Greatest Wonders Of The World E-Book

Vikas Khatri

• Herausgeber: V&S Publishers
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 124

Beschreibung

Naturally appearing structures and man-made maonuments that defy logic

Leseprobe

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© Copyright: ISBN 978-935-05724-7-4

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Contents

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

     1. Khufu’s Great Pyramid

     2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

     3. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia

     4. The Temple of Artemis/Diana

     5. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

     6. The Colossus of Rhodes

     7. The Great Lighthouse at Alexandria

The Seven Wonders of the Medieval Mind

     1. Stonehenge

     2. The Colosseum

     3. The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa

     4. The Great Wall of China

     5. The Porcelain Tower of Nanjing

     6. The Hagia Sophia

     7. The Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Seven Natural Wonders of the World

     1. Mount Everest

     2. The Great Barrier Reef

     3. The Grand Canyon

     4. Victoria Falls

     5. The Harbour of Rio de Janeiro

     6. Paricutin Volcano

     7. The Northern Lights

The Seven Underwater Wonders of the World

     1. Palau

     2. The Belize Barrier Reef

     3. The Galapagos Islands

     4. The Northern Red Sea

     5. Lake Baikal

     6. The Great Barrier Reef

     7. The Deep Sea Vents

The Seven Wonders of the Modern World

     1. The Empire State Building

     2. The Itaipu Dam

     3. The CN Tower

     4. The Panama Canal

     5. The Channel Tunnel

     6. The North Sea Protection Works (Netherlands) 85

     7. The Golden Gate Bridge

Seven Forgotten Natural Wonders of the World

     1. Angel Falls

     2. The Bay of Fundy

     3. Iguazu Falls

     4. Krakatoa Island

     5. Mount Fuji of Japan

     6. Mount Kilimanjaro

     7. Niagara Falls

The Seven Forgotten Modern Wonders of the World

     1. The Clock Tower (Big Ben)

     2. The Eiffel Tower

     3. The Gateway Arch

     4. The Aswan High Dam

     5. The Hoover Dam

     6. Mount Rushmore National Memorial

     7. The Petronas Towers

Seven Forgotten Wonders of the Medieval Mind

     1. Abu Simbel Temple

     2. Angkor Wat

     3. Taj Mahal of Agra

     4. Mont Saint-Michel

     5. The Moai Statues

     6. The Parthenon of Athens

     7. The Shwedagon Pagoda

Prologue

Earth is a very beautiful planet. It has a store of treasures that can never be exhausted. The treasures of Earth are precious like gold and diamonds, but more precious than these are the treasures that fill a man with amazement, wonder, surprise and joy. The wonders of the Earth are many and of many kinds. Some of them are natural – nature formed them over time in a way that is beyond understanding.

Geothermal phenomena, like deep sea vents, volcanoes and waterfalls are of breathtaking beauty. Images of oneself haloed by rainbows formed high in the sky, take one’s breath away. One can look and wonder at the marvels of the nature.

Some of the wonders are architectural marvels which, account for the brilliance of the human mind, its perceptive power and adroit endeavors. These were considered as some of the greatest wonders of the world, but not great enough to leave behind an indelible impression on human mind, they were lost to the other greater and stupendous works of the human imagination. The momentous works of art as and architecture by the humans and their ability to capture in realistic frame have baffled travellers and onlookers from times immemorial. With the advance of the science and technology, engineering skills and construction facilities, the human hands, out of there minds began to carve, edifices which made the world more pleasant and beautiful.

This book aims to present before the reader, ‘a few’ of the countless wonders our planet has to offer us.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

The ancient Greeks loved to compile lists of the marvellous structures in their times. Though we think of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World as a single list today, there were actually a number of lists compiled by different Greek writers. Antipater of Sidon, and Philon of Byzantium, drew up two of the most well-known lists. Many of the lists agreed on six of the seven items.

The final place on some lists was awarded to the Walls of the City of Babylon. On other lists, the Palace of Cyrus, king of Persia took the seventh position. Finally, towards the 6th century A.D., the final item became the Lighthouse at Alexandria. Since the it were Greeks who had made the lists, it is not unusual that many of the items on them were examples of Greek culture.

The writers might have listed the Great Wall of China if they had known about it, or Stonehenge if they’d seen it, but these places were beyond the limits of their world. It is a surprise to most people to learn that not all the Seven Wonders existed at the same time. Even if you lived in ancient times you still would have needed a time machine to see all the seven.

While the Great Pyramids of Egypt were were built centuries before the rest and are still around today (it is the only “wonder” still intact) most of the others only survived a few hundred years or less. The Colossus of Rhodes stood only a little more than half a century before an earthquake toppled it.

1Khufu’s Great Pyramid

More than any other ancient peoples, the Egyptians seemed to spend the best years of their lives, and certainly their best efforts, in preparation for death. The greatest toil, and the most perfect resting place, went to the pharaoh. It is a splendid tribute to all that industry that the Great Pyramid of the Pharaoh Khufu at Giza near Cairo is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the World that still stands.

Khufu ‘s Great Pyramid

It would be difficult to imagine today’s world without the Great Pyramid. It is more than 224 metres along each side, and 137 metres high – about the height of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It is a solid mass of masonry consisting of 2,300,000 blocks of stone, each about 2 ½ tonnes and, with the outer casing, weighing altogether nearly 7 million tonnes. All this monumental effort was expended by 100,000 workmen, using no draught-animals, no mechanical equipment and only the strength of their muscles to move each block. It took them twenty years to build Khufu’s pyramid, in about 2,700 B.C.

Nearly are two more pyramids, and from an aircraft above them you can see south-wards a whole landscape of pyramids –each built to preserve one man’s body under millions of tonnes of masonry.

The reason behind it all was that the Egyptians believed their pharaoh was a god – son of Re, the Sun-god. His spirit or soul (ka) could not survive in the afterworld unless his body was properly preserved, and for his journey to that world he would need his treasure, furniture, clothing, ornaments and all the regalia of his rank. All these things, therefore, had to be put into the pyramid with his body.

The pharaoh was not alone in needing the things of this world in his next life. The same was considered true of all Egyptians. A schoolboy dying prematurely would be buried with his exercise books; a carpenter with his tools; and for every dead person there would be plates of food in the tomb. So when, thousands of years later they re-emerged under the skilful probing of modern archaeologists, a way of life and a pattern of culture was revealed more vividly than any history book could portray.

We learn, for instance, that the pharaohs and their advisers knew that not even millions of stone blocks were sufficient deterrent to the tomb robbers of their times. Deep inside their tombs we can see how they dealt with the problem of thieves by building dummy corridors. Along these corridors they placed deep pits – traps from which there was no escape for any plunderer who fell in. How many ancient thieves died in this grisly way we shall never know, but the death pits are still there and your heart can still miss a beat as you look down to where one false step could lead you.

It is an awe-inspiring experience to walk, sometimes crouching, sometimes upright, through the sloping, dimly lit corridor inside Khufu’s pyramid, where the pharaoh, the most powerful man in the world 5,000 years ago, intended that no human being should ever walk.

A steep passage leads to the pharaoh’s last resting place, a soundless room furnished now with only a huge empty granite coffin. After the size of the pyramid, the room seems strangely small. The passage was sealed after Khufu’s funeral by releasing granite blocks that slid into place to form part of the masonry.

What happened to the pharaoh’s body? Curiously, from the very earliest descriptions of the Great Pyramid, the coffin room has always been described as empty. Perhaps, when the accumulated knowledge of twenty years’ hard labour was being passed around by 100,000 workmen, tomb robbers were able to piece together a detailed account of the secret interior structure of the pyramid and work out a plan to rob it. Perhaps, too, they stole the royal mummy so as to leave no trace of their vandalism. Since Egyptians would consider that as soon as the mummy ceased to exist its soul would die, the irony is that the Great Pyramid was built for nothing.

Khufu’s successor, it is believed, was his brother Cephren, who built the second great pyramid at Giza, next to Khufu’s. Cephren’s face is familiar, for it is the face of the Sphinx. Nearly 5,000 years ago this pharaoh had the Sphinx carved out in his own likeness, to remind Egyptians that their ruler was at one with the gods.

The third pyramid at Giza, the smallest of the three, was built by Menkaura. He is a pharaoh about whom very little is known, except that he reigned for a much shorter period than either of his predecessors Khufu and Cephren.

2The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Six hundred years before the birth of Christ, King Nabopalassar of Babylon was brought the news he had long been waiting for. His army, combined with the Medes, had at last destroyed Nineveh, capital of the brutal Assyrian Empire, and defeated the Assyrian army.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Triumphantly, Nabopalassar prepared to build a great empire for his successors. How this was done is vividly reported in the Bible, which tells how the Chaldeans, as the Babylonians were then called, built their empire on the successes of war.

Nabopalassar died and his son Nebuchadnezzar, a successful soldier, succeeded him. Nebuchadnezzar’s aim was to build Babylon as a monument to his glory. Fortresses and strongpoints were raised along its walls, a bridge was built to span the river and the fortified royal palace, reached by the Ishtar Gate, rose in splendour above the city.

Close to his palace Nebuchadnezzar built his amazing Hanging Gardens, which Greek visitors to Babylon described as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The King made the gardens, it was said, to please his Queen, who was a Princess of the Medes — the same tribe that had allied itself to his father for the final overthrow of the Assyrians.

The Queen, so the story went, disliked the flatness of Babylon, and was homesick for the hills of her native land, so Nebuchadnezzar had his gardens laid out on terraces to form a man-made hill. The terraces were connected by steps 3 metres wide, and they were built in tiers held up by vast arches, raised upon other arches, one above the other to a height of 100 metres. A strengthening wall 7 metres thick surrounded the gardens.

Huge flat stones covered with lead were laid on top of the arches, in which the plants were grown. Elaborate building techniques prevented the earth’s moisture from reaching the arches and underming them, and all the gardens were watered by a pump, probably worked by slaves on the top tier, which drew water from the river below.

Everywhere there was water, cascading in waterfalls and trickling unseen into the lead-based flower beds to maintain the lush oasis. Thus the Hanging Gardens, with the pulse of summer in the air, glistened like a jewel in the bustling capital of Nebuchadnezzar’s exotic empire.

As Assyria had fallen, so did the Babylon that Nebuchadnezzar built. It lasted less than a century before it surrendered to Cyrus of Persia. Today Babylon is a ruin, mouldering in the dry desert of Iraq, and all that remains of its fabulous Hanging Gardens, built to please a homesick Queen, are a few arches and an empty well.

3The Statue of Zeus at Olympia