Countless examples of architectural and cultural greatness in humanity’s ancient
past are permanently lost to the modern world, reduced to dust throughout long
centuries or destroyed in upheavals both natural and anthropogenic in nature, or sometimes both.
The ‘seven wonders of the ancient world’ are perhaps the greatest examples of such
lost beauty. Located in the eastern Mediterranean, these legendary wonders have long captivated
and inspired the imagination. Welcome to our video giving an overview of the Seven Wonders.
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The first of our marvels is the most mysterious of them all - the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Our
classical sources on the great gardens, such as Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Josephus,
themselves drew from older writings which are now lost. In one of those vanished sources,
a Babylonian priest of Marduk known as Berossus
wrote how King Nebuchadnezzar II once wed a princess Amytis of the Median Empire. This was
probably a diplomatic arrangement and Amytis seems to have grown understandably homesick,
a fact which Nebuchadnezzar attempted to remedy in spectacular fashion
by constructing elevated gardens and filling them with trees from his wife’s place of origin.
Although widespread in many of the ancient sources,
this tale and the Gardens of Babylon are almost certainly a legend without any historical basis,
passed down and distorted over time. Nevertheless, it does contain the truth that
ornate royal gardens were used by ancient kings to display their wealth, ability to create lush
beauty within arid environments, and for luxury. A prime feature of such gardens, for example,
were trees possessing leaves which sheltered people of note from the scorching sun.
There is no evidence of elaborate garden constructions of this kind at Babylon. However,
it is speculated by historians such as Stephanie Dailey that the ‘Hanging Gardens’ did exist,
but not in Babylon. Instead, she began the now-dominant hypothesis that they were constructed
in the Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh by King Sennacherib, who reigned over vast swathes of the
Near East from 705 to 681BC. If these ‘Hanging Gardens of Nineveh’ were indeed a reality,
then their destruction would’ve likely come in 612BC, the year in which Assyria’s long-subjugated
empire rose up against it, descended on the imperial capital, and put it to utter ruin.
After two Persian invasions in the first decades of the fifth century were defeated,
the golden age of Classical Greece, and particularly Athens, began in earnest. New and
more sophisticated forms of culture were pioneered in this civilisational blossoming, including the
iconic Greek play, philosophical concepts which remain with us today and, crucially,
grander styles of architecture and sculpture. To enhance the hallowed shrine of Zeus at Olympia,
in the Peloponnese, the governing council there chose to build a large temple inside which an
already existing image of the god existed, and could be protected from the elements. However,
the Classical Age’s awe-inspiring tastes demanded something beyond a small cult object, and so an
exiled Athenian sculptor was hired to create an ideal image of the King of the Gods - Pheidias.
According to the retelling of later Roman authors, the sculptor’s inspiration for this great project
was Homer, and specifically verses 528 to 530 in the Iliad. In these particular passages, he
‘talks of an austere Zeus, the movement of whose head caused the whole of Mount Olympus to shake.”
Using techniques developed first during his work in Athens, Pheidias completed a spectacular 42
foot tall representation of Zeus sitting on a godly throne. In his right hand the figure holds
an icon of the goddess Nike, and in the left is grasped a sceptre crowned by an eagle. So huge did
the work sit in its temple that if the god were to stand, it would definitely destroy its housing.
For almost 1,000 years following its construction, the statue amazed and awed visitors who held Zeus
divine. However, when the Roman Empire instituted Christianity as its state religion in 391,
Theodosius I implemented laws which led to the sanctuary’s decline.
The statue itself was eventually carted off to adorn a palace in Constantinople,
where it was destroyed by fire in 462AD...
Three more of the ancient wonders could be visited across the Bosphorus on Asia Minor’s western
coast, one of which historian Edward Gibbon described in poetic fashion. “The arts of Greece
and the wealth of Asia had conspired to erect that sacred and magnificent structure. Successive
empires, the Persian, Macedonian and Roman revered its sanctity and enriched its splendour.”
This particular praise is reserved for none other than the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
First constructed in the sixth century BC reign of, and patronised by the prodigious wealth of,
Lydian King Croesus, the Temple was an intricately decorated, glittering rectangular structure
surrounded by 127 beautiful, 60 foot high fluted columns in the Ionic style.
To further emphasize its importance, the main platform was elevated slightly above ground level,
reached by any potential suppliant by perfectly crafted marble steps.
In addition to the splendour of its oriental construction,
mixed with the Hellenic spirit in which it was so clearly infused,
the so-called ‘Artemisium’ is rightly famed for the myriad historical figures:
According to legend, king Croesus was about to be sacrificed by the soldiers of Cyrus the Great,
but then the skies suddenly opened up and rain began to fall, the Persians relented,
and Croesus was saved. The temple’s patron goddess failed utterly to intervene in a similar manner
when Herostratus, who notoriously desired fame immortal by any means necessary, burned the
sanctuary down in 356, supposedly on the very evening Alexander the Great was born. Plutarch
justifies her absence by explaining how the goddess was dealing with just this special birth.
It was tenaciously rebuilt soon after, but in the midst of Rome’s Imperial Crisis,
Ephesus’ Artemisium was destroyed by piratical Gothic raiders
in 262. Although it was semi-rebuilt in the respite of the early fourth century,
Early Church Father St John Chrysostom completely levelled the pagan structure in 402.
Almost exactly 100 miles south of the grand temple of Artemis sat the great Carian city of
Halicarnassus. At that time, this Greek realm was a powerful satrapy-kingdom within the Achaemenid
Empire, so its ruler Mausolus was a Persian satrap as well as monarch of his own realm.
He moved his capital from the old Carian royal seat at Mylasa to the
ancient harbour city of Halicarnassus, refounding it after a period of neglect.
There, Mausolus also wed his sister Artemisia, who along with her husband began work on a lavish
tomb for the dynasty. When the Carian ruler did eventually perish in 353BC
with the work unfinished, Artemisia ensured it was completed before her death two years later.
Constructed using a skillful synergy of Hellenic, Persian,
and Egyptian architecture, this Mausoleum, as it became known in reference to its patron,
comprised a huge 440 foot circumference podium topped with Ionic columns and a pyramidal roof.
Decorating the intricate work were a number of statues and reliefs, the most notable of which was
one in the image of Mausolus riding a Herculean chariot, placed atop the mausoleum’s roof…
As one of the longer lasting ancient wonders, Mausolus’ tomb remained standing proudly
throughout the Macedonian and Roman Empires, and further into the crusader age. Consigned
to irrelevance long before, the colonnade and upper section of Mausolus’ resting place
was collapsed by an earthquake at some point in the early second millennium. However, like so many
other artefacts of the ancient past, the Mausoleum was condemned to oblivion by the crusaders.
Seeking to refortify their nearby fortress at Bodrum in 1494, the Knights of St John used a
significant amount of the remaining Mausoleum stone to bolster the fortifications, including
a number of slabs depicting the ‘Amazonomachy’ - the mythical battle between Greeks and the warrior
woman Amazons. The inner chamber was also looted in the aftermath, but a number of treasures were
eventually carted off to the British Museum during later excavations, where they remain to this day.
To conclude our journey around the Anatolian seaboard, we go to the island of Rhodes. At
the very tip overlooking one of the great Rhodian harbours for hundreds of years,
was a massive statue of the Greek sun god Helios - patron deity of the island and city.
Its name, as almost everyone knows, was the Colossus of Rhodes. The great statue’s history
begins with Alexander the Great’s death and the conflicts between the Macedonian generals and
nobles known as the Diadochi Wars. This continued until a deadly, unstable balance of power began
to emerge. Among those powers, the Antigonids - Antigonus I the ‘one-eyed’ and his son Demetrius
were unquestionably the most powerful, opposed by a coalition informally led by Ptolemy, in Egypt.
In 307, at the very zenith of Antigonus’ power, Rhodes refused to join in his war against Ptolemy
due to economic relations with the latter, leading eventually to the Siege of Rhodes by Demetrius in
305BC. Despite Demetrius’ skill, Rhodes survived the siege and then sold Demetrius’ siege engines
for funds to create a grand monument to their victory - the Colossus. After a significant time
of preparation, Rhodes’ appointed sculptor - Chares of Lindos, and his bronze casters
constructed the giant 30 metre tall statue between 294 and 282BC, when it was finally completed.
Unlike the Colossus’ literary clone in Game of Thrones, the Rhodian real thing did not
bestride the harbour entrance. Unfortunately, the metal and stone giant did not stand for long.
In 226, it and the city in which it stood was wracked by a massive earthquake which
broke Helios at the knee and sent him tumbling down, destroying many houses.
Ptolemy III - ruler of Egypt at the time, offered to bankroll a restoration,
but the Rhodians declined due to the ban of an oracle. So, in its collapsed state,
the Colossus lay where it fell for 900 years until the Arabs plundered it in 654AD.
Across the Mediterranean coast in the primeval kingdom of Egypt, our penultimate wonder
goes a long way to prove the assertion that Alexander the Great had some involvement in
almost every lofty occurrence after his time. In 332BC, during the Macedonian invasions,
Alexander annexed Egypt, including the offshore island of Pharos, from the Persian Empire.
Marching north from the old pharaonic capital of Memphis, Alexander came across a small
fishing village known as Rhacotis, located on a brilliant site. As the new pharaoh of Egypt,
he ordered that a mighty city be constructed there from which he could look across the sea to his
homeland. It was the first and most famous of many cities to bear the king’s name - Alexandria.
To accomplish the task in appropriately grandiose fashion, the king appointed his
talented court architect Dinocrates of Rhodes, who eagerly got to the task. Plans for the city’s
layout were drawn up in the latest Hellenistic grid-style developed by Hippodamus of Miletus.
With those blueprints to work on, the construction of this so-called
Queen of Cities began immediately. As Alexandria slowly but surely came into being
under Ptolemy’s supervision during the Diadochi Wars, a wealthy Ptolemaic courtier and diplomat
known as Sostratus provided, at least in part, the 800 silver talents necessary to fund his
city’s most famous piece of artistic genius mixed with practical usage - the Lighthouse,
or ‘Pharos’ of Alexandria, named so because of the island upon which it was constructed.
Just over 100 metres tall in total, the Pharos was almost certainly a three-tiered structure
decreasing in scale from bottom to top. The first was a rectangular segment of 60 metres,
above which was a cylindrical tower of a further 30 metres. The weight of the upper structure was
held by a similar cylinder structure within the lower tier. The lighthouse was capped
with a summit crowned by both a great beacon and statue of Zeus Soter - Zeus the Savior.
The resilient Pharos and its brilliant seaward light survived relatively intact until the
later part of the first millennium AD, when it was badly damaged by a series of earthquakes.
Arab traveller Ibn Battuta visited Alexandria in 1349 and according to him Pharos was in such
a bad state that ‘it was not possible to enter it or climb it up to the doorway’ …
The final wonder in our list - Khufu’s Great Pyramid - is the oldest and only one to survive.
The Great Pyramid was the culmination of centuries’ worth of research and advancements
in architecture during the Old Kingdom. Its predecessors were the rectangular, mud brick
‘mastaba’, and the following ‘step pyramid’, the most famous of which housed the sacred remains
of Third Dynasty Pharaoh Djoser at Saqqara. Constructed by the Pharaoh’s vizier Imhotep,
this structure was the very first to be constructed entirely out of stone.
Sophisticated construction techniques and innovations continued to advance apace
as the third dynasty came to an end, with the notable advent of the pyramid ‘complex’,
consisting of the magnificent tomb itself, adjacent mortuary temples, causeways,
sphinxes and other related buildings and tributes to the dead God King.
The second monarch to rule over the Fourth Dynasty - Khufu, or ‘Cheops’ as his name is
Hellenised - commissioned his vizier Hemon to construct a royal tomb for him as well,
selecting the site of Giza near the edge of the Libyan desert. His smooth-sided construct was the
first and grandest pyramid to occupy the area, but far from the last. Dedicated Egyptian officials
and workers undertaking corvee labour had the site levelled to provide an open section of
ground for the work. Then, probably using nothing but astronomical observation, the
orientation for each side was obtained. Contrary to modern expectations, this archaic method
was in fact incredibly accurate, and the alignment error on each side is only a fraction of a degree.
Hemon oversaw the building process, a process which we are still not certain of
4,500 years later. Historians consider two main possibilities: either that the Egyptians used
ramps to encircle the grand structure as it gradually rose, or that they had a long ramp
stretching out into the desert, extended as necessary as the pyramid ascended.
However it was done, the movement of stone blocks at minimum 5 tonnes in weight must have been a
titanic effort. When that stone was in place, the entire pyramid was layered with uniform blocks
of shimmering white limestone giving Khufu’s tomb an appropriately divine appearance. The labour of
Hemon and all of his myriad technicians, engineers and workers is so enduring that 4,500 years later,
we can still visit Giza and see the complex in its mostly intact state. So unfathomably ancient is
the structure that an Arab proverb states that “Man fears Time, yet Time fears the pyramids.”
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