Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER
Who selected the Seven Wonders of the World?
SHORT ANSWER
Hellenistic holidaymakers compiled lists of wondrous sights, but couldn’t make up their minds
LONG ANSWER
When ancient Greek travellers toured around the Mediterranean in the second and first centuries BC – taking in conquered lands and civilisations, and seeing places like Egypt, Persia and Babylon – some of them recognised that this could be the beginning of a booming tourism industry. To aid future visitors, they wrote guidebooks of the awesome feats of engineering and architecture they encountered along the way, which they called theamata , or ‘sights’.
As this was rather an inadequate description for some of the most extraordinary constructions of antiquity, this eventually morphed into thaumata , or ‘wonders’.
There was never a single, definitive list of the Seven Wonders, as each writer could add whatever sites they wanted, although most tended to settle on seven selections since this was a spiritual number representing perfection. Lists comprising different buildings, monuments and mythical locales kept proliferating for centuries, until finally the discussion of what constituted a ‘wonder’ settled down around the time of the Renaissance.
Today’s Wonders are an amalgamation of several different lists, the best known compiled by the second-century BC poet Antipater of Sidon and the enigmatic mechanics engineer Philo of Byzantium. In their lists, however, the Lighthouse of Alexandria didn’t make the final cut, both opting to include the Ishtar Gate of Babylon instead.
1955 The year that
