"25.000" "Lost Treasures of the Ancient World The Seven Wonders" "= MVGroup =" "Egypt, land of the Pyramids mighty monuments constructed in the earliest days of history." "Monuments that endure to this day, attracting visitors from across the world." "Many of these visitors come to Egypt, to see one pyramid in particular, the great pyramid of Cheops." "They know the Pyramids have long been classed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World." "The most celebrated man-made constructions of ancient times." "Of these, only this great pyramid survives, but history and archaeology enable us to tell the stories of all seven all of them Lost Treasures of the Ancient World." "The word 'wonder' has been defined as a feeling of surprise curiosity and astonishment." "The word also applies to anything which provokes this feeling." "An ancient construction like the great pyramid is undoubtedly a wonder." "It's not the only one of course, even modern buildings have been referred to as wonders, the Eiffel Tower being a good example." "But when we talk of the Seven Wonders of the World, we usually mean seven specific man-made constructions from before the birth of Christ." "The idea of the Seven Wonders stems from the great days of Greece and Rome." "At that time many travellers and writers identified what they considered the greatest art and architecture of the known world." "Not all of them agreed in their choices." "The constructions that we now accept as the Seven Wonders would not become fixed until long after antiquity." "But even in classical times the notion that there should be seven specific great human achievements defined as wonders proved irresistible to many." "The number seven does seem to crop up in a surprising number of different contexts." "There are the seven wise men and there are the seven hills of Rome." "Later on in the Middle Ages the seven liberal arts." "They seem to go for sevens even when there are really rather more we get the seven Pleiades for instance has a constellation when there are more of them than that." "The idea of collecting wonders or sites seems to be quite widespread and probably goes back as early as the famous 5th century historian Herodotus who visited the Persian empire and saw the hanging gardens of Babylon and the great Pyramids." "The idea that there should be seven and only seven is, I think, partly a modern idea although we do have even from the second century BC, a list of seven theamater Seven Wonders which is not exactly identical to our modern notion." "Even in the dark ages the idea of Seven Wonders remained." "In the sixth century AD, the Bishop of Tours produced a list of wonders that included the temple of Solomon at Jerusalem ." "The famed English monk, the Venerable Bede included the capitol at Rome amongst his choices." "There did gradually come to be a fairly standard list with seven items on it, but on some of the lists you will get one or two of the wonders have her dropped off and alternative ones have been put in in their place" "Quite often we have the walls of Babylon as well as the hanging gardens." "The Pharos of Alexandria is one that quite often doesn't figure so there seems to have been a great fluidity in what constituted the Seven Wonders." "Roman authors put in Roman things, so the Capitol and the Coliseum tended to get there and then Christians got in Noah's Ark or Solomon's temple so it always fixed a bit, but the number seven seemed to be a number they always wanted to come up with." "The Seven Wonders that we understand today today would not be fully codified until the Renaissance, that time when the Western world began to look back to Classical times." "Renaissance scholars began to consider the greatest constructions of Classical times and seven would eventually become established." "The Seven Wonders of the World as we have them them in our modern formulation spread over an astonishing length of time although the first one to be built the great pyramid at Giza belongs to the early third millennium and is far and away the earliest," "all the others belong to the first millennium BC." "From the very beginning, no credible list of wonders has been complete without the Pyramids." "In size, material and age the Pyramids are unique amongst monuments made by man" "The greatest of them, Cheops' pyramid at Giza is 450 feet high." "It's the largest stone building on Earth." "It's 4500 years old." "At that time, many human communities were still in the Stone Age." "The wheel had only recently been invented, yet the Egyptians of that era had the ability to build these massive geometrical structures that endure to this day." "We know much about the society of Ancient Egypt." "The Egyptians were skilled farmers, cultivating the land made fertile by the annual flooding of the Nile." "They grew wheat, barley and fruit." "They also grew papyrus reeds which were made into writing scrolls." "A written language was developed by 3000 BC and the survival of mainly ancient Egyptian texts has provided scholars with invaluable information about their life." "We know, for instance, that Egypt was ruled by kings known as Pharaohs whose successive rules became classified into Dynasties." "The first Dynasty is held to have begun around 3100 BC." "The famous pharaoh Tutankhamen was one of the 18 Dynasty in the 14th century BC." "While the Dynastic lines only ended in 30 BC with the death of Cleopatra." "The Pyramids began to appear in the third Dynasty with the reign of pharaoh Djoser." "He commissioned the architect Imhotep to build a mausoleum for him at Saqqara." "To build this memorial Imhotep chose to use a recently discovered building material stone blocks." "Using these blocks Imhotep and his Labourers built the first of the pyramids" "Djoser's stepped pyramid." "The Pharaohs in the first half of the third millennium BC seemed to have had quite elaborate memorials but still in a rather simple fashion compared with the step pyramids that came afterwards." "There would be a simple burial chamber and a ground with perhaps some timber over it and then a simple mound over the top of it." "Although something called a Mastaba which seems to have been based upon a picture of the bench that you might have outside a shop or something, which again is a very simple and rather flat structure which builds up over the burial mound." "Now the first step pyramid is rather building on that idea of a bench, it's just several benches which are built one on top of another, gradually stepping inwards so that you get something like the pyramid structure," "but it isn't quite smoothed off in the same way." "Imhotep's step pyramid would start an unstoppable trend." "Pharaohs after Djoser wanted their own pyramids." "The pyramid of Snefru, the first king of the fourth Dynasty was the first to have the giant steps filled in, producing the smooth pyramid shape that is most familiar to us today, while the pyramid commissioned by his son also adopted this new style of design." "But this pyramid would become famous more for its magnitude than its design." "Snefru's son was pharaoh Khufu." "Khufu, however, is better known by the Greek version of his name Cheops." "Near to what is now modern day Cairo, the greatest pyramid of them all was constructed in this pharaoh's name." "This is the first, and possibly the greatest, of the Seven Wonders of the World the great pyramid at Giza." "And now we are in front of the great pyramid built by king Cheops the second king of the fourth dynasty over than 2600 BC." "And this one actually was considered like a miracle or a wonder of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, still standing until now." "This one actually is the biggest one in all Egypt because Egypt has about 96 Pyramids, but the most interesting one and the most famous, the great pyramid of king Cheops." "Designed by the Pharaohs cousin Bizier-hemon and built over a period of 30 years, the proportions of the great pyramid are staggering:" "it's 450 feet high, it's sides are 756 feet." "The difference between the longest side and the shortest side is just 8 inches." "Some 2,300,000 stones were used to construct the pyramid, all of them at least two tonnes in weight." "Until the 19th century AD, this was the tallest man-made construction anywhere on earth." "It remains the tallest construction in stone, a man-made mountain." "In the great pyramid, the chamber for the king himself is almost in the centre, slightly off centre in fact, and in the chamber where the king was buried is a giant sarcophagus." "Here we are in the third chamber of the king Cheops and this actually the only one which has a sarcophagus of the king which is made out of granite carried from Aswan." "The measure of this room is about 10 metre by 5 metre and the ceiling itself consisting of nine slabs of granite weighs about 400 tonnes carried from Aswan." "The last governed region in Upper Egypt about 1500 kilometres South of Cairo." "And here we discovered the sarcophagus of the king which we found empty without any Mummy because the robbers of the Pyramids at the time came over and steal everything even the Mummy of the king Cheops." "Even today we cannot be totally sure how Cheops' pyramid was constructed." "A combination of ramps and levers must have been deployed, worked by tens of thousands of individual Labourers, both on the site and in the many stone quarries set up all over Egypt." "The greatest Greek historian Herodotus claimed that 100,000 men were employed on the great pyramid." "He also provided an account of how hey went about their work." "After laying the stones for the base, they raised the remaining stones to their places by means of machines formed of short wooden planks." "The first machine raised them from the ground to the top of first step." "On this, there was another machine which received the stone upon its arrival and conveyed it to the second step, whence the third machine advanced it still higher." "The construction method adopted certainly achieved its purpose." "As the third millennium AD begins, this monument from the third millennium BC endures." "Of all the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it's far and away the oldest." "It's also the only one that can be seen today." "However, thanks to the writings of classical historians such as Herodotus Philo, Strabon and Pliny the Elder and the more recent efforts of archaeologists, the story of these six monuments can also be told." "The first of the Seven Wonders to be constructive after Cheops' pyramid would not be built until 2000 years later, in the city of Babylon, east of the Euphrates in present-day Iraq." "In the seven and sixth centuries BC," "Babylon was a great city, famed for its imposing city walls and the monument known as the Tower of Babel." "Under the conquering king Nebuchadnezzar," "Babylon attained the peak of its power." "This biblical king has become legendary, not only as a great General, but also as a builder the builder of the second wonder of the world, the hanging gardens of Babylon." "If the classical sources are correct and the hanging gardens were built about 600 BC, the ruler at that point was Nebuchadnezzar and he is in fact responsible for pretty-much all of the buildings we can see currently see at Babylon (as the sort of remains)." "And Babylon at that point was the biggest city that had ever been built." "According to later Greek historians such as Berosus the hanging gardens were built for Nebuchadnezzar's wife Amayitis." "She came from Media, which is a hilly country, and when he settled her in, she was a bit unhappy because there was no mountain scenery around her." "To cheer her spirits, the king ordered the construction of a living mountain to remind her of her homeland." "As described by the historians of antiquity, the hanging gardens must have been a remarkable achievement." "Built on a stone site 400 feet square, they consisted of several stepped terraces rising eventually to a height of 50 cubits, around 80 feet." "The terrace layout explains the term 'hanging'." "Strictly speaking gardens did not hang, but overhung from one terrace level down to the next." "The accounts vary quite a bit for the hanging gardens." "One thing they seem to agree upon is that it was a rising set of terraced gardens." "It seems to have been a rising series of galleries, with the gardens planted on top." "And one of the sources talks about the light that could come into these galleries so that these, themselves, could have almost a pavilion structure." "With the structure completed, the gardens themselves were planted with lawns, flowers, streams and trees." "Trees up to 50 feet in height." "The construction was apparently so strong that it could accommodate the massive quantity of earth required." "More remarkable still was its system of irrigation." "With little rain in Babylon, water had to be taken from the Euphrates and pumped 80 feet in the air to flow down the terraced levels." "How they raised the water has been the matter of great scientific debate." "I personally think that the least they had what the Assyrians and Babylonians called the Shaduf method, which was that at each level there was a bucket on a hinge which would take the water up then it would be emptied at the next level" "and then the same would go on up all the levels." "There is some suggestion by some scholars that he had some very meticulous ancient screw method for raising water to the top." "Unfortunately though, we cannot be certain that the hanging gardens existed at all." "They are not mentioned in any surviving Babylonian texts." "Significantly, Herodotus does not mentione them at all." "Most notably, Herodotus did not write about the hanging gardens." "He did either go to Babylon, or met some people who had been there and he does describe the Xerot the city walls, the Palace and another number of other structures around in Babylon, but doesn't mentioned the hanging gardens" "and since he is a writer who wrote down a lot of very great detail about things, if he doesn't mentioned the gardens that is actually suggestive." "Archaeological evidence is also inconclusive but in the early 20th century the German Robert Koldewey undertook a substantial excavation of ancient Babylon." "He exposed many of its architectural features, including palaces roadways and the remains of the walls." "But in the north western part of the city," "Koldewey unearthed the remains of a basement 14 large rooms with arched stone ceilings." "This was significant, in addition one of these 14 rooms contained a well with three shafts sunk into the floor." "Koldewey was convinced that this was part of the water pumping system of the long lost Hanging Gardens of Babylon." "There are difficulties in this." "A very big problem that the site was some way away from the river Euphrates and one of the things that nearly all our sources for the gardens agree on, was the remarkable irrigation structure for getting that water up to the top of these towering gardens," "so that it could be made so green and lush and, of course, it would be very difficult to have any such gardens if there weren't such a mechanism." "Now the natural reading is that the gardens were very close to the banks of the Euphrates themselves and hence quite a lot of more modern archaeologists have tended to put the gardens on the banks of the Euphrates to the west and north of the site where we think Nebuchadnezzar's Palace was." "Certainly when I was exploring that area and earlier, no one had found any thing which you could say these were the Gardens." "Koldewey, however, just by the river found very massive foundations and they were never satisfactorily explained, though I identified those later with the basis of what would have been the arched basis for the foundation of the gardens." "This is the photograph of Koldewey's vaulted building." "Just to the north of the city wall the present suggestion for the hanging gardens is right, as it were, on the horizon here by the river Euphrates." "Since the Babylonian sources don't admit to the gardens, but yet the classical sources are so convinced that they did exist and that they were somewhere in the area, we have to shift our assumptions and one place where they might actually have existed is in fact in Assyria." "100 years earlier there is a king in Assyria called Sennacherib, about 700 BC and he, in fact, set up a new capital at the City of Nineveh which is right near modern-day Mosul, is right across the river," "and does a number of things which do sound very similar to the things that the classical sources have picked up." "So there is in fact a small river, the river Khawsar, which runs through the site of Nineveh and one of the things he does is actually line the walls of the river with stone, which appears in some of the classical sources," "raise up the huge terrace over the top of the site of a previous Palace and then build his Palace on top of that, including right next to it what he calls a sort of park which would have then overhung over the river edge." "So my view is- that is, in fact, the origin of the hanging gardens of Babylon." "We may never know for sure whether the hanging gardens were the amazing wonder of the world described in antiquity." "The existence of the third wonder however, is undeniable." "The statue of Zeus was constructed in the fifth century BC, at the venue for the Olympic Games." "Having begun in 776 BC, these Games were at their peak in the fifth century before Christ." "Every four years, athletes from Greek communities across the known world would take part in sporting contests in honour of Zeus, the king of the Gods." "They took place at Olympia, in present-day southern Greece." "It was not a conventional town." "It existed purely for the temple of Zeus and its Games." "Consisting of a shrine to the Gods, and an adjoining stadium." "It was here, in 456 BC, that the great architect Libon completed the temple of Zeus, a fine building in the Doric style that was popular in the Greece at the time." "Impressive though it was, it would soon be overshadowed by an object placed inside it." "Not long after the completion of Zeus' temple, the Olympian authorities decided to commission a monumental figure of their greatest God to reside within the temple." "They hired Phidias, a sculptor who also worked on the Parthenon in Athens." "Phidias was given the resources for a monumental work of art." "These resources, combined with Phidias's genius resulted in the third wonder of the world, the statue of Zeus." "It was started by Phidias soon after he had finished work on the Parthenon in about 438 or so, and was probably finished by 430." "Once again we have to rely on ancient writers to establish the appearance of the statue of Zeus." "According to their evidence," "Phidias' statue depicted him seated on a throne, a sceptre in one hand and a figure of the goddess of victory in the other." "The statue of Zeus at Olympia was made so that the outer surface of it would appear of gold and ivory, but the internal structure would have been made of a framework of wood to support the ivory and gold." "Obviously, those materials were extremely valuable materials in the ancient world, gold a valuable material, ivory not native to Greece and therefore an exotic material and when we're dealing with a statue on the scale of the statue of Zeus," "some 40 feet high, we are talking about large quantities of these materials." "The throne, too, was made of gold and ivory with jewels lavishly set into the structure." "It seems that also from the remains that have been found in connection with the workshop that glass sheet which at that time would have been a much more precious material than it is now was used, perhaps in the form of the victory figure who perched on Zeus' outstretched hand." "More impressive still were the statue's proportions." "It was 40 feet high." "Zeus's head almost touched the temple's ceiling." "Strabo complained that if Zeus was ever to stand up from his throne, he would take the roof off." "Others felt that Phidias' approach effectively demonstrated the majesty of Zeus." "Unfortunately, no contemporary visual depiction of the statue has survived other than on coins." "We do know that for hundreds of years visitors to Olympia marvelled at Phidias' achievement." "Although the ruins of Olympia can still be seen today, nothing of the statue remains." "What ultimately caused its destruction was not simple decay, it was moved in the late fourth century to Constantinople, where in the late fifth century it was apparently destroyed by fire the gold would presumably have melted and the ivory would have been destroyed in the fire" "and of course it wooden interior armature would have been completely consumed." "The remnants of the temple have survived, however, and in 1958 German archaeologists unearthed the workshop used by the great statue's creator." "Remarkably, they discovered a broken cup." "On it was scratched the phrase Phidio amee" " I belong to Phidias." "A message from across the millennia from the creator of one of the Seven Wonders of the World." "The worship of Gods such as Zeus played an important role in the daily life of ancient civilisations, and different communities worshipped different deities." "At Ephesus in Asia Minor, the people worshipped Artemis, sometimes called Diana." "She was the goddess of fertility, often depicted laden with eggs." "To demonstrate their faith in Artemis' powers, the Ephesians constructed three great temples in her honour." "The first was destroyed in battle in 550 BC;" "the second was burnt to the ground by an arsonist in three 356 BC;" "the third would become the fourth wonder of the world." "According to Pliny the Elder, the third temple of Artemis was a massive rectangular structure built of marble." "It was 425 feet long, 225 feet wide." "No fewer than 127 columns rose from the massive platform base of the temple 60 feet in the air to the roof." "If Pleny's account is accurate, then the temple covers an area four times as large as the Parthenon in Athens." "The Parthenon is surrounded by a single Doric simple peristyle colonnade." "The temple of Artemis was surrounded by a double colonnade of Ionic columns, the more complicated columns of the othovelute capitols." "And in particular at both ends of the temple there were multiple rows of these columns." "So the effect would have been a forest of these tall Ionic style columns which would have made the building seem much, much more monumental, much more impressive than the Parthenon." "We cannot be sure how long the temple was in construction." "Pliny the Elder suggests a period of 120 years." "We do know that for centuries the temple of Artemis was famous throughout the known world." "Visitors wondered at its amazing proportions, many buying silver idol statues of the goddess herself." "The temple's fame can also be established from surviving Roman coins which clearly depict it." "It is also mentioned in the Bible." "The Book of Acts clearly recalls a visit to Ephesus by St. Paul where he was condemned by local silversmith Demetrius." "Since St Paul was opposed to idol worship," "Demetrius knew that his livelihood was threatened by Christianity." "Even the temple was that threat from the new religion he argued." "His fears were justified, two centuries later the temple was destroyed, not by Christians but by raiding Goths." "The temple was destroyed in the third century AD and after that it was never rebuilt." "and of course the rise of Christianity made it increasingly inappropriate to do anything like that." "So that it remained there outside the city of Ephesus and not surprisingly began to be used as a quarry." "Over the centuries the site sank beneath the swampy mud of the area." "Its memory lived on, however, and in the late 19th century a British archaeologist John Turtle-Wood decide to search for physical remains." "In 1869, after 7 years searching, he succeeded." "When he came to dig it he found that the remains were disappointingly small." "He was able to uncover a considerable part of the platform but dismantled to quite a low-level." "There was one column base with a bit of the shaft of the column still remaining in place and the foundations to indicate the place of one or two others." "But on the whole the remains in situ were very disappointing." "The problem is that the site is terribly waterlogged so it meant digging in an extremely muddy watery environment and over the next few were years he discovered a number of the architectural members of the temple of Artemis and these were transported back to Britain, to the British Museum," "as a result of his discoveries." "Today visitors to Ephesus can see the remaining ruin for themselves a single column marking the site of one of the wonders of antiquity." "We can only imagine the structure that once stood here." "A similar feat of imagination is required at the site of the fifth wonder of the world." "At Halicarnassus, just 50 miles to the south, here an excavated foundation and a few scattered stones are all the remains of the mausoleum, the building dedicated to the king who ruled 24 centuries ago." "He was King Marsellus and he ruled the then city state of Halicarnassus from 377 BC to 353 BC." "In his honour, the widow of Marsellus, Artemisia, decided to build a tomb for his body that would surpass all others in size and magnificence." "She succeeded his tomb was so spectacular, any great tomb is now called a mausoleum." "As with other ancient wonders, we can't be completely certain of the mausoleum's dimensions but Pliny the Elder again provides an invaluable description." "According to Pliny, it consisted of a massive stone base with a circumference of 440 feet." "On this base, stood 36 columns carrying the roof, designed as a stepped pyramid." "In all, the building was 140 feet in height." "But there was more to the mausoleum than just its size and architecture." "Sculpture by the greatest artists of the age was a significant feature." "Relief sculptures decorated the base;" "freestanding figures between the columns;" "the chariot and the very top of the pyramid roof." "Visitors came to admire these figures as works of art in their own right for several centuries to come." "The mausoleum enjoyed a remarkably long period intact." "It would be the 13th century before an earthquake sent it crashing to the ground." "The mausoleum at Halicarnassus was also found in a fairly poor condition when it was excavated in the 19th century." "Up until the 16th century it seems to have survived quite substantially, but then a great deal of its material was removed by the Knights of St John at Malta who had a large castle at Bodrum, either in order to build the castle itself" "or in order to make mortar to hold the walls together." "Some fragments from the mausoleum have been found actually in the castle but a lot of it has just disappeared forever." "Charles Newton was another of these early pioneers of archaeology in classical lands." "And in the 1850s he began examining the site of Halicarnassus and he determined the location by excavation of the mausoleum." "At the time thoug, I think it is fair to say that he didn't find remains that allowed us, in any detail, to reconstruct the particular monument, merely its location and some of the sculptural decoration that had been applied to it." "New excavations in the Sixties and early Seventies by Professor Christian Yapperson of the University of Orhoose in Denmark completely uncovered the platform on which the mausoleum had stood ." "He found a lot of things out about the way in which the tomb chamber was built how it was closed, about the rituals which took place in honour of Marsellus after his death." "He also revealed details relating to the earlier use of the site and, quite interestingly, details of the attempts (eventually successful) to break into the tomb chamber and rob the contents of it, so that when the Knights of St John found it, it was substantially empty." "For the student of the mausoleum, then, some physical remains of the structure can still be seen today." "Sadly this is not the case with the sixth wonder of the world, located at Rhodes." "We must fully rely on the historians of the age to gain an impression of the Colossus at Rhodes." "Not far from Halicarnassus, off the coast of Asia Minor." "We know that the origin of the Colossus stems from a conflict at the end of the fourth century BC." "This was the chaotic period following the death of Alexander the Great when his empire was divided up amongst three of his generals" "Ptolemy, Seleucus and Antigonus." "When Rhodes decided to back Ptolomy," "Antigonus sent his son Demetrius to take the city." "Landing with an army of 40,000 men, he laid siege to Rhodes attacking the city walls from a siege tower 150 feet high." "Bravely, Rhodes resisted the siege and Demetrius departed from the island, leaving his siege tower behind." "The idea that the Colossus was actually built on the framework of the siege tower which had been left behind by Demetrius is hard to go along with because the tower itself would have been built on a wooden framework whereas the Colossus seems to have had an iron framework" "within the bronze plates and also because the siege tower would certainly have had a fairly large base, tapering upwards, whereas the structure of any reasonable human figure has a relatively thin lower part which swells upwards towards the hips," "so that the shape would be wrong as well." "It seems more probable that what happened was that he siege tower, and perhaps other gear left behind by Demetrius, were sold-off by the Rhodians and the money, as spoils of war, used to build the Colossus as a monument to their victory." "The completed statue was of their Sun God Helios." "It would be a giant named after an old word for a statue, a word that would subsequently be applied only to statues on the huge scale" " Colossus." "The Colossus at Rhodes was indeed massive." "Ancient accounts suggest a height of around 60 metres." "A giant human figure constructed of bronze plates placed on a framework of iron." "Pliny wrote that the thumbs of the Colossus was so big that a man could not put his arms around them." "According to Philo, the sculptor Chares of Lindos built a statue starting at the base and working his way up." "Pliny the Elder said that Chares worked for 12 years." "But the classical accounts fail to provide an infallible picture of what the Colossus actually looked like." "However, coins of the era, depicting Helios surrounded by the Sun's rays, give a clue to the appearance of the head." "We cannot even be sure where the great statue stood in the city of Rhodes." "What I think is fairly clear is that the idea that it straddled the harbour is quite impossible." "It would have had to have had a spread of several hundred metres to be able to do that and clearly no statue in the ancient world, especially when we have some dimensions of from ancient writers, could have done that." "It may have stood by the harbour although that's been disputed." "Perhaps more likely is that actually stood away from the harbour a little way in the sanctuary of the god Helios." "For all our limited knowledge of the Colossus, we do know its fate." "Just 56 years after its completion, it fell in an earthquake." "When Philo described the size of the Colossus' thumbs, the great statue was already horizontal on the ground." "The ancient sources give us to understand that it was broken off at the knees." "Now, King Ptolemy of Egypt immediately offered to rebuild this, but an oracle apparently had told Rhodes, the Rhodians, not to rebuild it and so it lay there for a very long time afterwards." "Even in that position, it remains an attraction right up until the seventh century AD when Arab raiders carried off was then left of the ruins, leaving no trace of one of the most mysterious of the Seven Wonders of the World." "Destruction by earthquake would also be the fate of the final wonder, situated across that Mediterranean from Rhodes" "it was the Pharos at Alexandria, perhaps the most functional of all the wonders." "It served as a lighthouse in the city founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC." "After Alexander's death, Egypt became the responsibility of Ptolemy and his successors." "They decided that a great lighthouse was required for Alexander's city." "This would serve as a guide for ships entering the harbour and as a symbol of a prosperous city." "Like many of the other wonders, however, our knowledge of the lighthouse that was constructed is limited." "We know that it stood on the island of Pharos." "he architect is popularly believed to have been a man named Sostratus, although some authorities dispute this." "We can also be reasonably sure as to the shape of the structure." "It was built in three separate levels, topped by an open chamber, where a great fire would burn its light reflected by a giant mirror." "The most likely source of light for the Pharos at Alexandria would have been a large beacon fire on its top somewhere." "It's unlikely with ancient technology that a glass lens could have been used to concentrate that light but a mirror behind the fire is a much more practical proposition." "There is a story that Archimedes used a concave mirror to set light to attacking Roman ships, so the knowledge and technology for large concave mirror were perfectly available at the time." "Now, the engineering feat is not merely in building the lighthouse, but if one thinks about it, of keeping that beacon going because beacons need fuel." "This is beacon is a long way up in the air, there must be a constant trail of people carrying the fuel up to keep this beacon running is still very remarkable indeed." "It is a massive construction and it would have been no easy thing to keep that beacon aflame." "On the very top, possibly as high as 400 feet, stood a statue representing Zeus, the protector, or possibly Poseidon." "We cannot be certain." "It's basic shape can be reasonably assumed, however, the evidence from coins of the time is again invaluable in complementing the writings of the ancients." "Much of our knowledge of the Pharos stems not from ancient writers at all." "Arab writers, as late as the 12th century AD, describe it in detail." "Sadly, the next century would see the eventual destruction of the Pharos in an earthquake." "The lighthouse seems to have been finally destroyed in a series of earthquakes in 1303 and 1326 I think and that was the point at which a lot of the rocks disappeared underwater where they've only recently been discovered." "The destruction was total and its ruins were incorporated into an Islamic fort which still stands on the island." "The site, apparently, is the site of a fort which was built in 1480 by a Sultan called Quaitbay and apparently he used a lot of the materials from the Pharos to build this fort." "Meaning again that there is virtually nothing there other than what has been rearranged into this different structure." "So the Pharos, like the hanging gardens of Babylon, is one of those Seven Wonders which is not really accessible, even through archaeological means." "Only in recent times have archaeologists attempted to discover the remains of the Pharos on the seabed." "It's possible that further physical evidence of its wonder may yet come to light." "They have been some really exciting discoveries in the Harbour in the last 10 years or so and they found a lot of Sphinxes." "They also found a lot of statues, Colossal statues which looked very much as if they formed some part of the decoration of this lighthouse, particularly what looks to be three couples of Ptolemies and their Queens." "There has been a longstanding dispute of whether there was a Zeus or whether there was a Poseidon on top of it." "Again, it looks more likely that perhaps there was both." "There seems to have been a lot more statue work, on this lighthouse than people had hitherto understood." "So concludes the story of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World." "But in many ways, the story continues both in the minds of people fascinated by their original greatness and in the efforts of the archaeologists searching for the physical evidence of that greatness." "But for the most remarkable aspect of the story, however, we must surely journey south from Alexandria back to the great Pyramid of Cheops a pyramid constructed, as we've seen, 4700 years ago." "That this single wonder predated all the other six by some 2000 years and has outlasted all the others by at least 500 years, is simply remarkable." "This is surely the greatest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World." "For All MVG Lovers."