The 7 Wonders

But that's not the point.

And sure, there are those who say that if the Greeks had known about the Great Wall of China (it had been completed less than one hundred years before the whole hullabaloo started), it would have been one of the Eight Wonders of the World.

But that's still not my point.

The point is we're supposed to take it on faith that the list of seven worldly wonders is the same as the ones the Greeks were all swoony about in the 2nd century BC.

But they just didn't write down their list. They were too busy gabbing and gossiping about what crazy thing some Emperor was going to build next to bother to record anything for the rest of us living downstream the timeline.

Well, ok, Herodotus mentions them... in passing. But does he list them for us? Does he rattle off wonders one through seven? No. Tricky bastard. He just says "Oh, this thing over here is nifty, and this is sure splended." (2).

In fact we have to wait until the 16th century AD to get any sort of surviving record of today's list of wonders. That's almost 1800 years, folks. That's a good long time.

And let me ask you... just how pure do you think the list of seven wonders stayed when it's authenticity was left up to story tellers, and artists, and poets, and people who wanted to promote national pride? We've got no idea where this history has been... and when you start putting your faith in that list of seven wonders, you're putting your faith in every person who had a chance to swap out one wonder here for another wonder there.

By the time the oldest surviving reference to today's list of seven wonders was put to paper only one of the structures was even standing (heck, it even stands to this day).

I'm telling you, just say no to historical fact. Pick your own damn seven wonders and ignore what the historians throw down your throat.

i,jasona

1) What are the 7 "wonders"? The ok-we-can-still-see-it Pyramid of Giza, the supposed Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the dubious Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the implied Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the currently-missing Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the we-needed-cannons-so-we-melted-it-down Colossus of Rhodes, and the doesn't-shine-like-that-any-more Lighthouse of Alexandria.

2) Actually, there wasn't enough of his translated works on line to completely double check before I posted... but damned if he doesn't mention them in his first two volumes... and other supposedly scholarly people sure phrase their references like he doesn't mention them.