The Great Pyramids of Giza are the only one of the ancient Wonders still standing.
Chances are you’ve never heard of a guy named Antipatros Sidonios. The English version of his title – the Antipater of Sidon – probably doesn’t ring a bell, either. And it likely doesn’t help to know Antipatros was a 2nd century B.C. poet, and that Antipater means something along the lines of “father” or “like the father,” and Sidon is an ancient coastal city in what’s now Lebanon.
But anyone who’s ever read a history book surely knows about a famous list put together by this Greek bard. A sort of guide to the world’s tourism hotties at the time, it read like this::
“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.'”
From this came the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
A Colossus once straddled the entrance to the harbor at Rhodes.
Only one of the Wonders – Egypt’s Great Pyramids of Giza – still stands. The ravages of time have taken the rest: the immense Temple of Artemis at the sprawling city of Ephesus and the huge tomb of the Persian king Mausolus at Halicarnassus (now the popular cruise port at Bodrum), both on the Turkish coast; the Colossus that once stood over the harbor at the island of Rhodes on the eastern edge of the Aegean Sea; King Nebuchadnezzar’s Hanging Gardens of Babylon in Mesopotamia (now Iraq); and the seated Statue of Zeus at Olympia on the west coast of Greece.
Where’s the seventh Wonder? Antipatros only listed six in his poem, but the Greeks were partial to groupings or combinations of seven, that number representing perfection. So later on the soaring Egyptian Lighthouse of Alexandria was slipped into the list of Wonders, boosting them to seven. Who picked the lighthouse? No one knows for sure (maybe Cleopatra had a good PR person).
Antiquities on display at the Turkish coastal city of Bodrum (once Halicarnassus), site of the tomb of the Persian king Mausolus.
More Wonders
Fast-forward two millennia, and entrepreneur/adventurer/filmmaker/museum curator Bernard Weber figures lots of eye-popping marvels have been built since Antipatros got the ball rolling on global wonders. So in 1999 he comes up with an idea to spotlight more wonders among the (relative) newbies. He calls the project the New7Wonders of the World, run by a nonprofit foundation based in Switzerland.
The judging started off with some 200 nominations (amid lots of politicking by countries to get on the initial list). Then the nominations were whittled down to 21, again – since billions of tourism bucks were at stake – hyped by all kinds of PR campaigns.
Pyramid of Kukulcan at the Maya archaeological site at Chichen Itza, one of the New7Wonders of the World.
Finally, after a reported 100 million votes were cast, the contest wrapped up on July 7, 2007. Among heavy-hitters that came in as runners-up were America’s Statue of Liberty, Paris’ Eiffel Tower, Russia’s Kremlin, Chile’s Easter Island and Australia’s Sydney Opera House.
Jordan’s No. 1 tourism draw at Petra scored among the New7Wonders of the World.
Walking away with the top honors and officially becoming Wonders were (drum roll): Mexico’s tourism magnet at the Maya ruins of Chichen Itza, India’s Taj Mahal, Jordan’s jaw-dropping labyrinth at Petra, the Roman Coliseum, the Great Wall of China, Peru’s mountaintop ruins at Machu Picchu and the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro.