Different passages within the Nice Pyramid – an enormous burial place for Egypt’s King Khufu – had been charted by medieval Arabic scientists and desecrated by off-duty Napoleonic troopers. Constructed greater than 45 centuries in the past, this pyramid, the oldest of the well-known Seven Wonders of the Historical World, has at all times been a catalyst for awe.
And it’s not alone. Throughout time, the Seven Wonders of the Historical World – the Pyramids at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria – have actually mattered.
They mattered a lot that, within the epoch after Alexander the Great’s loss of life, a bespoke catalogue, the Laterculi Alexandrini, was generated to group them collectively. Written in papyrus about 150 BC, it’s our oldest extant proof for a listing. We aren’t positive who created the record, however we do know that it was copied and shared, and that it has impressed poetry, prose and artistic endeavors for millennia.
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The exact entries range a bit of: in some variations, the partitions or an obelisk of Babylon are included; later, the Colosseum is talked about; the Lighthouse has typically been overlooked. The Laterculi Alexandrini additionally lists the seven biggest rivers, the seven greatest mountains, the seven most interesting artists and the seven greatest lakes.
The actual fact the Wonders deserved to be listed in a bunch of seven proved that not solely had been these exemplars of their age, tasks of pioneering ambition that made extraordinary incursions into the panorama, however that they every encapsulated one thing particular and essential concerning the human expertise.
Marvellous information
The phrase marvel (from the Previous German wuntar) means ‘one thing marvellous’. Initially within the Greek, these points of interest had been described as thaumata – works that wanted to be seen. Crucially, and this can be a reality that’s too usually missed, all seven had been related. In some instances, the identical artists labored on them. In addition they reference each other’s designs. A few of antiquity’s biggest names, together with Alexander the Nice, visited lots of the websites.
Forward of writing my new ebook on the Seven Wonders, I set myself the duty of travelling to the placement the place every as soon as stood. This, I reasoned, was one of the best ways to get a really feel for what these creations meant to the ladies and men of antiquity who designed them, constructed them, worshipped in them, fought over them, wrote about them, maintained, cherished, cherished and looted them, and made perilous journeys to go to and to tick them off their bucket lists.
Following of their footsteps took me on a journey by each historical and trendy landscapes.
1. The Nice Pyramid at Giza
Egypt’s large resurrection machine
Constructed at the very least 4,500 years in the past, the Nice Pyramid is the oldest of all of the Wonders, and but nonetheless stands as we speak virtually intact. And it may very well be even older than beforehand thought: the 2013 discovery of 1,000 fragmented papyri paperwork on the Purple Beach doubtlessly pushes its date again an additional 100 years.
The pyramid was constructed over a span of 20–23 years as an enormous resurrection machine for Khufu, the king of a united Egypt, serving to to move him to the afterlife. As such, it was conceived as a method for the traditional Egyptians to attempt to perceive the place of people within the cosmos and the chances of each mortality and immortality.
The pyramid’s mathematical precision is astonishing (it’s near geometrically excellent – simply 2cm out in some locations). Constructed of two.3 million limestone blocks, rising 146.6 metres excessive, it was initially cased in gleaming, polished, white Tura stone. Just a few slabs nonetheless stay on the Giza plateau, surveyed by bored camels ready for his or her vacationer burdens.
As the location of the pyramid was initially lapped by the Nile for six–8 weeks of the yr in the course of the time of inundation, we now assume that historical Egyptian builders could have used the river’s rise and fall to maneuver the pyramid’s stone constructing blocks into place.
2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Botanical booty takes centre stage
Created someday between 691 and 550 BC, the Hanging Gardens are probably the most elusive of all of the Wonders. No indeniable archaeological proof for them exists, and now we have crammed this hole with our imaginations. Due to this fact, whereas the Hanging Gardens have left behind the least arduous proof within the floor, they’re, satirically, probably the most well-known, and probably the most generally cited of all the traditional seven.
Constructed both by King Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon or by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in Nineveh, they virtually actually employed ingenious watering schemes (together with palm tree trunks lined with waterproof bitumen) working up a sequence of staggered planting ledges, all saved hydrated by machines that had been an early model of Archimedes’s screw. Unique crops and timber had been showcased right here – many seized as botanical booty on campaigns of growth by both Assyrian or Babylonian monarchs.
A venue for internet hosting visiting dignitaries, for displaying wealth, and probably a location to take a seat and be healed by the night-time energy of the celebs, the gardens appear to be the traditional world’s try to duplicate (and management) nature itself.
Exploring the story of the Hanging Gardens is essential as a result of it reminds us to privilege jap in addition to western sources for the Surprise monuments. Crucially, we study from Babylonian and Assyrian information that each the idea of ‘wonders’ and the symbolic energy of seven stretches proper again to the beginnings of historical past itself.
Seven was a potent quantity as a result of it related the 4 parts of the Earth (earth, air, hearth and water) with the three of the heavens (the solar, the moon and the celebs). So we hear of seven heavens, seven hells and 7 ages of man in Center Japanese cultures. Grouping objects or concepts into lists of seven offers us that means as a result of they counsel human tradition has a predictable sample.
Whereas the Nice Pyramid was a gargantuan imposition on the panorama by a king and his individuals looking for to know their connection to the chemistry of area and the cycle of life and loss of life, the Hanging Gardens celebrated each the fantastic thing about nature and the chances of humankind’s dominion over it.
3. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
A spot of refuge… and homicide
This Surprise was subsidised within the sixth century BC by the famously wealthy King Croesus of Lydia. But the temple, sited close to the western coast of modern-day Turkey, was accessible not simply to kings however to commoners. And in addition to honouring an jap deity, Artemis – who protected animals and virgins alike – it was famend as a spot of sanctuary.
Many sought refuge right here, together with Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe (who was double-crossed and murdered on the temple’s steps). Latest archaeological excavations have proven the stalls the place refuge-seekers slept.
The temple was destroyed within the mid-fourth century BC (21 July 356BC) – earlier than being rebuilt, in even grander type, in c340 BC (this later model would itself succumb to fireside, earthquake and plunder).
Gargantuan in scale, the temple’s double row of columns would turn into the mannequin for Greek temples throughout three continents. The truth is, plenty of the artists employed on the later constructing would go on to work on different Wonders, such because the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. And a constructing impressed by the Temple of Artemis would home one other of the Wonders: the Statue of Zeus…
4. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
The place man met the divine
The imposing ivory and gold Statue of Zeus, seated in his temple residence, missed the stadium of the sanctuary of Olympia in southern Greece. The statue was an incarnation not simply of divine, however of human potential.
Constructed round 430 BC, at a time within the classical world when pioneers like Socrates had been declaring the ability of philosophy, human company and the human thoughts, this bearded, muscle-bound male god was constructed to have fun the efficiency of agnostic competitors, of striving and of successful. The ancients would have skilled this ferocious art work, whose brow was mentioned to glower like a thunderstorm, after arriving on the web site as non secular pilgrims.
I travelled to Olympia alongside the sacred route that related it to town of Elis, throughout lockdown. With out the mechanical sounds of the fashionable world round, Zeus’s sanctuary was thick with birdsong and with the rustle of sacred olive timber. The statue itself is now, nonetheless, lengthy gone – it’s believed that it was taken to Constantinople within the early centuries AD, the place it was in all probability misplaced in a fireplace.
On the time Zeus’s sanctuary was constructed, it might even have resounded with the hum of fifty,000–100,000 guests – Greeks summoned from in every single place from the Black Sea to Byzantium to reward the king of the Olympian Gods with shows of athletic prowess.
5. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
A web site of loss of life and glory
Standing at greater than 45 metres excessive, this gigantic constructing gave its title to mausoleums all around the world and has been mimicked within the cenotaphs and tombs of everybody from Abraham Lincoln to Vladimir Lenin.
The mausoleum (which was finally destroyed by warfare and earthquake) reveals a lot concerning the cosmopolitan nature of life across the Mediterranean 2,300 years in the past. Constructed by the Karian ruler Mausolos together with his spouse (and sister), Artemisia, in c351 BC, its fantastic hybrid of types included Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek and Karian.
It might have exploded like a firework on the coast of what’s now Bodrum. Whereas researching the constructing strategies of the mausoleum, I used to be lucky sufficient to be allowed 5 metres beneath floor right into a grave commissioned by Mausolos for his father, Hekatomnos, in close by Mylas. Hekatomnos’s sarcophagus demonstrates the beautiful nature of the stone-carving that will have embellished Mausolos’s personal burial place. It was coated with scenes of Hekatomnos’s household, together with portraits of Mausolos and Artemisia, and a lion hunt.
Artemisia has turn into notorious by historical past because of an anecdote handed down from Roman instances. In response to the creator Aulus Gellius, Artemisia missed her brother-husband a lot that after his loss of life she floor down his bones to drink them, along with the ash from his funeral, after which pined away.
However there’s a robust probability, given we all know gladiators drank bone-meal for power, that Artemisia truly sought to steal Mausolos’s energy. No matter her intentions, Artemisia accomplished this huge, richly painted grave after her husband’s loss of life, and was buried in her personal chamber within the mausoleum.
5 centuries later, the essayist Lucian of Samosta imagined a dialogue between Diogenes the Cynic and Mausolos within the underworld. The king boasted that as a result of he was tall, good-looking and an outstanding warrior, he wanted to be commemorated with probably the most splendid tomb on the earth. Diogenes quietly identified that the ruler’s hairless, skinless, eyeless cranium would now look the identical as his personal. The truth is, Diogenes added, Mausolos would look worse, as Halicarnassus’s mausoleum was a useless weight bearing down on the king’s corpse.
6. The Colossus of Rhodes
Greece’s second solar
The colossus was a gargantuan celebration of a second in historical past when battle sharpened into diplomacy. Wipe out of your minds the favored picture of a large, kitsch statue, legs akimbo, straddling two of Rhodes’s harbours. That might have been structurally unimaginable. In actuality, Rhodes’s towering illustration of the sun-god Helios (with a face paying homage to Alexander the Nice) was in all probability erected excessive on the island overlooking the sanctuary of Helios the place the Helian video games had been held within the god’s honour.
The colossus was constructed (in c302/292 BC) after a pitiless siege of Rhodes by the son of one in all Alexander the Nice’s generals, Demetrius the Besieger. Legend has it that a lot of the uncooked materials to make the determine derived from the melted down weapons and siege engines used to interrupt by heavy partitions and gates, which had been surrendered following a truce.
But these uncooked supplies additionally, it appears, got here from beneath the bottom. The creator Philo of Byzantium wrote: “The artist used a lot bronze for the work there was virtually a scarcity of metals, for all of the Earth’s mines had been exploited in finishing up the venture… for on the earth a second solar stood to face the primary.” Certainly, ice cores from Greenland present air pollution ranges hovering within the Hellenistic and Roman ages, attributable to the method of larger-than- life-size steel statues being produced to show man’s dominion over cities and far-flung territories.
All the Seven Wonders show the fevered prospects of the human creativeness – and the cruel calls for of constructing our goals flesh. By constructing a statue greater than 30 metres tall honouring the solar, the Colossus of Rhodes’s creators set in prepare a historical past of people plundering the Earth’s sources, and a heating of the planet, which now threatens us all.
7. The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria
Historical past’s biggest warning beacon?
The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria guided sailors to security alongside some of the perilous coastlines of northern Egypt. Inbuilt c297 BC, it additionally acted as a warning beacon in instances of misery – and, with an articulated ornament on its summit, could have been the world’s first weathervane.
It was additionally, clearly, stunning. Standing at 120 metres tall (till its collapse, because of earthquakes, within the Center Ages), the lighthouse performed with a sequence of geometrical shapes: rectangular, round and sq.. It was embellished with the identical pink granite that lined Khufu’s burial chamber within the Nice Pyramid. A few of these blocks are nonetheless in situ, re-used as door frames and as thresholds within the fort of Qaitbey, which now swamps the lighthouse’s footprint.
Lucian (one in all my favorite authors of antiquity) was impressed by a hidden inscription on the Pharos Lighthouse, left by its architect, Sostratus of Knidos, as an allegory for the writing of historical past itself.
The seen inscription praised the pharaohs who had commissioned the Pharos. However when the gypsum protecting was washed away, we’re instructed that beneath was a dedication commemorating Sostratus’s hope for the security of sailors. As Lucian wrote: “Historical past must be written in that spirit, with truthfulness and an eye fixed to future expectations moderately than with adulation and a view to the pleasure of current reward.”
In an 1,800-year-old work of science fiction (additionally written by Lucian), an historical astronaut staring down from the Moon recognises Earth, because of a sighting of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes. At present, courtesy of satellite tv for pc imagery, we actually can look down on Earth from area.
However though we’d solely have the ability to see one of many Seven Historical Wonders standing in situ, their energy to fireside our mind and seize our imaginations nonetheless burns disproportionately shiny.
This text was first revealed within the February 2024 problem of BBC History Magazine. You possibly can take heed to Bettany Hughes discover the Seven Wonders of the Historical World in a this podcast episode.
Bettany is the presenter of a brand new three-part docuseries Seven Wonders of the Historical World. The primary episode airs on Channel 5 at 6.30pm on 1 August 2025. The sequence will discover the historical past and significance of the traditional wonders, combining archaeological entry, new analysis, and digital reconstructions.