EXCLUSIVE: THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD!!!

A conversation with Bettany Hughes about discovering the truth behind history's greatest monuments

Nearly thirty years ago I went on a school trip to Egypt and the Holy Land. It seems strange, looking back on it: a cruise ship chugging around the eastern Mediterranean, full of hormonal teenagers occasionally disembarking to be whisked around Cairo, the Temple Mount, the Dead Sea etc.

But it happened, and the memories are some of the most vivid I have from childhood. I can particularly recall standing at the foot of the Great Pyramid at Giza, contemplating its timeless massiveness at the time as trying to escape the attentions of a sun-leathered trinket pedlar.

It would be glib and untrue to say that this was the moment which began my adult interest in history. But it was certainly a day that has gained importance in retrospect. Travelling to clap eyes on great historical sites is now one of my great passions, and if I were to create a memory-chain backwards, it would begin there, in Giza, with the dusty silent ancient geometric megalith looming and the tat-seller trying to hawk me a wooden model of his mule.

However, today’s newsletter is not about me. It is about one of my all-time favourite historians and broadcasters, Bettany Hughes.

Bettany’s new book, The Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World, is published next week. (You can find links to retailers here.) It’s terrific: a deft combination of on-the-ground archaeological investigation, historical reflection and vivid storytelling.

The Great Pyramid at Giza is the only one of the Seven Wonders still substantially intact; most are ruins or entirely gone. One, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, remains so mysterious that it is often suggested that it did not really exist. But Bettany does a superb job in her book of evoking them in both their original majesty and their modern dilapidation.

Bettany was good enough to spare some time for a chat with me about the book and the process of writing it. Here’s what we talked about.

NB - paid subscribers, the chat is unlocked for you straight away. Everyone else, I’ll de-paywall it at some point next week…

DJ:  The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are a big ‘brand name’ in western history. But what connects them? As in - who picked them, why are there seven rather than five or eleven…? Why do we hold them in such reverence today?

BH: It’s fascinating isn’t it – we almost feel there should be a list of the Seven Wonders of the World, as part of the natural order of things. Seven Wonders lists have existed for at least 2,200 years. But who said these should number seven, and who agreed which ‘wonders’ should be celebrated by this kind of catalogue?  

Seven was always thought to be a semi-magical number – an addition of the four elements of our planet (earth, air, wind, fire) and the heavens (the sun, the moon and the stars). ‘Seven of the best’ lists were in fact composed throughout antiquity. A fantastic scrap of papyrus from the Second Century BCE called the Laterculi Alexandrini – which was basically a catalogue of the seven best of everything – seven best islands, rivers, artists…you get the picture...is the oldest extant evidence we have for a list of the Seven Wonders of the World. This particular list was very fragmentary but there were other later ones which ran to the full seven. Sometimes there are differences. The Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, for example, turns up most in later lists.

These ancient seven do have a common theme – basically they were all massive. It is a ‘size matters’ list. But they are connected in other more subtle ways too. All came from geographical locations that had a strong connection to the Hellenistic world, and in some cases the architects drew inspiration from each other ( the Temple at Olympia that housed the statue of Zeus, for example, was a copy of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus).

DJ: I suspect you had rather a lot of fun researching and writing this book. Could you tell us about one or two of your favourite experiences checking out the remains (or not) of these relics of the ancient world?

BH: You know me – I can’t write good history unless I go to the place where that history happened. And researching this book was quite the trip – with the sites scattered in Europe, Asia and Africa around the Mediterranean.

I managed to get to all seven wonder-sites apart from The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Babylon has been in a red zone since I started writing this book (but I might just be able to get there in 2025).

Two of the best experiences that immediately spring to mind are both in my least favourite places – underground. Researching the Great Pyramid I had to crawl so deep beneath into the bedrock I could taste the salt from the chiselled limestone ( a sea bed 50 million years ago) chamber I’d entered on my hands and knees.

And investigating the story of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus I ended up in a newly excavated tomb commissioned by Mausolos for his father. In the dark I stepped backwards into a robber-pit drilled in by the tomb-robbers – nearly the last I was heard of!

Seven was always thought to be a semi-magical number – an addition of the four elements of our planet and the heavens… ‘Seven of the best’ lists were composed throughout antiquity.

DJ: In the Middle Ages, where I tend to lurk, we see a vogue for monumental building - I’m thinking of the great castles of Edward I, the great Gothic cathedrals in France and England, and so on… where do you think the human urge comes from to build big?

BH: This starts as soon as we start to join together as societies. The Great Pyramid is massive – and so amazingly well constructed over 4,500 years ago, it is still pretty much intact.

Our drive to think big starts way before the Giza pyramids – think of the underground temple in Malta, the Hypogeum, 6,000 years old, or the incredible sites in SE Turkiye like Karahantepe, 11,000 years old – where one excavated chamber is ringed with giant, phallic columns.

It is our joy and our curse that we always want to try to outdo – or at least match – the magnificence and scale of nature.

DJ: Could you say something about the economic dimension of building ‘wonders’? Are there certain 'golden' moments in economic history that provide the raw materials and the labour conditions to build at scale?

BH: Well tragically these are all monuments built at times of mass slavery. Although not all built by the enslaved – slavery underpinned the economies of the ancient world. The Temple of Artemis, Statue of Zeus at Olympia and Colossus of Rhodes were all built at (or just after) times of war – in some ways they were a statement about the power of, and hopes for, the future.

DJ: Are we living through such an age now? How do you think historians looking back will view our own era of wondrous architecture?

BH: Sadly I think future historians will think what poor technicians we are – because now things are built to have obsolescence rather than to last. There will be materials in the future we can’t yet dream of. I often imagine the historians of the future looking back on us pityingly as we (sometimes patronisingly!) do when we survey some naïve creations of populations of the past.

DJ: What are you doing next? TV? Writing? Both? 

BH: Writing my first kids book – very exciting! And I’m midway through a real filming adventure – exploring the story of the society who built Petra. Plus I’m considering writing a book on the Wonders I had to miss out – the Colosseum, Petra, the Great Wall of China…what do you think?!

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The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Bettany Hughes (W&N, £25) is out now. Find a retailer here.

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