“Ozymandias”
comes to mind when I reflect that only one of the seven ancient wonders of the
world still stands; that one, ironically, is the oldest, the Great Pyramid of
Giza. In 1988, Peter Clayton, Martin Price, and four of their colleagues who
study antiquities put together essays on The
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World using what evidence can be gathered.
They quote Strabo, Pliny, Homer, and other writers, gather archaeological
evidence, provide maps and plans and reconstructions and also look at what is
often the only contemporary evidence: coins struck at or near the time that the
wonders they describe were still standing. Not surprisingly, both Clayton and
Price are scholars of ancient numismatics. The list consists of two tombs, two
statues, a temple, a garden, and a lighthouse. In an introduction, Clayton and
Price point out that six of the seven wonders, minus the Pharos at Alexandria,
are already noted as marvels in a poem by the Greek Antipater around 140BC, but
that the list doesn’t get formalized until the Renaissance, when artists try to
depict the seven ancient wonders in engravings.
1. The
Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu, whom the Greek historian
Manetho called Cheops—and the name stuck—around 2600BC. Manetho, writing during
Ptolemy II’s reign ~250BC who devised the Old, Middle, and New Kingdom division
of Egypt’s thirty dynasties. Cheops’s pyramid represents the culmination of Old
Kingdom tomb building. The pyramid’s shape, with its 55
slope, suggests the sun’s rays and is tied to
sun-worship. The site was made level using a water enclosure and carefully aligned
with the cardinal points of the compass, using the stars. The stepped blocks
were filled in to make a smooth inclined surface and the whole was encased in
white limestone. The pyramid was 480 feet high, and each of the sides was 756
feet, plus or minus less than eight inches. The Great Pyramid has more internal
passages and chambers than any other Old Kingdom pyramid. Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus,
and Strabo all wrote about the pyramid two millennia after its construction,
when it still had its limestone casing.
2. The Hanging Gardens of
Babylon are not mentioned in cuneiform texts that describe the building
projects of Babylonian kings, including Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562BC). There is
evidence that Mesopotamian kings such as Sennacherib and Assurnasirpal prized
gardens that were extensive and elaborate. But it is the detailed descriptions
of later writers, Berossus (c. 270BC), Diodorus Siculus (c. 50BC), Quintus
Curtius Rufus, Strabo, and Philo of Byzantium (c. 250BC), who write with a
voice as of authority, who have convinced many of their existence. Herodotus,
at around 450BC the writer about Babylon nearest in time to Nebuchadnezzar’s
reign, makes no mention of hanging gardens in his descriptions of the city.
None of this has prevented excavators of Babylon such as Koldewey and Wiseman
from theorizing where in the city the gardens might have been.
3. The Statue of Zeus at
Olympia, in the Peloponnesus, was a site of worship, but also the location of
the quadrennial games, which the Greeks dated from 776BC. Their origin was in
religious ritual, probably funeral rites celebrating Pelops, but later shifting
to honor Zeus. A complex of stadium, gymnasium, temples, and quarters for the
athletes who gathered for the games, it was 175 miles to the south Mt. Olympus,
in Thessaly. The temple of Zeus was built around 460BC out of a conglomerate
stone of fossil shells, and Pheidias supervised the decoration from a nearby
workshop. The stature of Zeus, seated, was of chryselephantine—gold and
ivory-13 meters high, completed in the 430s. We have a nearly contemporary coin
from Elis, close to Olympia, depicting the statue within the temple. Pausanias,
a Greek, visited the temple and described it and the statue in AD174. In 391
the emperor Theodosius closed the temple, and later the statue was transported
to Constantinople, where it was destroyed by fire in 462. Meanwhile landslides,
earthquakes, and floods had toppled and covered most of the buildings at
Olympia, where they were not excavated until recent centuries.
4. The Temple of Artemis at
Ephesos, 425 by 255 feet, had 60-foot columns whose bases were cylinders
surrounded by sculptured reliefs, Ionic capitals, and three windows in the
pediment framed by statues of Amazons. The temple was first built around 600BC
and we don’t know what sort of stature of Artemis presided there. That temple,
destroyed by fire about 350BC was rebuilt, and the statue in that temple, was
that of a mother-goddess with many breasts. The later temple was destroyed by
Ostrogoths in AD262. Afterward there was some rebuilding, which was in its turn
destroyed by St. John Chrysostom in 401.
5. The Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus, finished around 350BC, was probably started during the reign of
Mausollos, who was ruler of Caria and a Satrap of Ataxerxes III, the King of
Persia. Legend said it was built by his sister/queen in grief, but she survived
him by only two years (353, 351BC). The Mausoleum had already suffered
earthquake damage when the Knights of Malta took it apart for building stones
and burnt a lot of the marble statuary to make lime for their Castle of St.
Peter in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
6. The Colossus of Rhodes, was
in the harbor of the city and island that were on two main ancient sea routes
and became a power around 400BC. The city withstood a siege by Macedonia in
305BC and the inhabitants sold the siege engines that were left behind and used
the money to build a bronze statue to their patron, Helios, 110 feet high,
completed about 275BC but not, as later legend would have it, bestriding the
harbor. An earthquake toppled the Colossus (at first this meant any statue;
later a very large one) in 226BC.
7. The Pharos at Alexandria, so
called because of the island off the city, now connected to it by a mole, was
completed around 275BC. It was a three-tiered structure about a hundred meters
tall that lasted until the fourteenth century, when its ruins were used to
build an Islamic fort on the site.
