in History | March 5th, 2026 Leave a Comment
You may not be able to name all, or even most, of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But you almost certainly know that there were seven of them. In a way, that aligns well enough with the worldview of the Greeks who first made reference to such a list, given their near-reverence for that number. Seven were the strings of the lyre (unless there happened to be eight or nine), seven were the gates of Thebes, and seven were the “wandering stars” in the night sky (if you count the sun and moon). The identity of the wonders was less important than the length of their list, and indeed, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in his Told in Stone video above, additions and changes were proposed since the beginning.
The classic seven-wonders roster includes the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Great Pyramid of Giza, that last being the only one still in existence today.
Ryan’s alternative list includes the Egyptian labyrinth at Hawara, which Herodotus considered superior even to the Pyramids; the Temple of Zeus at Cyzicus, which Pliny the Elder described as lined by gold tubes to let in the sunlight (surely stripped out as soon as the place fell into disuse); the sewers of Rome, a civilizational achievement unto themselves; and the Theater of Scaurus, which, though constructed out of wood for temporary use, seated an astonishing 80,000 people.
