The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: Stories Behind the Legends

Where the List Came From

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were a set of famous structures admired by travelers in the Greek-speaking world more than two thousand years ago. The Greeks did not actually call them "wonders". Their word was theamata, which means "sights" or "things to be seen". The list worked a little like a modern travel guide's must-see attractions: places worth a long journey.

Many writers produced lists of remarkable sights. The historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, described amazing buildings in Egypt and Babylon. The scholar Callimachus of Cyrene, who worked at the great Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC, wrote a collection of wonders from around the world, but it has been lost. One of the oldest lists that survives is a short poem by Antipater of Sidon from the 2nd century BC. His version was almost the one we know today, except that instead of the Lighthouse of Alexandria he named the mighty walls of Babylon. Another early text, On the Seven Wonders, is attributed to a writer called Philo of Byzantium.

Why seven? For the Greeks the number seven had a special feeling of completeness. It was also the number of moving objects they could see in the sky: the Sun, the Moon and the five planets visible to the naked eye.

The list in its final, familiar form became fixed much later. In 1572 a series of engravings designed by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck was published as Octo Mundi Miracula ("Eight Wonders of the World"). It showed the seven classical wonders plus an eighth image of the Colosseum in Rome. These popular prints helped settle which seven monuments belong on the list.

A Greek View of the World

Look at a map of the seven wonders and you will notice that they all lie around the eastern Mediterranean and in the Middle East. That was the world Greek travelers knew best, especially after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC opened up Egypt and the lands of the former Persian Empire. Five of the seven wonders were made by Greek architects and artists, while the other two came from the much older civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The wonders were also built at very different times. The Great Pyramid was already more than two thousand years old when the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes were completed around 280 BC. Because the Colossus fell in an earthquake in 226 BC, all seven wonders could have been seen standing together for fewer than sixty years, and that is assuming the Hanging Gardens really existed.

The Great Pyramid of Giza

The oldest wonder is also the only one still standing. The Great Pyramid was built in Egypt as a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu, also known by his Greek name Cheops, around 2600 to 2560 BC. It stands on the Giza Plateau on the edge of modern Cairo.

Facts and figures

• It was originally about 146 metres tall. Today it is about 138 metres, because its top and its outer layer have been lost.
• Each side of its base is about 230 metres long, and the sides are lined up very precisely with north, south, east and west.
• It contains an estimated 2.3 million stone blocks.
• For around 3,800 years it was the tallest structure built by humans anywhere on Earth.

When it was new, the pyramid was covered with polished white limestone from the quarries at Tura, so it shone brightly in the sun. Over the centuries most of those casing stones were removed and reused in other buildings.

Who built it?

An old myth says the pyramids were built by slaves. Archaeologists now think otherwise. Excavations near Giza uncovered a town where workers lived, with bakeries, breweries and cemeteries for the builders. The workers were organized into teams and were fed and cared for. In 2013 archaeologists working at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast found the oldest inscribed papyri ever discovered, including the logbook of an official named Merer. It records how his crew transported limestone blocks by boat from Tura to Giza for Khufu's pyramid.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Hanging Gardens are the most mysterious of all the wonders, because no one is sure they ever existed. According to the traditional story, King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, who ruled from 605 to 562 BC, built a series of planted terraces for his wife Amytis. She came from Media, a green and mountainous land, and missed the hills of her homeland in flat, dry Mesopotamia.

Greek and Roman writers such as Diodorus Siculus and Strabo described terraces rising one above another, covered with trees and flowers, and watered by machines that lifted water from the Euphrates River. Such a garden would have been a remarkable feat of engineering in a hot, dry climate.

The problem is that Babylonian records, which include many inscriptions about Nebuchadnezzar's building projects, never mention the gardens. Herodotus, who described Babylon in detail, did not mention them either. The German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, who excavated Babylon in the early 20th century, thought he had found their foundations, but later researchers doubted his interpretation. The Oxford scholar Stephanie Dalley has suggested that the famous gardens were really in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, built by King Sennacherib about a century earlier, and that later writers confused the two cities. The debate continues.

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

Ephesus was a rich Greek city on the west coast of what is now Turkey, near the modern town of Selçuk. Its great temple was dedicated to Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and of wild nature. In the 6th century BC the wealthy King Croesus of Lydia helped pay for a huge marble temple, designed by the architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes.

In 356 BC a man named Herostratus set fire to the temple simply to make his name famous. The Ephesians tried to punish him by forbidding anyone to mention his name, but historians recorded it anyway. A later legend claims the temple burned on the same night that Alexander the Great was born.

The Ephesians rebuilt the temple on an even grander scale. When Alexander later offered to pay for the work, they politely refused, saying it was not fitting for one god to make offerings to other gods. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder reported that the temple had 127 columns, each about 18 metres high. The poet Antipater of Sidon wrote that once he had seen this temple, all the other wonders seemed to lose their brightness.

The temple was badly damaged during a raid by the Goths in the 3rd century AD, and its stones were later carried off for other buildings. Today, visitors to the site see a single column put back together from fragments, standing in a marshy field.

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia

Olympia, in southern Greece, was the home of the ancient Olympic Games, held in honor of Zeus, king of the gods. Around 435 BC the famous sculptor Phidias created a giant seated statue of Zeus for the god's temple there. It was about 12 metres tall, so large that the god's head nearly touched the roof. The geographer Strabo remarked that if Zeus stood up, he would lift the roof off the temple.

The statue was made with a technique called chryselephantine work, from the Greek words for gold and ivory. Thin panels of ivory formed the skin, while gold sheets made the robe and decorations, all fixed over a wooden frame. Zeus held a figure of Nike, the goddess of victory, in his right hand and a scepter topped by an eagle in his left. According to the travel writer Pausanias, olive oil was used to protect the ivory from damage caused by the damp ground of Olympia.

In the 1950s archaeologists excavated the workshop where Phidias made the statue. They found tools, clay molds used for shaping glass and gold pieces, and a small cup scratched with the words "I belong to Pheidias". The statue itself disappeared. One ancient account says it was taken to Constantinople and destroyed there in a fire in the 5th century AD.

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

Mausolus ruled Caria, a region in the southwest of what is now Turkey, on behalf of the Persian Empire. His capital was Halicarnassus, today the town of Bodrum. When he died in 353 BC, his wife Artemisia II continued building a magnificent tomb for him, and it was completed around 350 BC.

The tomb was about 45 metres high. It combined a tall stone base, a ring of Greek columns and a stepped pyramid roof crowned by a sculpture of a four-horse chariot. Four of the most celebrated Greek sculptors of the time, including Scopas and Leochares, were said to have each decorated one side of the building. Ancient writers praised it as much for its sculpture as for its size.

The Mausoleum survived for well over a thousand years before a series of earthquakes brought it down. In the 15th and early 16th centuries the Knights of Saint John used many of its stones to build and strengthen their castle at Bodrum, which still stands. Some of the surviving sculptures, including two large statues often identified as Mausolus and Artemisia, are now displayed in the British Museum in London. The building's fame was so great that the king's name became a common word: any grand tomb is now called a mausoleum.

The Colossus of Rhodes

In 305 BC the island city of Rhodes was besieged by Demetrius, a powerful Macedonian general later nicknamed Poliorcetes, "the Besieger". After about a year the attackers gave up and left behind much of their equipment. The Rhodians sold it and used the money to build a giant statue of their protector, the sun god Helios.

The sculptor Chares of Lindos worked on the statue for about twelve years, finishing it around 280 BC. It stood about 33 metres tall, roughly the height of the Statue of Liberty from its feet to its crown. Bronze plates were fixed over an iron framework, and the lower part was weighed down with stones for stability.

The Colossus stood for only about 54 years. In 226 BC an earthquake struck Rhodes and the statue snapped at the knees. The Rhodians were told by an oracle not to rebuild it, so it lay on the ground for centuries. Even in ruins it drew visitors: Pliny the Elder wrote that few people could wrap their arms around its thumb. Later accounts say that in the 7th century AD the remains were sold for scrap metal.

A popular image shows the Colossus standing with one foot on each side of the harbor entrance while ships sailed between its legs. This picture was invented in the Middle Ages. Engineers today agree it would have been nearly impossible to build, and the statue would have fallen into the harbor and blocked it. It most likely stood on land with its legs together.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria

The city of Alexandria in Egypt was founded by Alexander the Great and became the capital of the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after him. To guide ships safely into its busy harbor, a huge lighthouse was built on the small island of Pharos. It was begun under Ptolemy I and completed around 280 BC under his son Ptolemy II. The architect is believed to be Sostratus of Cnidus.

The lighthouse is usually estimated to have been more than 100 metres tall, which made it one of the tallest buildings in the ancient world. Ancient descriptions and images on coins suggest it had three stages: a square lower section, an octagonal middle and a round top. At night a fire burned at the summit, and stories say a large mirror reflected sunlight during the day so that sailors could see it far out at sea.

The lighthouse remained in use for many centuries but was damaged by several earthquakes, especially in the 14th century, and eventually fell into ruin. In the 1470s the Mamluk sultan Qaitbay built a fortress on the same spot, partly from its fallen stones; the Citadel of Qaitbay still stands there today. In 1994 underwater archaeologists began finding huge blocks and statues in the harbor of Alexandria, some of which may have come from the lighthouse.

Its name lives on in many languages. The word for lighthouse is phare in French, faro in Italian and Spanish, all taken from the name of the island of Pharos.

How the Wonders Were Lost

Six of the seven wonders have disappeared, and their fates show the different forces that can destroy great buildings.

• Earthquakes brought down the Colossus of Rhodes, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
• Fire destroyed the earlier Temple of Artemis and, according to one account, the Statue of Zeus.
• War and raids damaged the rebuilt Temple of Artemis.
• Reuse of materials finished off several of them, as people took the stones and metal for new buildings and other purposes.
• Uncertainty surrounds the Hanging Gardens, which may never have existed in Babylon at all.

The Great Pyramid survived because of its shape and sheer mass. A pyramid has no tall, thin parts to topple and no roof to collapse, and its solid stone core was simply too big to carry away.

The Legacy of the Seven Wonders

The seven wonders have shaped how people think about great achievements. Words like mausoleum and colossal, the latter related to the name Colossus, come from them. The Statue of Liberty in New York was partly inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes, and the poem by Emma Lazarus mounted on its pedestal is titled "The New Colossus".

People have also kept making new lists. In 2007 a worldwide public vote organized by the New7Wonders Foundation chose the Great Wall of China, Petra, Christ the Redeemer, Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza, the Colosseum and the Taj Mahal as the New Seven Wonders of the World. The Great Pyramid of Giza, the last survivor of the original list, was given an honorary place.

Above all, the ancient wonders remind us what people could achieve without modern machines. With ropes, ramps, levers, bronze tools and enormous teamwork, ancient builders created monuments so impressive that people are still talking about them thousands of years later.