Ancient Wonders of the World

The Great Pyramid is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that still stands. It was built by order of the Pharaoh Cheops, who once ruled Egypt. More than 100, 000 slaves had been laboring for twenty years to build it. They had no machines, not even carts – all the work was done by human strength alone. Yet each huge block was so well laid that the Pyramid has stood for 5, 000 years.

Near the Great Pyramid in Egypt there is a huge sculptured rock called the Sphynx. The face is that of a man, perhaps the Pharaoh Khafre who built it almost 5, 000 years ago. But the body is that of a lion, and between its great stone paws there is a small temple.

In Babylon, one of the great cities of the Ancient World, there was a famous garden which amazed visitors for hundreds of years. It was called the Hanging Gardens, because it was built along arches and towers and looked like a wall of flowers and green shrubs. The garden was kept alive by a hidden pool on a highest terrace, from which the water was drawn to appear in a series of fountains. The gardens were built by King Nebuchodnozzor, who is mentioned in the Bible as a cruel conqueror of Jerusalem.

The greatest god of the ancient Greeks was Zeus, for whom the Roman name was Jupiter. The greatest statue of Zeus was at Olympia, where the famous Olympic Games were held in nits honor. The statue was 40 feet high – about seven times a man’s height – and was made of marble, decorated with pure gold and ivory. After 1, 000 years, an earthquake tumbled it down.

The Temple of Artemis is one of the most famous temples of the ancient world. It stood for 600 years in Ephesus, a great city of Syria. The temple was sacred to Artemis, also called Diana, goddess of the moon. The finest sculptors and painters of Greece decorated this beautiful building, which was destroyed by barbaric Goths. Only a few pieces of statues columns remained. They were dug up by modern scientists.

Few remember the tiny kingdom of Caria, which once flourished in what is now southwestern Turkey. But the name of its king, Mausolus, is known because of the word “mausoleum” – a massive tomb. The original Mausoleum, built in memory of this king by his widow, Queen Artemisia, was so magnificent that it was one of the Wonders of the Ancient World.

Rhodes, an inland near Greece, was one of the richest and busiest towns of the ancient world. Standing across the entrance to its big harbor, was a huge statue of the sun god Helios, famous as the Colossus of Rhodes. Although ships sailed beneath these giant feet, the Colossus was not as large as the American Statue of Liberty.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, sometimes called the Pharos of Alexandria was a tower built by the Ptolemaic Kingdom between 280 and 247 BC which was between 393 and 450 ft (120 and 137 m) tall. It was one of the tallest man-made structures in the world for many centuries, and was regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Pharos was a small island just off the coast of the Nile Delta's western edge. In 332 BC when Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria on an isthmus opposite to Pharos, he caused the island to be united to the coast by a mole more than three-quarters of a mile long (1260 m/4, 100+ feet) called the Heptastadion