The Seven Wonders of the World [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Everyone has heard of each of the Seven Wonders of the World, but few have seen all of them for themselves. To do so one has to go abroad to Persia, cross the Euphrates river, travel to Egypt, spend some time among the Elians in Greece, go to Halicarnassus in Caria, sail to Rhodes, and see Ephesus in Ionia . . . Philo of Byzantium, On the Seven Wonders, written c. 225 bc, in Alexandria, Egypt Some of the first excavations conducted by Europeans in the Middle East - at the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in 1856, at Ephesus and the Temple of Artemis in the 1860s - were digging for two of the Seven Wonders of the World. Not only did these expensive enterprises promise the recovery of great works of art, the tangible remains of the ancient Wonders themselves, but also firm evidence of the vanished world that had produced that ardent poetry and prose, that kaleidoscope of exquisite images and strong spare themes, which had fiielled the Western imagination for almost two millenia. We all of us know a wonder when we see one. Newspapers, indeed, regularly ask their readers to vote on new lists of modern objects of wonder; to list things that arouse the same reactions in us today as the first lists of Seven Wonders did in the age of Philo of Byzantium. At first glance, it seems that the story of the Seven Wonders, the very idea of earthly wonder, is so deeply embedded in us that many people now call it simply 'human nature'. In fact, the apparently innate sense that enables us to sniff out wonders is an inherited sensitivity; the Seven Wonders and the aspirations they embody had finite beginnings. The Seven Wonders of the World, therefore, hold two stories within them: firstly, that of their ancient reality; secondly their later history as symbols of magnificence and competition. This is the real stuff of history, that slow brew suffusing over millenia to form a vast catalogue of past imaginings and future aspirations. In common with many other popular images and ideas, the precise origin of this list called the Seven Wonders of the World is now lost to us. References to the Seven Wonders abound in classical writings, yet most of these ancient texts are ambiguous in their authorship, disputed in their dates and serve only to underline the impression that the Seven Wonders of the World were as well known and, perhaps, as little recited then, as they are now. Securely dated written evidence shows that the first full modern version of the list of Seven Wonders actually appeared less than four centuries ago, in Italy ix