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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