In one of our recent videos, we covered the histories, purpose and architectural achievements
of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - the Giza Pyramid, Colossus of Rhodes, Hanging Gardens,
Statue of Zeus, Pharos of Alexandria, Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Temple of Artemis. Since
that video performed so well and since there are so many more great marvels to cover, we decided to
make a second episode on the topic with seven more lesser known wonders from days that are long gone.
Welcome to our video covering a host of ancient wonders that you might not have heard about.
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‘Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime, a rose-red city half as old as time.’ goes the final
couplet of John William Burgon’s ‘Petra’. But what actually was Petra and how did it come to be?
Most people have seen the signature photograph of a marvelous, collonaded entranceway-like structure
carved into a mountainside in Southern Jordan, but the story of Petra and its proper scale are
often ignored. With an area of over 100 square miles between and within a series of mountains
and hills, Petra was the capital and greatest city of the ancient Nabataean Kingdom - a mercantile
Arab realm located in the northwestern part of Arabia. Over the course of 400 years between
the ages of Ptolemy I and Trajan, Nabataean rulers seized control over vital trade routes
and became prodigiously rich as ‘middlemen’ in the trade of vital products such as incense.
This phenomenal wealth allowed Nabataean rulers to construct the magnificent buildings
and monuments that we see at Petra today. When modern visitors arrive at the complex,
they travel through a kilometre-long gorge known as al-Siq, in the southeastern segment.
When they reach the other end, the gorge opens to reveal what appears at first to
be the aforementioned entrance to a Lord of the Rings-esque Dwarven mountain city.
This most awe-inspiring of Petra’s remains is actually known as Al-Khazneh - ‘The Treasury’,
and is thought to be the Mausoleum of Nabataean monarch Aretas IV, although its purpose is still a
mystery. It was made by ‘architecture in reverse’, excavating and hollowing out the space between
walls and columns in stone that already existed, rather than building them from nothing. Initially
Al-Khazneh was painted with rich colour, but that has worn away over the centuries. But the treasury
only one of the several dozen prominent sights within the bounds of Petra. As a religious centre,
several temples were present, as were festival theatres, bathhouses, titanic gates, houses,
further royal tombs, pools, waterworks and even a number of Christian churches, constructed after
the Nabataean Kingdom’s absorption into the Roman Empire by 106AD. Other trade routes surmounted
Petra in Late Antiquity and an earthquake in 363 damaged a number of structures. By the
Islamic period, the city was all but abandoned. In order to discover our next great world wonder,
we must voyage all the way east to the city of Xi’an in China. In 1974,
at the base of nearby Mount Li, a group of Chinese well diggers discovered shards of earthenware,
terracotta and arrowheads. Through years of subsequent excavation and study, this find would
eventually be identified as the tomb of the first emperor of China - Qin Shi Huangdi. This imperial
grave was, according to Edward Burman, ‘conceived on a scale more massive than any other monument
at that stage of human history.’ Throughout his notoriously stringent reign, the emperor employed
a total of perhaps 700,000 conscripted labourers to construct his magnificent tomb complex.
The core tumulus originally stood at 115 metres tall and was enclosed by double walls,
inside which were large temples, imperial halls and administrative buildings.
But the most iconic feature of the emperor’s tomb is undoubtedly the army of so-called Terracotta
Warriors discovered to the east of the primary mound. Although discovered in many pieces like
a giant jigsaw puzzle, each of those pieces was astonishingly well preserved, a fact which allowed
restorationists to piece them back together. Over 8,000 figures have been discovered and
rearranged so far, each one possessing individual details such as hand position and hair style.
This includes 130 chariots drawn by 520 horses, and a further 150 horses for cavalrymen.
The presence of terracotta civil officials, acrobats, strongmen, poets and musicians indicates
that it was designed to give Qin Shi Huangdi everything he might need in a life after this one.
Dashing back over to the chief land of all antiquities - Egypt, we find
an extraordinary gem which is often lost among the more well-known sites. In September 1900,
a stone-hauling donkey misstepped and fell into a hole in the ground. Its owner sent
word to the local Alexandria museum that he had ‘broken open the vault of a subterranean tomb’.
Tired of bogus finds, the curator sent his assistants instead, but what they found - the
so-called ‘Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa’, would occupy that curator for the rest of his life.
Archaeologists believe that this catacomb was used since the second century AD
as part of a ‘necropolis’ on Alexandria’s western side, to intern the dead for the next 200 years
before falling into disuse as the Roman empire fell on hard times. Perhaps the most stunning
aspect of this particular complex is the close intermingling of Egyptian, Greek and Roman
styles of art and even method of burial. From the remains of what was probably a funerary chapel of
some kind runs a windowed, six-metre-wide shaft traversed by a spiral staircase,
which leads into the tomb itself about ten metres underground. Between the base of the stairs and
the top-underground level there is a foyer area with stone-carved chairs, where visitors might’ve
rested. A brief passage from there would take a visitor to a circular antechamber which is itself
adjacent to the ‘Triclinium’ - a banquet hall used in feasts to honour the dead.
After descending a flight of stairs from the ‘rotunda’ room, a visit would pass a pronaos or
colonnaded ‘porch’ into a labyrinth like series of corridors containing burial niches on either side.
This section resembles something like a traditional Greek temple, and it serves as
the main area of the entire Catacomb. Below this middle tier, there is a third level
containing even more burial niches. However, this entire section is flooded and inaccessible. Unique
art engraved into the middle level of the tombs is what truly makes the catacomb a wonder. One author
said that the catacomb was “Visible evidence of an age when three cultures, three arts and three
religions were superimposed upon Egyptian soil.”, a fact which makes it unique in the ancient world.
Also unique in its diversity of civilizational influence is what may be perhaps the most
well-known but misunderstood institution in all of Alexandria - the great library.
Its point of origin was the early Hellenistic Period, when Ptolemy I commissioned Demetrius of
Phalerum to establish a library at his capital. It would be a grand, universal nexus of scholarship,
where all written works of the world would be assembled. In a greater library precinct which
was probably but not certainly located next to a port near the central city, were two distinct
institutions with a broad overlap of purpose. The mouseion or ‘museum’, dedicated to the muses,
was the equivalent of what we might describe as a research institute, which brought together great
scholars. Then there was the library itself, a place of books and scrolls which expanded by
the patronage of Ptolemy’s successors to become the world’s greatest collection of knowledge.
Ptolemy III is said to have treated with the other kingdoms and empires across the world,
asking them to lend their books for copying into his universal library.
Galen also tells us that Alexandrian customs officials were ordered to confiscate any books
that were found on any ship coming into port, so by 250BC, it possessed over 400,000 multiple-work
scrolls and another 90,000 single scrolls. At least one ‘daughter’ library was created, the
most well-known of which was the Serapeion, housed within the syncretic Greco-Egyptian god Serapis.
What exactly happened to the library is shrouded in myth. However, it probably began to decline
as its patron dynasty’s fortunes did - in around 100BC or thereabouts. Julius Caesar famously and
accidentally burned part of the library in 48BC, destroying part of the collection. A rebellion
and subsequent counterattack during the reign of Aurelian saw further destruction, and in 391
the Serapeion was sacked by Christians during the reign of Theodosius I.
Moving to Mesopotamia, we have a wealth of possible candidates, such as the restored Ziggurat
of Ur. However, still standing in its weathered but original form after almost 1,500 years is
the last glorious remnant of Sassanid Persian glory - the Taq Kisra - or ‘Arch of Khosrau’.
It was constructed in the 550s for the Sassanid monarch Khosrau I as the centrepiece of his
new palace. Although this era was one of warfare between Khosrau and the Byzantines,
experts from Constantinople were dispatched to assist the Shah in the palace’s development.
The masterful arch is around thirty-five metres in height and twenty-five metres wide,
originally covering a hall fifty metres in length, although much of that hall has collapsed
over the centuries. Uniform bricks of 30 by 12 centimetres squared and 7.5 by 3 centimetres thick
were utilised along with a swiftly-drying form of gypsum cement. To construct the lower walls, these
bricks were laid horizontally, and then turned to tilt on their edge for the arching section itself,
a sophisticated architectural method known as the pitched-brick technique.
While the core design of both the palace and its highlight arch were essentially Sassanid in
nature, the columned palace facades flanking it which formed and still form part of the
wider palace structure were Greco-Roman in style. Even so, the skills necessary
to construct an arch on Ctesiphon's scale were, at their root, Mesopotamian in origin.
Lesser predecessors can be found as far back as 2,500BC or even before, when the technique was
used to build small roofs from mud brick. When the Arab armies captured the Sassanid capital
in 637AD, they used the former throne room as a mosque, but quickly abandoned the city as not
to their liking. Even 200 years later, however, the Taq Kisra was still dubbed most beautiful
of any brick palace that ever existed. It is so resilient that, though undermined by
flooding over the hundreds of years since, even modern explosive weaponry detonating nearby
hasn’t succeeded in demolishing the arch. It remains today, along with a single palace facade.
In about 1850, far to the north of Ctesiphon on the upper reaches of the Tigris River,
English explorer Austen Henry and his staff unearthed a series of depository chambers designed
to store engraved tablets - a traditionally Mesopotamian equivalent of paper books.
This hoard on the site of old Nineveh, which was expanded in subsequent excavations,
became known as the ‘Library of Ashurbanipal’. Ashurbanipal - King of the Neo-Assyrian Empire,
is most notorious as a brutal conqueror and military leader, but this last great monarch of
Assyria also repeatedly and proudly boasted of both the depth of his knowledge and the
sheer quantity of topics he was versed in. Many palace reliefs of the king include his depiction
with a writing stylus tucked into his waist belt, as a symbol of his intellectual nature.
Over years Ashurbanipal collected over 30,000 clay tablets, authored by himself and by others.
When Nineveh was torched by the Medes and Babylonians in 612BC, the clay tablets were
baked harder by the fire and thereby preserved. The wonder in this bounty of Assyrian cuneiform
is not any specific library structure or grand piece of architecture, but the sheer historical
value of the discovery. With the discovery of Ashurbanipal’s library, thousands of contemporary
texts were discovered telling the story of the Assyrians in their own words. Containing pieces
of such diverse nature as divination, religious, medical and mathematical texts, Among the most
precious works found among the tablets was the Epic of Gilgamesh, a work of Babylonian poetic
genius. In 2021, the British Museum contains over 30,000 of these recovered tablets.
Our final wonder is perhaps the most iconic and well known, so well-known that its absence from
the list of seven primary ancient wonders often comes as a surprise - the Colosseum of Rome.
The story of this colosseum - known as the Flavian Amphitheatre,
is thoroughly bound in the fall of Augustus’ Julio-Claudian Dynasty and the rise of the
Flavians. Under the last Julio-Claudian emperor - Nero, a section of the Roman city centre,
annihilated by fire in 64, was extravagantly put back to use with the construction of the
emperor’s Domus Aurea - or Golden House. But Nero’s notorious excesses and insanity
eventually resulted in his demise and civil war, which was eventually won by Vespasian.
As part of the first Flavian emperor’s programme of de-Neroization, he ‘gave back’ to the Roman
people Roman land appropriated by Nero for his own personal pleasures. Although a section of the
Domus Aurea remained in imperial usage for a long time after, the site of the last Julio-Claudian’s
nearby private lake was converted into what we now call the Colosseum. Much of the funding for this
mammoth project was garnered from the concurrent conquest of Judea, which had been concluded by
Vespasian’s son Titus. Over the course of a stable Flavian decade, from roughly 70 to 80AD,
the 190 by 155 metre Flavian Amphitheatre was built in Rome’s core with stone and concrete.
Its beautiful circular exterior stood three ‘stories’ tall, each possessing a series of arched
entrances supported by semicircular columns. The bottom level possessed columns in the doric style,
followed on the second level by Ionic style columns and crowned by ornate Corinthian columns.
Within the structure there were seats for over 50,000 attendees, who would’ve been protected
from sun and rain, as they spectated, by a large awning. These spectators would’ve been gathered
to observe gladiatorial combat, mock hunts, wild animal fights and even staged naval engagements.
Popular entertainment of this kind continued for about 400 years until the oncoming tide
of Christianity and the decline of the Western Empire reduced the Colosseum’s
usage. It suffered earthquakes, lightning and was eventually abandoned completely, only used
as a quarry for other building projects such as St. Peter’s Cathedral and the Palazzo Venezia.
We are considering covering more wonders in our future videos, so make sure you
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