The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World | Gioventù Ambasciatrice

Long before steel and concrete, before diesel-driven machinery, there was mud brick, stone carving—and ingenuity. Man conceived and erected mind-boggling wonders still discussed today. He relied on simple techniques to solve the most difficult challenges. Few consider that ancient man created the most stunning works of design and architecture without the aid of modern technology.

Whether soaring towers, multilevel mega malls, elaborate indoor botanical gardens or sprawling urban communities, the monuments of today are firmly rooted in the designs of the past, proving that ancient man understood far more than most give him credit.

Let’s pry open the dusty pages of history and take an in-depth look at some of the most startling projects man has created.

Origins of the List

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World lined the Mediterranean Sea and stood in what was once the empire of Alexander the Great. A powerful military commander, Alexander conquered lands from Greece to Egypt, and as far east as India. United under him, these regions experienced a period of renaissance, a time when the arts and construction flourished.

The city of Alexandria, in Egypt, named after Alexander, became a center of culture and learning. From it proceeded traveling historians, many of whom were sent city to city documenting the great works, cultures and stories of the people.

Callimachus, one such scholar, wrote a book naming the wonders of the world. His criteria drew from size, design and craftsmanship. He chose projects without equivalent, some of which were more than 2,000 years old. However, before his work became widely known, it was destroyed by fire.

The next mention of the wonders appeared in the second century. Greek scholar Antipater of Sidon mentioned seven wonders of architecture and sculpture in a short epigram that seems to follow Callimachus’ work.

For hundreds of centuries, successive peoples altered this list, thinking their own works should be included. Structures such as the Roman Coliseum, Solomon’s Temple and Noah’s Ark were added to the list.

However, during the 16th-century Renaissance, Dutch artist Marten Heemskerk revisited the original list. Fascinated with the early Greek epigram, he created a series of fanciful engravings to capture the majesty and wonder of each project. While they didn’t reflect the actual structures, the engravings were accepted as fact, and became the list we use today.

Despite the fantastic scale of each project, only one remains standing today: the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt. Through much study, archeologists have located the other wonders and recreated the story of each.

Source: ArtToday, Inc.

Source: Getty Images

#1 The Great Pyramid at Giza

In stark contrast with the flat, windblown terrain of the Giza plateau, the nearly 500-foot-tall Great Pyramid, a perfectly formed geometric shape, is an awe-inspiring wonder to behold.

It was built as a tomb for Pharaoh Khufu in 2560 BC, a full 2,000 years before the other wonders appeared. The pharaoh, a spiritual and military leader of the ancient Egyptians, was seen as a god who descended to Earth to rule the empire. The pyramid was his tomb, meant to be a conduit between the heavens and Earth upon his death.

The Pyramid at Giza is the largest of its kind in the world. Subsequent structures did not match the longevity or size of the first. The Great Pyramid’s height is 480 feet tall, just short of the Washington monument. Until 150 years ago, it remained the tallest structure in the world. Today, it is the world’s tallest stone structure.

The plateau of Giza was chosen as the Great Pyramid’s construction site since it was rich in stone and was a quarry to mine the huge blocks necessary for construction. Most stone blocks weighed over five tons. A block was placed every two minutes on the site—yet even at this rate, it took the Egyptians 23 years to finish!

While authorities disagree on the total number of workers required to build the pyramid, estimates range from 20,000 Egyptian workers to three shifts of 100,000 slaves. Either way, workers were extremely skilled in pyramid building and had developed finely honed techniques to make construction as efficient as possible. Instead of using rollers, as some suggest, the workers most likely employed sleds, or flat skiffs, that slid easily over the gravelly sand. Once inertia was broken, they could slide the heaviest stones.

Ramps made of mud, rubble and loose material allowed the sledges to slide with little friction. Workers either used a spiral ramp to transport the blocks to the top of the rapidly growing pyramid or a straight and narrow ramp.

Both presented difficulties. Spiral ramps would have made it difficult to maneuver the blocks at the corners of the ramp. The size and weight of the block would have made it nearly impossible to pivot. A straight ramp would have alleviated this problem, but to reach the pyramid’s highest point, the ramp would have had to be over a mile long. This would have extended far beyond the quarry where the stone was mined. The ingenuity of Egyptian engineers will probably never be known.

Aside from size, the primary reason the pyramid is considered a wonder is the mathematical precision used in its design and construction. The base of the pyramid covers 13 acres, or roughly nine football fields. Almost a perfect square, the pyramid’s parallel ends form a north/south axis. The Egyptians, armed only with rope and geometry, managed to make a structure that had four nearly perfect equal sides composed of five ton blocks of stone. Recent scientific measurements have revealed the four sides are only several inches different in length.

To finish, polished limestone blocks were added to the pyramid’s exterior. This made the structure smooth and white, not jagged and stepped as we know it today. The Great Pyramid of Giza glimmered in the sun—the tallest structure in the world—seen for miles amid the rugged, flat desert.

Modern architects still employ the pyramid form for its stability and proportion. Architect I.M. Pei borrowed this form for the pyramid at the Louvre in France, using lightweight glass instead of stone.

#2 The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The city of ancient Babylon was set in the Arabian Desert in modern-day Iraq. Ancient Babylon was the most splendid and prosperous city in the Mediterranean. The city’s 56-mile perimeter—laid on a grid plan—had walls so thick that two chariots could race on their top side by side. Positioned at the Euphrates River, Babylon was a major economic power in the region.

Nebuchadnezzar, the city’s king, had amassed great wealth and power, but was continually hampered by the rival Median Empire. Legend has it, he arranged a marriage between his son and a Median princess, forging a bond of peace.

However, after moving to Babylon, the princess longed for her homeland, a lush mountain region. To satisfy her, the king constructed a manmade mountain and planted on it the most splendid gardens ever constructed: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Archeological research suggests that the garden was a 300-foot-tall stepped pyramid of several terraces covered in foliage. This “green pyramid” rose from the plains of the desert, complete with terraced waterfalls and lush plant life from Media. Many species of trees were reported to have been over 50 feet tall.

Today’s illustrations of the garden are highly dramatized, and details about it are rife with myth, legend and religious stories, making it difficult to discern the facts. Through the ages, Babylon was completely destroyed and little evidence remains proving the structure ever stood.

However, if the story of the hanging gardens is true, construction posed significant challenges for Nebuchadnezzar. The desert climate made irrigation nearly impossible for a garden of that height and scope.

To surmount the structural challenges, the Babylonians likely used a special combination of mud and water from the Euphrates to make bricks. Examining the architecture of the city, bricks may have been mass-produced on the plains surrounding the city and used for construction.

The exact location of the gardens is unknown, and it is likely that they were destroyed within 100 years of their construction, leaving few traces to fully understand their scale. However, gaps in the city grid show it may have occupied several blocks of the city.

Gardening was respected in the Babylonian Empire. Under Nebuchadnezzar, the perfume and herbal industries boomed. The Babylonians were knowledgeable in plants and were skilled at farming and irrigation. Many historians believed that they received much of this special insight into gardening from the ancient Israelites, whom they took captive.

The most significant challenge to the Babylonians remained irrigation.

How could they elevate hundreds of gallons of water 300 feet to sustain a garden that size? While it has been supposed that human labor was used, a work force of hundreds of laborers would be staggering.

Historians speculate that the Babylonians used a complex series of buckets and pulleys assembled at the core of the gardens. These machines would have constantly dipped into a water source at the base of the gardens and be raised, dumping into pools at the top of the structure. From these elevated pools, waterfalls pouring down the stepped pyramid would have provided water to the many levels of terraced plant life.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon remains one of the most elusive and mysterious of the Seven Wonders. Existing half in legend, but rooted in the baked brick techniques of Babylonian past, this is arguably the most beautiful of all Seven Ancient Wonders. It stands as the only wonder displaying creation’s beauty alongside the achievement of man.

Five More Wonders…

With each of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, mankind proved time and again that the simplest techniques and ingenuity achieved a grand work—long before the development of modern technology. Today these works cannot be recreated. Often, the secrets of design and construction are buried in the sands of history.

However, opening the books of history and archeology, we are able to clear this sand and peer through time at monuments so grand that they collectively earned the title the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

[Read Part 2]