Seven Wonders of The Ancient World

Numerous sites have been catalogued over the ages in various lists as the Wonders of the World. These sites are both natural as well as man-made constructions that fascinate us. An attempt is made here to bring out these compilations one by one.

The first is the list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that identifies seven most remarkable man-made classical antiquity sites. These sites were popular among the Hellenic sight-seers around the Mediterranean rim. The number 7 according to the Greeks represented prosperity and plenty.

The historian Herodotus (484 BC–ca. 425 BC) and the scholar Callimachus (ca 305–240 BC) brought out the first list of the ancient world, but their writings have not survived except as references. The Great Pyramids of Giza (also called the Khufu’s) is one of the oldest and the largest of the three pyramids, The Statue of Zeus at Olympia made by the Greek sculptor Phidias (photo, right), Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (photo, left) in Turkey (only foundations and sculptural fragments remain), Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Turkey, which is a tomb built for Mausollos, a Persian governor by his wife Artemisia, the Colossus of Rhodes (Grece), the large statue of the Sun god destroyed by an earthquake in antiquity, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria on the small offshore island of Pharos in Egypt figure in this list. The earlier list had mentioned the Ishtar Gate as the seventh wonder, but this seems to have been replaced by the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

The Greeks had categorized these sites as “miracles” and not as Wonders. The list that is known to us came up during the Middle Ages.

Source: Google

Images: Google