THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

An illuminating voyage into marvelous historical sites.

Underlying Hughes’ fascinating tour of the Seven Wonders of the World, a list compiled in the second century B.C.E, are questions about the nature of wonder itself: “why we wonder, why we create, why we choose to remember the wonder of others.” Devoting a chapter to each, Hughes, author of Istanbul and Helen of Troy, describes in rich detail the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia—the only Ancient Wonder on mainland Greece—the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos in what is now southern Turkey, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria. The author imagines how they would have been seen by their original makers as well as what they have meant to those who made long and sometimes arduous pilgrimages to visit them. Around 10 million each year, for example, travel to the Great Pyramid of Giza, constructed 45 centuries ago at the edge of the Libyan desert. More than “a staggeringly audacious and sophisticated act of construction,” the soaring structure of 2.3 million limestone blocks, housing internal burial chambers, is “saturated with symbolic meaning” about the nature of life and death. Of all the Seven Wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may not ever have existed, although Hughes speculates that they could have been an elevated arboretum within Babylon’s colorful inner walls, irrigated by an innovative water system. Whatever form the gardens took, Hughes asserts, they were expressions of power, both political and technological, the start of “a dangerously domineering relationship with the natural world.” Others of the wonders, too, like the looming statue of Zeus and the tomb, or mausoleum, of King Mausolos, were gargantuan representations of “individual agency and perfect power.”

A captivating journey with an erudite guide.