Jordan - The seven wonders of the ancient world

the
SEVEN
WONDERS
of the
ANCIENT
WORLD

First published 2002 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Copyright 2002, Taylor & Francis.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-77187-1 (pbk)

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Typeset by Fakenham Photosetting Limited, Fakenham, Norfolk

For Marie

The author and publisher would like to thank Julian Smith, classics mentor, for his many helpful contributions and Mac Dowdy, architectural historian, for his careful yet striking reconstructions of the Seven Wonders.

The watercolour paintings appearing in colour throughout originally appeared in J. A. Hammerton, Wonders of the Past, 1924.

The locations of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

T HE very notion of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World raises questions for both of its nouns and both of their adjectives. Why seven? What was so wonderful about these particular wonders? What do we mean by the Ancient World ancient for whom and what sort of world?

Interestingly, the notion did not start with Wonders but with Sights. The two words in Greek were quite similar and the one slipped into the other naturally enough: theamata turned into thaumata. These Seven Sights for the armchair travellers of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds to sight-see as they read about them had to be, in the nature of things, wonderful enough to arouse awe in the first place. On the whole, it was scale of engineering and/or luxury of concept and appointment that prompted the choice. The Pyramids of Egypt had both unparalleled scale and a seemingly over-luxuriant expenditure of effort to construct them. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were self-evidently a luxurious indulgence achieved by triumphs of engineering (which were equally apparent in the great walls of that city). The gigantic Statue of Zeus at Olympia was decked in the most elaborate adornment and sculpted by the most ingenious means. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus combined scale with vivacity of decoration and pioneering architectural devices. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was the biggest tomb in the Graeco-Roman world (after the Pyramids) and exhibited an ostentatious compendium of international styles put together with massive engineering effort. The Colossus of Rhodes, even in the wrecked state into which it fell within half a century of its completion, continued to proclaim the majesty of its conception and ambition of its construction as a ruin. The Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria was before all else an essay in innovatory engineering on a grand scale.

The temple at Ephesus

Greatness of size, luxury of appointment and boldness of concept and execution, combining to make a vivid imaginative impact on those who saw them and those who read about them: these were the qualities that first got these sights-cum-wonders listed, in a certain cultural context that we call the Hellenistic world. The same qualities went on recommending them to the Roman world that succeeded and absorbed the Hellenistic one. (With the end of the Roman empire, there came also the end of the entire epoch that we know as the Ancient World, reaching back beyond Hellenism through classical Greek and biblical times to the older civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia whose first rise marked the beginnings of ancient history for the Western world.)

Hellenism was the international culture that Alexanders conquests of the late fourth century BCE engendered in Greece, in the (mostly eastern) Mediterranean world of Greek colonies and in the Greek-ruled reaches of Egypt and Asia Minor (and some way beyond). Hellenism spoke Greek and read Greek and was heir to the religious, artistic and intellectual traditions of the classical Greeks; but it encompassed, too, the rougher ways of the Macedonian Greeks from whom Alexander the Great himself had sprung and the frankly oriental habits of the peoples brought into the fold in the east. (Alexander, for one, liked to dress up as a Persian and to put on the semi-divine pretensions of the eastern monarchies.) Hellenism survived the political break-up of Alexanders empire at the hands of his succeeding generals and thrived in the cities they maintained, to greatly influence the Roman empire in due course.

Of course, Hellenism did not come into being overnight with Alexander of Macedon. Many of the seeds of its flowering were germinating in late classical Greece. With its trading depots in Egypt and its important commercial cities along the coast of Anatolia, Greece had long been on the receiving end of exotic influences; in some of its richer colonies, in the western Mediterranean too, Greek culture had already taken a turn for the luxurious and even megalomaniac before the coming of the Macedonians in the late fourth century BCE. (BCE = Before the Common Era; CE = the Common Era of our present dating system.)

The philosopher Plato who died in 347 BCE, a decade after Alexander was born, could evidently see the Hellenistic way of life coming in his own day. His moral tale of Atlantis, one of the last things he wrote, was designed to contrast the old, sober virtues of the Greeks (as he saw them) with a changing worlds new and luxurious vices, which he projected backwards in time onto his Atlanteans. These Atlanteans finally took grandeur, including self-aggrandisement, luxurious excess and high-handed ambition so far that, for all their power, they were defeated thousands of years ago in Platos fiction by the virtuous Athenians of yore, and then drowned by the gods. Plato might have welcomed the Macedonians at first as a stern, firm hand on the degenerating Greeks around him: he would have been appalled to find Alexander going on to usher in a semi-oriental empire of greedy commerce, ostentation, showy mixed-up religions and everybody on the make. It is to be very much doubted whether he would have been at all impressed with the Seven Wonders of the World that Hellenistic culture was to make so much of.