1. THE GREAT PYRAMID (GIZA, EGYPT)
The oldest and only surviving wonder is the largest of Egypt’s eighty pyramids, built in honor of the Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu about 2560 B.C. Located just outside of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile, and flanked by the slightly smaller pyramids of Khafra and Menkaura, it contains about 2.3 million blocks of quarried limestone, some weighing over 3 tons. It is 755 feet long each side and, although erosion and damage have reduced its original height by 33 feet to about 443 feet, remained the world’s tallest structure until the nineteenth century. The effort involved in the pyramids’ construction—Herodotus was told that as many as 100,000 men were involved—has beggared the belief of scholars since. Egyptologist Kurt Mendelssohn notes in The Riddle of the Pyramids (1974): “The pyramids of Egypt are immensely large, immensely ancient and by general consensus, extremely useless.” He concludes: “What mattered was not the pyramid but building the pyramid.”
2. THE HANGING GARDENS (BABYLON, IRAQ)
Details are scarce regarding what were said to be terrace gardens atop arches seventy-five feet above ground level sustained by the rerouted water of the Euphrates. They are ascribed to Nebuchadnezzar II, who is said to have commissioned them around 562 B.C. to ease the homesick pinings of a royal bride from lush and mountainous Medes. Archaeologists have found evidence of a man-made mountain and a system for providing artificial rain, although there remains dispute about where the site was located. The visiting Pliny the Elder found them in ruins about A.D. 70.
3. THE STATUE OF ZEUS (OLYMPIA, GREECE)
Constructed about 430 B.C. from ivory and gold by the Athenian Phedias—also one of the decorators of the temple at Ephesus—the statue of a seated Zeus stood forty-three feet tall and was enclosed in a multicolored temple near the site of the ancient Olympics (then held every five years). His eyes were jewels, his throne footstool gold. The statue defied Caligula’s demands that it be brought to Rome in the first century, but not a plan to move it east after the temple was closed when the Olympics were outlawed as a pagan practice in A.D. 391. It reposed in a palace in Constantinople for seventy years before being destroyed by fire.
4. THE TEMPLE OF DIANA (EPHESUS, TURKEY)
Philon of Byzantium, the mathematician who first surveyed the Seven Wonders, thought the temple in the Ionian city of Ephesus most spectacular: “But when I saw the temple at Ephesus rising to the clouds, all these other wonders were put in the shade.” Commissioned by Croeus in about 550 B.C., the marble temple featured 127 66-feet-high columns and was decorated by a host of bronzes, including a statue of Diana, goddess of hunting. St. Paul denounced it in the New Testament, stating that “the temple of the Great Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed.” After two centuries it was indeed seriously damaged by an arsonist, though it was the Goths who finally razed it to the ground in A.D. 262.
5. THE TOMB OF KING MAUSSOLLUS (HALICARNASSUS, TURKEY)
The inaugural mausoleum, in the Persian province of Caria, was commissioned by Queen Artemisia upon the death in 353 B.C. of her husband/brother Maussollus, after she had first drunk his ashes in a cup of wine. The rectangular sculpted marble tomb, surrounded by thirty-six Ionic columns supporting an architrave that bore a statue of the monarchs in a chariot, took three years to build. An earthquake damaged the roof and colonnade after 1,900 years, and the Knights of St. John of Malta fortified a crusader castle with stones from the tomb.
6. THE COLOSSUS (RHODES, THE AEGEAN SEA)
This 108-feet-high nude of Apollo, constructed of stone and iron plated with bronze, was designed for Rhodians by Chares of Lindos to celebrate the lifting of a twelve-year siege by Ptolemy I of Macedonia and erected on its marble base in about 260 B.C. Cassius’s famous allusion in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—“He doth bestride this narrow world like a Colossus”—is misleading: The statue stood with feet together on a promontory at the harbor entrance. Badly damaged by an earthquake after less than forty years, it was never restored, on the advice of an oracle. Invading Arabs sold the 360 tons of stone, iron, and bronze to a scrap merchant, who needed 900 camels to freight it to Syria.
7. THE PHAROS (OFF ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT)
A 384-feet lighthouse designed by Sostratus of Cnidus on the orders of Ptolemy Soter in 290 B.C., though not completed until the reign of his son Ptolemy Philadelphus. Erected on a small island and topped with an image of Poseidon, it relied for illumination on a huge brazier and reflecting mirror visible over 300 miles from shore. Weakened by earthquakes in 956, 1303, and 1323, its stone was plundered for a medieval fort by Egypt’s Sultan Qaitby in 1480.