The Seven Wonders of the World travel guide: A bucket list for ancient travellers
'It feels to me that wonder can be a catalyst for caring,' says historian and author
*Originally published on Nov. 6, 2024.
Throughout her career, historian and documentary producer Bettany Hughes has always maintained her sense of wonder at the cultures and the monuments humanity has brought into existence.
Her latest book, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, focuses on the seven ancient monuments that back in the 4th century BCE were listed as a set worthy of wonder — awe-inspiring structures that epitomized human imagination and ambition.
Those wonders include the Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Temple of Artemis, among others.
"I feel more hopeful about the future as a historian. That we have survived and we are still creating beautiful things. And the wonders are almost a kind of touchstone of that, for those generations of the past," Hughes said.
In October, IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed joined Bettany Hughes to discuss the power of wonder, as captured in the seven wonders of the world. The event was recorded in front of an audience at the Toronto Reference Library.
Here is an excerpt from their conversation.
I want to start with the big picture, and that is the word 'wonder.' Wonder is at the very heart of your exploration. What does wonder require of us?
The word wonder comes from old Germanic roots. And it means something to marvel at. And wonder is a state, a feeling. What I adore about wonder is that it's something that you can be completely saturated with as an individual. But possibly more importantly, it encourages us to share that feeling of awe and enthrall and to communicate it.
I had a very emotional reason for writing this book and a very academic one. And the academic one was just there's a lot of very cool archeology telling us how these seven wonders were built. But also what I see through time is in very good times and very bad, as a species we crave wonder. We crave that sense that we can achieve beyond the possibility of the individual, that if we collaborate, we can produce extraordinary things we want to share.
We want to talk about the biggest, the best, the tallest, the longest. The pyramid is still the heaviest building created by human hand. And we want to share those ideas. So for me, it's something which as a hyper-social species we crave — and we need wonder.
Could you talk about that first list that documents what is wondrous in the world? How did the sense of wonder play a part in making it happen?
Yes, there is a list that was set down around 2,300 years ago. And incredibly, we have very early extant fragments of that original list on a bit of papyrus. It's called Laterculi Alexandrini, which gives us the clue that this was almost certainly written in the great city of Alexandria, in Egypt and northern Africa. The Laterculi Alexandrini, brilliantly, is a list of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but it's also a list of lists.
It lists the seven tallest mountains, the seven finest springs, the seven best artists, the seven best generals. And that tells us something about the time and the people who wrote this list. This is the Hellenistic age. It's after Alexander the Great has died and his empire is carved up by those who followed him. And there's this notion at that time that you can manage the world rationally, that, up until then, there's been this notion of chaos and kind of exploration. But now, because Aristotle is the main philosopher and he loved rational thinking, if we did lists, we somehow make sense of the world.
[The list] is not just praising these monuments. It's also kind of a bucket list. It's saying whether you're rich or poor these are the seven things that you should see before you die. And so as time goes on, the lists are really practical. They're travel guides in effect. There's a guy called Philo of Byzantium, who's one of the authors. And if you read that, I mean, he literally says, 'don't go and dock at that harbour in Rhodes. Otherwise, pirates will steal all your luggage.
Like, the Lonely Planet
Kind of like a lonely planet. Yeah.
But how would you have decided at the time? What criteria would determine what sites would actually be included in this list?
We're talking about the Hellenistic age. So the classical world has preceded you. Ancient Egypt has gone before. So there are lots of beautiful monuments in the eastern Mediterranean and in North Africa. It is definitely — and I'm not being crude here — a size matters list. These are all enormous structures. So there's a monumentality about all of them.
But I think there's more than that because they're choosing these things because each and everyone says something very special about the people who made it and about us as a species. They incarnate a very different drive, each and every one of them. And as I said, you could visit all of them. So that's the thing. They were all achievable within a boat sail of the Mediterranean. Or if you wanted to be brave and head out to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, then you went further east.
So that makes sense of why they were chosen back then. I'm curious if you could tell me why that list has staying power?
I think it's both because they are extraordinary buildings. I mean, if you think about it, they're nuts, a lot of them. I often imagined when these things were being built, they must have been these kinds of equivalents of ancient planning, committee rooms with people sitting around tables and going, 'it will never work. You're going to put this bronze statue over 100 feet high. It will fall down.' There must have been a lot of naysayers. So I think actually, the sheer skill and ambition and technicality of each of these is extraordinary.
But yeah, the temple of Artemis for Ephesus is twice the size of the Parthenon in Athens on the Acropolis. So it was their size and their exceptional nature. And because people talked about them genetically, we remember them, we remember their significance.
The amount of detail that you go into makes every one of these locations so vivid. It feels as though you've seen them all. But we know that although you've been to the locations that some of them don't exist at all. I'd like to start with the oldest and the only one that's still intact, and that is the Great Pyramid of Giza. Could you take us back to 4,000 and paint a picture of what that pyramid would have been like in its infancy?
Yes. Wow. I mean, awe-inspiring. I've been and I still am never not speechless in front of it. It is the most extraordinary building. It's made of 2.3 million individual limestone blocks, and 6.5 million tons worth of material.
There's a series of archeological discoveries on the Red Sea at a place called Wadi al-Jarf, which are telling us how the pyramid was built, And I'll give you more detail on that because it doesn't get better than this as a discovery. But just imagine we're there 4,600 years ago banished from your mind this notion of pyramids in the desert. This was a river landscape. The River Nile and its tributaries ran much closer to the great pyramids and to those that came afterwards.
And so in the inundation, the pyramid would be reflected like an infinity pool in the water. There was clover there. There were Tamarisk trees. There are hippopotamus bones. So we think that baby hippopotamus were actually frolicking around and unfortunately being eaten because hippopotamus is very tasty if you're an ancient.
The Nile was this beautiful water, absolutely humming with the blue lotus. So there's exquisite colour. It wasn't what we think. It wasn't this kind of dune landscape. And then you have the pyramid itself cased in this gleaming white, highly polished Tura limestone. It would have looked like a sci-fi movie. I mean, without a doubt, it would have been this incredible, sharp-edged shape with a kind of gleaming capstone made of a mixture of gold and silver. It would have been extraordinary and awesome.
You wrote that the purpose of your book was to ask, 'why we wonder why we create and why we choose to remember the wonder of others.' Have you come up with an answer?
It was a very hopeful thing writing this book, because what I've learned through the writing of this is that if we wonder, we engage. And if we engage, we connect. And if we connect, we understand. And if we understand, we care. So it feels to me that wonder can be a catalyst for caring.
I would say that's what I've learned, that it allows us to understand that if we collaborate, we can achieve extraordinary things. We all know that we're living in quite wonderful times, but this proves to us that we can privilege beauty and ambition and collaboration.
And also wonders are a statement that there will be a future because there has to be a generation beyond the creation of a wonder who will appreciate it and adore it. They knew that when they were building it, they built it for them, but they also built it for beyond so that they're acts of hope, these wonders.
Download the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app to listen to this conversation.
*Q&A edited for length and clarity. This episode was produced by Nicola Luksic.
