Today we’ve got one left, the Great Pyramid at Giza. Also the oldest one, and in my mind the most magnificent of the lot. Still, if you could, which of the remaining six would you most like to see and have a look around in its heyday?
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. I’ve been to Ephesus (which is now located in and around the town of Selcuk, Turkey) and poked around the ruins of the temple. I’d love to have seen it in its heyday. Ephesus is still really incredible, by the way, and anyone who has the opportunity to visit shouldn’t miss it.
Antipater of Sidon, the fella who compiled the original list, agreed with you, writing;
"I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, “Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand”
It’s a toss up between the Colossus of Rhodes and the Hanging Gardens. Just to see what they were really like. Nothing like we commonly imagine would be my expectation.
I don’t know. I’m thinking that, while it sounds cool, it would just end up being a big disappointment. A time traveler’s equivalent of a tourist trap.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: — Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Shelley
The Hanging Gardens - provided that I could go for a walk around the rest of Babylon as well. I think that would be cooler to see than any of the wonders.
Undoubtedly the Colossus of Rhodes. The others were mainly big boxy buildings, and the statue of Zeus doesn’t seem to be anything special. The Pharos lighthouse would be neat if they really did use giant lenses or mirrors, but the odds are way against it.
the Colossus, on the other hand, wasn’t really like anything else – an enormous free-standing bronze statue dominating the harbor. I would’ve loved to have seen it before the patina turned it green (If there ever was such a time – it probably took so long to build that it might have acquired that verdigris during construiction).
If you want to see what it looked like, the modern Statue of Liberty is probably awfully close – it was deliberately built about the same height, with the same cladding, and featured the same “sunburst” rays coming out of the head. If an earthquake hadn’t toppled it so early, Charlton Heston could’ve done his speech from the end of Planet of the Apes in front of it.
for an interesting fictional treatment of its building (a la Pillars of the Earth) dig up a copy of L. Sprague de Camp’s The Bronze God of Rhodes. There’s also a literally spectacular (and none too accurate) movie about the statue, The Colossus of Rhodes , directed by a pre-Clint-Eastwood-western Sergio Leone
I’ve seen the pyramids and…well, I wasn’t that impressed. I don’t know if they just couldn’t stand up to the hype, or because I’d been working all week and was whacked out, or whatever.
They just didn’t seem as big or as impressive as I’d expected. And I don’t say this lightly. I’ve seen other things which absolutely did live up to expectations (The Barrier Reef, Milford Sound) and others that went way above (Cologne and Ulm Cathedral, Pompei).
Is it perhaps an optical illusion? maybe they don’t “tower” like…oh I don’t know…a tower of some kind?
I’ve been to Ephesus, Olympia and Rhodes and have seen any number of shows regaling the majesty of the others. The most intriguing for me will always be the Colossus.
