The Colossus of Rhodes

The island of Rhodes was an important economic centre in the ancient world. It is located on the southwestern tip of Asia Minor where the Aegean

Sea meets the Mediterranean. In 357 BC the island was conquered by Mausolus of Halicarnassus (whose tomb is one of the other Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), fell into Persian hands in 340 BC, and was finally captured by Alexander the Great in 332 BC.

When Alexander died of a fever at an early age, his generals fought bitterly among themselves for control of Alexander’s vast kingdom. Three of them, Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Antigous, succeeded in dividing the kingdom among themselves. The Rhodians supported Ptolemy (who wound up ruling Egypt)in this struggle. This angered Antogous who sent his son Demetrius to capture and punish the city of Rhodes. The war was long and painful. Demetrius brought an army of 40,000 men. This was more than the entire population of Rhodes.

When Demetrius attacked the city, the defeners stopped the war machine by flooding a ditch outside the walls and mining the heavy monster in the mud. By then almost a year had gone by and a fleet of ships from Egypt arrived to assist the city. Demetrius withdrew quickly leaving the great siege tower where it was. To celebrate their victory and freedom, the Rhodians decided to build a giant statue of their patron god Helios.

They melted down bronze from the many war machines Demetrius left behind for the exterior of the figure and the super siege tower became the scaffolding for the project. According to Pliny, a historian who lived several centuries after the Colossus was built, construction took 12 years. Other historians place the start of the work in 304 BC.

The statue was 34 m high and stood upon the a fifty-foot pedestal near the harbour pier. Altough the statue has been popularly depicted with its legs spanning the harbour entrance so that ships could pass beneath, it was actually posed in more traditional Greek manner: nude, wearing a spiked crown, shading its eyes from the rising sun with its right hand, while holding a cloak over its left.

The architect of this great construction was Chares of Lindos, a Rhodian sculptor who was a patriot and fought in defence of the city. The Colossus stood proudly at the harbour entrance for some fifty-six years. Each morning the sun must have caught its polished bronze surface and made the god’s figure shine. Then an earthquake hit Rhodes and the statue collapsed. Huge pieces of the figure lay along the harbourfor centyries.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Accounts indicate that the garden was built by King Nebuchadnezzas, who ruled the city for 43 years starting in 605 BC. (There is a less-reliable, alternative story that the gardens were built by the Assyrian Queen Semiramis during her five year reign starting in 810 BC.) This was the height of the city’s power and influence and King Nebuchadnezzas constructed an astonishing array of temples, streets, palaces and walls.

According to accounts, the gardens were built to cheer up Nebuchadnezzas’s homesick wife, Amyits. Amyits, daughter of the king og the Medes, was married to Nebuchadnezzar to create an alliance between the nations. The land she came from, though, was green, rugged and mountainous, and she found the flat, sun-baked terrain of Mesopotamia depressing. The king decided to create her homeland by building an artificial mountain with rooftop gardens.

The Hanging Gardens probably did not really ”hang” in the sense of being suspended from cables or ropes. The name comes from an inexact translation of the Greek word kremastos or the Latin word pensilis, which mean not just “hanging”, but “overhanging” as in the case of a terrace or balcony.

The Greek geographer Strabo, who described the gardens in first century BC, wrote, “It consists of vaulted terraces raised one above another, and resting upon cube-shaped pillars. These are hollow and filled with earth to allow trees of the largest size to be planted. The pillars, the vaults, and terraces are constructed of baked brick and asphalt”

Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian, stated that the platforms on which the garden stood consisted of huge slabs of stone (otherwise unheard of in Babel), covered with layers of reed, asphalt and tiles. Over this was put “a covering with sheets of lead, that the wet which drenched through the earth of a convenient depth, sufficient for the growth of the greatest trees. Whan the soil was laid even and smooth, it was planted with all sorts of trees, which both for greatness and beauty might delight the spectators”

How big were the gardens? Diodorus tells us they were about 122 m wide long and more than 80 feet high. Other accounts indicate the height was equal to the outer city walls (walls that Herodotus said were 98 m high). In any case the gardens were an amazing sight: a green, leafy, artificial mountain rising off the plain.