Seven Wonders of the World

Jason Carwile

Midterm

The Seven Ancient Wonders of the World show what mankind is capable of even without the technical advances we are fortune to live with today. Out of the seven wonders there is only one still standing today and that is the Great Pyramids in Egypt. The other six we have to piece together through stories told about them. There are disagreements of the other six wonders of the way the structures really looked like. The wonders will be talked about for years to come because we marvel at what the figures once were even though they do not exist today.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were ordered to be built by King Nebuchadnezzar II around 605 BC and they were built about 50 miles outside modern day Bagdad, Iraq. The garden was huge and one report by Diodorus says it was about 400 feet wide by 400 feet long and 80 feet high. The King decided to build the garden because he wanted to make his wife Amyitis feel more like she was at home. She came from an area with mountains and lots of greenery and relocated to an area that was flat and baked by the sun. His wife was depressed and homesick; in order to make her happy the king had the garden built. The garden was not actually hanging, but the Greek word kremsastos, was misinterpreted because it actually means overhanging. The garden was massive and is a Wonder of the Ancient World because of its size and the engineering they were able to accomplish in order to water the garden. They came up with a way to get water from the Euphrates River and carry up to the top of the garden in order to water the plants. Many question if the hanging garden existed because there has not been a true discovery of the garden, but if it did exist many believe the garden was wiped out by a 2nd century BC earthquake.

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia was another Wonder of the Ancient World. The statue was built by famous sculptor Phidias who traveled to Olympia around 432 BC to setup a workshop to start building the statue, which would take him 12 years to complete. The statue was built in a temple in Peloponnesus, which is modern Greece, and the reason for the temple being built was the Olympics were becoming bigger and greater in importance. The Olympiad was a time when people all over the world come together to compete and during that time differences were put aside. In order to honor the King of the gods, Zeus, they constructed a temple with the statue inside the temple. The temple was finished in 456 BC and the statue of Zeus was finished around 432 BC. The statue was 40 feet high and 22 feet tall with the statue's head almost grazing the roof. The statue was a wonder because of how massive it was and it was constructed of gold-plated bronze and ivory using a construction technique known as chryselephantine. In order to keep the statue in good condition there were people who had to attend to it to prevent the statue from becoming cracked. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. is compared to the Statue of Zeus, but Zeus stood twice as tall as Lincoln. Statue of Zeus stood for a while, but Christianity swept through Greece and the statue was not treated as it used to be. Emperor Constantine ordered the gold be stripped off the statue and in 392 AD Emperor Theodosious abolished the Olympics. The statue was moved to the city of Constantinople where it is believed it was destroyed in 475 AD by a fire that swept through the city.

The Colossus of Rhodes was another Wonder of the Ancient World. The Colossus was constructed on the Island of Rhodes to celebrate their victory and freedom in a conflict with Demetrius who was attempting to capture Rhodes. After the city of Rhodes won the battle they built the statue after their patron god Helios. The construction started