Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

No engineering blog would be complete without reference to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

I asked my wife the other day what the oldest wonder was and she stumbled. A lot of people don’t realise that the oldest is the one that still stands today: the Great pyramid of Giza. Talk about a design life!

See the simple visual timeline for when each wonder existed.


The wonders include:

• Great Pyramid of Giza
• Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• Temple of Artemis
• Statue of Zeus at Olympia
• Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
• Colossus of Rhodes
• Lighthouse of Alexandria

As each of the wonders are a major engineering feat in its own right, I will dedicate an article to each in due course.

Thanks to Nicolas M. Perrault for his illustration. The notes to explain his timeline is as follows:

• Green denotes the date when construction began.
• Red denotes the date (or timespan) when the wonder was destroyed.
• Yellow shows the narrow window (247 B.C. – 226 B.C.) when all seven wonders existed together.
• The temple of Artemis was destroyed and rebuilt again (starting 323 B.C.) before being destroyed by the Goths roughly 600 years later.
• The Colossus of Rhodes collapsed following an earthquake. The remains were left untouched for nearly a millennium. In 654 A.D., the Muslim caliph Muawiyah I looted the remains and sold them to a Jewish merchant, who broke them into pieces and carried them away.

For further information, refer to Wikipedia.

Copyright note: The montage image was taken from Wikimedia Commons and was compiled by the up-loader, Slof (refer http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SevenWondersOfTheWorld.jpg). The image are deemed public domain by their respective up-loaders: The top left (The Great Pyramid of Giza): Alex lbh (User:Bradipus), the author, licenses the image under the GNU Free Documentation License. The rest were uploaded by by Abhi madhani. The artist, Martin Heemskerck, died more than 100 years ago, ergo the work is in the public domain.