9 Incredible Lost Wonders of the Ancient World
The
Umayyad Mosque (Syria)
As
recently as two years ago, the Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo was still
standing. Then, in June 2012, the brutal Syrian civil war rolled into town. In
the year or so of intense fighting that followed, the ancient mosque was
effectively flattened. Shells brought down the 11th century minaret. Mortar
fire collapsed the courtyard and bullets tore the gilded walls to shreds. By
mid-April 2013, over 1,200 years of history had been brutally swept away.
And
the Umayyad Mosque was about as historical as it gets. One of the five holiest
place in Islam, it was said to contain the head of John the Baptist. The
architecture was some of the finest in the Islamic world and the ancient
minarets almost unparalleled in their simple grandeur. Now all that remains is
a broken ruin: another of Earth’s treasures, lost forever.
The
Library at Alexandria (Egypt)
A vast
monument to human knowledge, the Library at Alexandria is now known only
through ancient accounts. Set within the grounds of the great Alexandrian
Musaeum, it was crammed with scrolls upon scrolls filled with all the knowledge
of an entire era. Scholars flocked there from across the ancient world to
lecture or browse its collections. Some of the finest minds to ever live
wandered its corridors; and the complex which housed it was likely as grand as
the finest modern University.
Beyond
these fragments of details though, the rest of the Library is sadly lost to
history. In 48BC Julius Caesar torched the city and accidentally destroyed
40,000 of the libraries most-precious scrolls. In 272 AD it was damaged again
in battle, while religious riots may have resulted in its final destruction in
the 4th or 5th century. Fast forward to the present and only tantalizing
glimpses remain in ancient texts of this once-proud seat of learning.
The
First and Second Temples (Jerusalem)
Three
thousand years ago, King Solomon crowned his reign by building possibly the
grandest temple to have ever existed. Twenty stories tall, sheathed in burning
gold and housing the Ark of the Covenant, it shone over the hills of ancient
Jerusalem until destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC.
Or did
it? Outside of the Bible, there are no known references to Solomon’s Temple and
no archaeological evidence for such a building has yet been uncovered. It’s now
thought that this great temple likely never existed. The same cannot be said
for the Second Temple.
A
logistical masterpiece, the Second Temple towered even higher than its
predecessor and could hold hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at any given time.
Its walls were white marble, furnished with gold. Its entrance doors were made
of bronze. Fifty miles of aqueducts connected it to distant water sources, so
visitors would be able to undergo ritual immersion. Awe-inspiring as it
was, the Temple couldn’t last. Within a century of reaching its final, grand
shape it was obliterated by the invading Romans. Today only a small part of its
outer Western wall remains: Jerusalem’s famous Wailing Wall.
Bam
Citadel (Iran)
For
thousands of years, the citadel at Bam was one of the most-incredible sights in
a region full of them. Sitting at a crossroads between the old Silk Road and other
ancient trading routes, this gigantic clay brick monument looked down on weary
merchants as early as the sixth century BC. An enormous, twisting complex, it
looked like an architectural collision between Petra and an English castle.
Then in 2003, disaster struck.
Just
before 5:30am on Friday, December 26, a magnitude 6.6 earthquake devastated the
nearby town and shook the citadel to pieces. Before-and-after photos show a
proud adobe monument, rising into the sky; and then nothing but shapeless piles
of mud strewn over the ground. In seconds, a huge chunk of Iran’s proud and
ancient history had been reduced to dust. Currently, reconstruction works are
underway; but restoring the citadel to its former glory is now thought
impossible.
The
Old Summer Palace (China)
The
fate of the Old Summer Palace is a continued sore spot on Anglo-Sino relations.
A large, European-style mansion built during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor,
the palace was surrounded by extensive gardens so painstakingly constructed
they inspired awe in all who visited. 50 separate beauty spots overlooking
lakes and mountains gave the impression of a Chinese Eden. All told the Palace
was less a single building than a tiny city state: a perfect world hidden from
the noise and bustle of nearby Beijing.
Then,
during the course of the Second Opium War in 1860, the French and British razed
the place to the ground. Sparking a fire that raged for three whole days, the
troops sacked the Palace, destroyed its fountains and reduced its gardens to
ash. Fast forward to the present and very little remains of this one-time
wonder of Chinese history.
The
Stone Buddhas of Bamiyan (Afghanistan)
It’s
hard to imagine a greater act of cultural vandalism than the one that took
place in Bamiyan, Afghanistan in March 2001. For nearly fifteen hundred years
prior to that date, two gigantic Buddha statues had watched over the valley
from equally-large alcoves. Between 11 and 16 storeys high, these benign
behemoths had been carved from the rock face by workers in the Kushan Empire
600 years before Notre Dame was even a twinkle in some architect’s eye. Then,
at the dawn of the 21st century, the Taliban brought them crashing down.
After
drilling holes in the statues and surrounding cliff face, extremists stuffed
dynamite into every nook and cranny of the Buddhas. The resulting explosions
reduced the statues to dust. In an instant, one of the great unsung wonders of
the ancient world and significant slice of Afghan history disappeared. Today
only the alcoves remain: a reminder of Bamiyan culture in the pre-Taliban days.
Tenochtitlán
(Mexico)
Deep
underneath Mexico City lie the remnants of one of history’s great treasures:
Tenochtitlán. A gigantic, canal-based city with a population nearly equal that
of modern Venice, the Aztec capital was overseen by enormous pyramids and
hosted a market where 60,000 would gather daily to trade precious metals. The
crowning glory was a temple dedicated to the gods Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc
that stretched nearly 100ft into the sky; a place of murder and grisly human
sacrifice. Then in 1521, this strange and impressive place fell victim to
Cortez’s campaign of destruction.
Placed
under siege and devastated by smallpox, the city was eventually overrun by
conquistadors in August. All the inhabitants were massacred and the city was
pulled down to make way for the new capital. Everything – the canals, the
pyramids, the market and the giant temples – were all dismantled and lost to
history. Today the few fragments that survived inhabit the museums of Mexico
City, built upon the ruins of the once-proud Aztec Empire.
The
Hanging Gardens (Babylon or Nineveh)
Of all
the wonders lost to history, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are the only ones
we’ve lost so completely we no longer know if they ever existed. Built by King
Nebuchadnezzar II to remind his homesick wife of her fertile homeland, the
gardens were said to be a breath-taking sight. Huge stone slabs created
artificial mountains where trees sprouted from deep soil. A complex machinery
of Archimedes Screws drew gallons of water high up into the air from the
Euphrates River. It was even reported that living roots created a kind of
canopy over some parts of the gardens. Yet, as we’ve mentioned before, no-one
knows if the Gardens ever even existed.
According
to some scholars, it’s likely that ancient writers confused Nebuchadnezzar’s
Babylon with the Nineveh of Sennacherib. In the former capital of the
Neo-Assyrian Empire, a number of drawings have been unearthed, showing what
appears to be an impressive system for getting water up an artificial mountain.
Whether they really were at Nineveh or Babylon, the Gardens are nonetheless now
gone forever.
Beijing’s
Historic Hutongs (China)
Tiny
historic winding streets and narrow courtyards flanked by small one storey
houses, the oldest hutongs of Beijing have been around since the days of the
Ming Dynasty. Magical, confusing and near-impenetrable to the outsider, these
ramshackle little pockets of life are still used as homes even today: fragments
of living history. And yet, their days may well be numbered.
In an
act of large-scale vandalism less-brutal than the destruction of the Bamiyan
Buddhas (but no less final) Chinese authorities are now demolishing the hutongs
to make way for identikit office blocks. Frequently, this is against the will
of the owners and occupiers of the hutongs, but Beijing’s city authorities have
turned deaf ears to all protests. At the time of writing, a handful of these
historic residences remain standing. However, it seems unlikely they will last
much longer. With their destruction, China’s authorities will eradicate over
400 years of history, and deprive the world of yet another ancient wonder.
No comments