thumb in their arms," wrote Pliny, "and its fingers are larger than most statues."
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The colossus was the most short-lived of all the wonders and by the end of the century it lay broken – toppled by an earthquake around 225 BC. Greek historian Strabo says that the Rhodians dared not rebuild it after an unfavourable verdict from the oracle, so its shattered bulk lay on the harbourside untouched for hundreds of years. It was eventually looted for scrap in the 7th century by Arab armies and its dissected form supposedly took 900 camels to transport. Gone but not forgotten, allusions to the colossus still pepper popular culture, from American novelist George RR Martin to Shakespeare.
It's hard to fully communicate just how old the Great Pyramid of Giza is. Built around 2500 BC, it predates all the other wonders by roughly two millennia and has outlasted each of them by 500 years and counting. The combined lifespans of all six other wonders only barely cover the time the Great Pyramid has sat silently in the desert, and we are closer in time today to the reign of final pharaoh Cleopatra than her reign was to the pyramid's construction. Practically indestructible – at least one Arab ruler tried and failed to tear it down – the pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for nigh-on 4,000 years.
The Great Pyramid is the largest and earliest of the Pyramids of Giza – a term that also includes the neighbouring Khafre Pyramid and Menkaure Pyramid – and was built to house the body of 4th-dynasty pharaoh Khufu as he set off on his journey into the afterlife. A barely believable feat of ancient engineering, it covers 13 acres, weighs six million tonnes and tapers 455 feet (139m) into the sky. Its four sides align almost exactly with the points of a compass, and its base is level to within a couple of centimetres. Its dust-brown colouring now mirrors the desert that surrounds it, but in the 26th century BC its limestone casing would have gleamed white-hot in the dazzling Egyptian sun.
It was long assumed that pyramids were built by slaves – usually a safe bet in early antiquity – but the discovery of a 'workers' village' in the 1980s suggested that pyramid-building was a more respectable profession. The village contained dormitories, prime meat cuts and well-furnished tombs, all amenities that slaves would never have enjoyed. Instead, Giza's workforce was divided into gangs, often with pharaoh-affiliated nicknames; surviving graffiti mentions 'friends of Menkaure' and 'drunkards of Menkaure'. We still don't know exactly how the pyramids were built, but archaeologists can confirm that it had nothing to do with aliens. Current consensus involves ramps, rollers, sledges and levers.
The story goes that when Greek artist Phidias completed this mighty sculpture, the centrepiece of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, home to the ancient Olympic Games, he asked Zeus for a sign of approval. A while later, the temple was struck by a thunderbolt. The ancient Olympics were as much about religion as sport, and this statue represented a pinnacle of religious iconography when it was finished around 457 BC. Plated with ivory and gold, the king of the Gods was depicted enthroned with a sceptre in one hand and a statue of Nike (victory) in the other.
It's always tempting to overly romanticise the ancient world, but it's worth remembering that the limits of ancient engineering resulted in marvels that were smaller in scale than the modern mind might assume. The Statue of Zeus is sometimes depicted as a towering behemoth, reducing worshippers to ants on the temple floor. And though it was certainly impressive, at around 40 feet (12m) high at best guess, it pales in comparison to more modern figures like Rio's Christ the Redeemer (98ft/30m) or the Statue of Liberty (151ft/46m) in New York.
According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the statue barely survived the reign of the maniacal Roman emperor Caligula, who reportedly ordered Greece's most famous sculptures to be brought to Rome so their heads could be replaced with his own. Fortunately for Zeus, Caligula was assassinated shortly afterwards. But the temple did not survive Theodosius II's 4th-century ban on the Olympics, which saw the building looted and abandoned. Its skeletal remains were levelled by an earthquake a century or two later. The exact fate of the statue is less clear – one legend holds that it was carted off to Constantinople where it later perished in a fire.
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