Ideas - The 2,000-year-old travel list to complete before you die

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

More than 2,000 years ago, someone sat down and wrote a travel bucket list for the ancient world — suggesting must-see places that we now call The Seven Wonders of the World. It was kind of a Lonely Planet guide of its time, and included the Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Temple of Artemis, among others. Historian Bettany Hughes brings monuments and archaeological discoveries back to life in her book, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. 

The Shaw Festival presents Anything Goes, a dazzling production of Cole Porter's timeless musical set on the SS American. Follow the antics of a nightclub singer as she navigates love triangles and hilarious hijinks on the high seas. Anything Goes on this ocean liner, featuring spectacular tap dancing and hits like You're the Top. Don't miss Anything Goes at the Shaw. For tickets, go's Nala here. Thank you so much for listening to Ideas. Before we start today's show, I need to ask you for a favor. If you like Ideas, please hit the follow button on your app, whether you're using Apple, Spotify or anything else. We've got some really interesting episodes

on the way that you'll want to hear on being queer in Africa, on the flaw in facial recognition, and on the history of human shields. Okay, here's today's show. Okay, here's today's show. The word wonder comes from an old Germanic root and it means something to marvel at. And wonder is a state, it's a feeling and it's a thing. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. What I adore about WONDER is that it's something that you can be completely saturated with as an individual, but possibly more importantly, it encourages us to share that feeling of awe and enthrallment, to communicate it. And as a historian, through time, that is absolutely what I see. Throughout her career, historian and documentary producer,

Bethany Hughes has always maintained her sense of wonder at the cultures and the monuments humanity has brought into existence. As a species, we crave wonder. We crave that sense that we can achieve beyond the possibility of the individual, that if we collaborate we can produce extraordinary things. We want to share, as I said, our sense of wonder. You know, we want to talk about the biggest, the best, you know, the tallest, the longest, the pyramid, you know, the heaviest building still created by human hand, and we want to share those ideas. Her latest book centers on the seven wonders of the ancient world, those seven ancient

monuments that back in the fourth century BCE were listed as a set worthy of wonder. Those wonders include the Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Temple of Artemis, among others. Our conversation was recorded at the Toronto Reference Library and takes us on a journey through time back to the ancient world when the list of the seven wonders of the world was first compiled. There is a list that was set down, as far as we know the earliest list was set down around 2,300 years ago and incredibly we have a very early extant fragment of that original list

on a bit of papyrus. It's called the Latakuli Alexandrini which gives us a clue that this was almost certainly written in the great city of Alexandria, in Egypt, in Northern Africa. And the Lattaculli Alexandrini brilliantly is a list of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but it's also a list of lists. So it also lists the seven tallest mountains, the seven finest springs, the seven best artists, the seven finest springs, the seven best artists, the seven best generals. And that tells us something about the time and the people who wrote this

list. So this is the Hellenistic age. It's after Alexander the Great has died and his empire is being carved up by those who followed him. And there's this kind of notion at that time that you can manage the world rationally, that, you know, up until then there's been this notion of chaos and kind of exploration, but now because Aristotle is the main philosopher and he loved rational thinking, if we did lists somehow we make sense of the world. And I mean, I, you know, I love a list. I write lists.

It's so familiar. Yeah. It's so familiar because you sort of feel like you're putting, as I said, you're sort of controlling the chaos of what's going on around you. And in this Hellenistic age, they wrote these lists. So as I said, the Seven Wonders is actually only one of a list. And crucially, it's not a sort of esoteric list. It's not something which is fanciful.

It's not just praising these monuments. It's also saying it's kind of a bucket list. It's saying whether you're rich or poor, if you can, these are the seven things that you should see before you die. And so as time goes on, the lists are really practical. They're kind of travel guides in effect. There's a guy called the Pseudo-Philo of Byzantium, who's one of the authors. And if you read that, he literally says, don't go and dock at that harbour in

Rhodes, otherwise pirates will steal all your luggage. And there's a really great taverna you can go to after you've seen the Colossus. Like a lonely planet. It's like a lonely planet, yeah. So, but how would you have decided at the time, what criteria would determine what sites would actually be included in this list? Yeah. And that's a brilliant question because this is, I said we're talking the Hellenistic Age,

so you've had the classical world has preceded you, ancient Egypt has gone before. So there are lots of beautiful monuments in the Eastern Mediterranean and in North Africa. It is definitely, and I'm not being crude here, it is a size matters list. These are all enormous structures. So there's a monumentality about all of them. But I think there's more than that because I think they're choosing these things because each and every one says something very special about the people who made it and about us as a species. They incarnate a very different drive,

each and every one of them. And as I said, you could visit all of them. So that's the thing. They were all kind of achievable within a boat sail around the Mediterranean. Or if you wanted to be brave and head out to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, then you went further east.

So that makes sense of why they were chosen back then. I'm curious if you could tell me why that list has staying power. What is it about that list that makes it still legit today, enough to write another book about? I think it's both because they are extraordinary buildings. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, they're nuts, a lot of them. So I often imagine when these things were being built, there must have been these kinds of equivalents of, you know, ancient planning committee rooms with people sitting round

tables and going, it will never work. You're going to put this bronze statue over 100 foot high. It will fall down. And there must have been a lot of naysayers so I think actually the sheer skill and Ambition and technicality of each of these is extraordinary So, you know, we're going to talk about them But the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus is twice the size of the Parthenon in Athens on the Acropolis

I mean, they so these were huge things. So I think it was their size and their Athens on the Acropolis. So these were huge things. So I think it was their size and their exceptional nature. And I think that we, because people talked about them, genetically we remember them. We remember that they're significant. And that's why, you know, you're all here on whatever night it is. I am curious though why we take that author's opinion, why do we still take that author's opinion so seriously? I mean, they made the choice of these seven wonders. Why?

Yeah. I wonder if it's partly also because they were listed in a group of seven. And seven is a number which has huge significance for the ancients. It was considered a magic number. So if you grouped something into seven, you kind of gave it its own authority. And there are a lot of reasons for this. It's partly because the number seven combines the four elements of Earth, Earth, air, wind,

and fire, and the three of the heavens, so the sun, the moon, and the stars. So the notion was that kind of all cosmic power is contained in this number. Mathematically, seven is contained in this number. Mathematically seven is a very exciting number. I'm sure there are some mathematicians in the audience and you can explain to me afterwards why it's so exciting but I have a really good authority that it is. Interestingly a seven-sided shape is the only shape that you can't make with a

basically with the tools that they had, the engineering tools and the drawing tools that they had in the ancient world. So I think people might have thought that seven was some sort of God-given, you know, a God-given shape. And then much less romantically, I was talking about this book in Dorset in the beautiful West Country of England and somebody, a guy who was actually one of the ushers said, I think it's because we've got seven orifices on our face, which I hadn't thought about before. But anyway, so seven, I think if you lift something in seven, as I said, you've given

it its own symbolism and a kind of inherent authority to it as a group. If you haven't read this book, the amount of detail that you go into makes every one of these locations so vivid. It feels as though you've seen them all, but we know that although you've been to the locations that some of them don't exist at all. So we can't get to every single one of them,

so we're gonna talk about three. But I'd like to start with the oldest and the only one that's still intact, and that is the Great Pyramid of Giza, of course. So could you take us back to 4,000 years ago and paint a picture of what that pyramid would have been like in its infancy? Yes. Well, I mean, awe-inspiring. I don't know, has anybody in the audience been to the pyramids, to the Great Pyramids? And look at you. Yes, you have. So I don't know if you're the same.

I mean, I've been, and I still am never not speechless in front of it. It is the most extraordinary building. How many times have you been there? I actually, I probably, 20 or something. You my God. About as many years it was that I did the Spartans film. Yeah, probably about 20. And it's made of 6.5 million limestone blocks in heaviness, 2.3 million individual blocks, 6.5 million tonnes worth of material. If you'd gone there, actually, interestingly, 4,000... Had we been speaking

a year ago, we'd have said 4,500 years ago, but we now know that it's 100 years older than we thought it was just a year ago. So actually, it's 4,600 years ago. Just quickly, how do we know that? We know it because there's amazing archaeology on the Giza Plateau. And there's a whole, I mean this, you know now I'm getting speechless with excitement, there's a series of archaeological discoveries on the Red Sea at a place called Wadi al-Jaff which are telling us how the pyramid was built and I'll give you more detail on that because it is, you know, it doesn't get better than this as a discovery. But just imagine we're there 4,600 years ago.

Banished from your mind this notion of pyramids in the desert. This was a river landscape. The River Nile and its tributaries ran much closer to the Great Pyramids and to those that came afterwards. And so in the inundation, the pyramid would be reflected like an infinity pool in the water. There was clover there, there were tamarisk trees, there are hippopotamus bones, so we think that baby hippopotami were actually, you know, frolicking around and

unfortunately being eaten because hippopotamus is very tasty if you're an ancient. Nile perch, this beautiful water, absolutely humming with the blue lotus, so this kind of exquisite colour. So it wasn't what we think, it wasn't this kind of done landscape. And then you have the pyramid itself, cased in this gleaming white, highly polished, Tura limestone. So it would have looked like a sci-fi movie. I mean that's that is that is without a doubt. It would have been this incredible sharp edged

Shape with a kind of gleaming capstone made of a mixture of gold and silver. So it would have been it would have been Extraordinary and awesome and as it was being built and the process would have been extraordinary and awesome of building this building. Can you talk about that? Just more than 20 years it took to put it together. More than 20 years, so a lifetime, a generation's worth, probably 20,000 labourers on the Giza Plateau at any one time. And I just have to... It's so exciting.

This archaeology that's telling us in really precise detail how it was built. And I hate to banish, there might be somebody in the room, there usually is somebody who says it was built by aliens. I'm putting my neck out there and saying it was not built by aliens, it was built by human hand. And if anybody, you know, you've been, if you climb down into the pyramid and if you go down into the bedrock itself You I mean there's a thing called the descending passage you go down have you been down there?

I have not and actually I have to stop you there and ask you are Clostrophobic I know how do you how do you as a cluster? I know this because I am too Yeah, how are you as a claustrophobic person able to bring yourself to go down to those places? Well? What a stupid career I've chosen for myself. I mean, you know, really, really daft, because it's... I'm not scared of match, but I am scared of small dark spaces. So I thought, you know, that's what I spend my life doing, is crawling into them. But you went. You went. I had... Yeah, I did go and, you know, I have friends,

so there's often one person there going, come on, come on, it's's okay because the descending passage underneath the pyramid actually goes into the bedrock itself so you start standing and then you have to hunch and then you have to bend over and then eventually you're crawling on your hands and knees for about 70 meters it's obviously pitch black it's making me feel slightly nervous. We too. But the incredible thing is as you go down, you can feel the chisel marks of those who

built the pyramid. And if you touch them and then just put your fingers to your mouth, you can taste the salt because this 50 million years ago this was sea. So in that moment, thousands of years collapse, you know, and you are experiencing one thing that those men, and I think it was almost certainly men, you know, would have experienced. So I know it's built by, I know it's built by humans. But we also know that because of this incredible discovery in this place, as I said, called Wadi Al-Jaf, which is on the Red Sea. So these are harbours, they're man-made harbours

built by Sneferu, who was the father of Khufu, the king who was buried in the pyramid, and they're built specifically to import raw materials for these huge state-building projects. And the discoveries are just incredible. So on the edge of the harbor, which is huge, this site covers about six miles, there are 31 storerooms, some of which are 100 feet, 100 feet deep. And because it's desert sand,

in here there are things preserved like ships ropes from 4,600 years ago planks from the ships themselves the shoes of sailors anchors Where sailors have inscribed their names so we know the names of the men who helped to build the pyramid and then not only that There are a thousand Papyri fragments and these are the oldest inscribed papyri fragments, and these are the oldest inscribed papyri fragments that exist anywhere in the world, and they're basically a diary of how

to build a pyramid. Wow. Written by a man called Merah, who was a sort of foreman of this group called a SAAR, which was a working group of about 40 men. And we learn about the names of some of these others, these teams who built the pyramid. And they're called things like, they know, the Asian ones, the vigorous ones, the prosperous ones.

And you suddenly get this sense of this kind of competition, really, to erect this extraordinary monument. I absolutely don't have rose-tinted spectacles. I know that this was, as in fact, were all of the wonders, were built on the backs and blood and sweat and tears and sorrow of many. I don't think though that it was built by the enslaved, the pyramid. Some were definitely press-ganged into building it, but you do get the sense from these documents that there was, as I said, this kind of common goal, and the goal was to raise this pyramid so that the king could be buried, so that the world could keep turning.

Because you have to think we're talking about ancient Egypt where the membrane between the real and the unreal, the natural and the supernatural is very porous. And for them, there was this sense that the king had to be buried properly so that he could return to the sky, to the universe, and then the river Nile would keep flooding, the pomegranates would keep ripening on the trees. So it really, really matters to them. It's like a common purpose. It was definitely a common purpose, yeah.

As you mentioned, the average lifespan, which is quite shocking to contemplate, was about 19 years. Yeah. And so I'm curious what kind of relationship you think people of the time would have had with death. I mean, is it something... Just, can you talk about how people would have conceived of death and the role it plays in society?

Yeah. Well, death was all around, as you say. So for some of the groups, the average age of death is 19. For some, it goes up to 30, 35. But it's still, this is a very juvenile world. So most people would have been teenagers or kind of in their early 20s. So death is an absolute constant.

And it's one of the reasons that people talk about the Egyptians being obsessed with death death and that's a nonsense. They're actually obsessed with the possibilities of life and they love life so much they think that life is going to carry on if everything's done properly beyond. It's not an afterlife, it's a second life that people can end up inhabiting. You write that we have to appreciate that in ancient Egypt the membrane between reality and imagination, between fact and fantasy, between the natural and the supernatural was porous. Yes. Yeah, that's right. Well for them and in a way they got it right and this is one of the reasons that I

love what I do so much because And this is one of the reasons that I love what I do so much because in my head I'm living with these communities, these societies, these individuals who are so bright, who are so thoughtful, who are so empathetic, and they often get there not just centuries but thousands of years before we do so, like the ancient Greeks coming up with this notion of the atom, a word atom, two and a half thousand years before we understood what an atom was. So they just imagined the reality of that. And the ancient Egyptians are the same because the ancient Egyptians say, actually they understand molecular chemistry.

They understand that we are just part of the matrix, that we don't disappear when we die, everything, every single part of us becomes something else, and they understood that, both in a physical and in a metaphysical sense. So I think for them, the pyramid was a very hopeful place. It wasn't intimidating or kind of oppressive in any way it was this extraordinary resurrection machine and we you know we use the word pyramid the whole time which is actually a Greek word we shouldn't really call it a pyramid so the Greeks call the pyramids the pyramids because pyramids in ancient

Greek is a little cake. So they were basically going, oh that looks a bit like a bun, this kind of giant madeleine. Let's call it a pyramid, the enormous, enormous bun thing on the Giza Plateau. But the ancient Egyptians called it, it transliterates as M-E-R, mer, which means a place of ascension. So that's what it was for them. I love this notion of the pyramid, or pyramids being a hopeful place. And I'm curious how that role

or that description changed over time. Let's say you fast forward 100 years after it was built. Do they still think of it in the same way or does that change? Well, they do. I mean, interestingly, through ancient Egyptian culture, it's a place of pilgrimage so we know that people go and they worship and adore King Khufu there.

We know that they do these kinds of rehabilitation and renovation campaign campaigns to kind of make the pyramid look good right the way again interestingly like 2,000 years after it was built there's a particular culture there who sort of make it spic and span and they write this on the side of the pyramid and so this is around around 2,600 years ago and Herodotus the father of history who I love we think he went to Egypt and saw the pyramid and it looks as though he was completely duped by a kind of local guide And he went to so tell me my fine man, you know What is this writing this mysterious writing on the pyramid and the guy said?

Ah, it's the numbers of the amount of beetroot onion and garlic that the builders of the pyramid ate And herodotus goes amazing, you know, that's a fascinating and writes it down in his histories And I'm sure it was just some of them like, you know, it's it's hieroglyphs. I can't read Let's just tell him tell him what he thinks, but he was all by the place. Well, he was he was awed by it Really fascinating me the Romans are less less impressed by the by the pyramids Basically, I think they were jealous of them you know the Romans don't like people doing things better than they do and by the pyramids. Basically, I think they were jealous of them. The Romans don't like people doing things better than they do.

And they talk about them as being the kind of grand fancies of dictators with this notion that they're either a republic or it's a benign imperial power, Rome. And they're sort of slightly dismissive of the pyramids. So... They're sort of slightly dismissive of the pyramids. So let's flip the page to something that is a lot less available for us to see and for most people to see, or anyone to see as far as we know, and that is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. There are many accounts of them, but there's no physical evidence that they ever existed. Even the location is contested, as you point out in your book.

Can you tell us kind of about the most widely known descriptions of what they might have looked like if they really existed? Yeah, if they did. And it's the million dollar question because of all of the seven wonders, they're probably the most famous. If you guys go and have a meal with friends and you say, tell me the seven wonders, nine times out of ten it's the Hanging Gardens of Babylon that people say first, which is ironic because, as you say,

they might not have existed because we don't have any absolutely irrefutable evidence for where they were. I'm sure, actually, that they were somewhere because we have so many accounts of them, as you say, these really, really detailed descriptions talking about their construction, in particular the fact that they kind of rose 82 feet above the palace, the royal palaces of Babylon. So descriptions of these like almost kind of giant window boxes that had waterproof material put in them with whole trees being planted there and it looked like a mountain, it looked like

a fake mountain had been created above the palace. And I said they're so precise in the details of the irrigation systems and the technology used, it would be a very weird fantasy basically for somebody to spend a long time dreaming this up. But of course the problem with a garden is that it dies, plants die, so it's much harder to find a garden than it is to find a pyramid. And there is this possibility, as you say, you've been spent a lot of time in Iraq. In Iraq, not in Babylon, but I did, yeah.

Did you go to Mosul? I did... Yeah. Did you go to Mosul? I did. So Mosul, ancient Nineveh, 100 miles or so north of Babylon, also had extraordinary gardens in the palace of King Sennacherib, who ruled about 100 years before King Nebuchadnezzar, who is the man that we're talking about, Nebuchadnezzar II, who we're told actually created these gardens in Babylon. And there were definitely beautiful gardens there too. So it could be that people are getting things a bit muddled and just saying you go to this place,

you know, this faraway place in the east, and this is a place that has amazing gardens in this region called Babylonia, which was the name for the wider region. And if you think about it, kind of the clue's in the title because it's the hanging gardens of Babylon. On Ideas, you're listening to my conversation about the seven wonders of the ancient world with historian and documentarian, Betany Hughes.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US public radio, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. will mesmerize the whole family. Don't miss this epic adventure, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, this season at the Shaw Festival. For tickets, go to shawfest.com.

Excuse me, why are you walking so close behind me? Well, you're a tall guy. You throw a decent shadow when I'm walking in it to keep out of this bright sun. It hurts my eyes. Okay, well you know at Specsavers, you can get two pairs of glasses from $149 and oh, you'll like this. One can be a pair of prescription sunglasses. Sounds great!

Where's the nearest store? Mmm, not far. Come on. Let's hurry then. To my count. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one,

one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one,000 years ago, someone sat down and drafted a list of what was deemed to be the seven man-made wonders of antiquity. At the time, it was a kind of bucket list for ancient travelers, the most awe-inspiring structures that epitomized human imagination and ambition. Of all the structures on the list, only one still remains, the Pyramid of Giza. But the ones that have crumbled to mostly dust continue to hold a special resonance today. Bettany Hughes is a historian, author, and documentarian.

We spoke at the Toronto Reference Library about the seven wonders of the ancient world. There's no trace of one of the original wonders, the majestic hanging gardens of Babylon, and exactly where they might have existed is contested. Even the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who traveled to Babylon in the 5th century BCE, made no mention of the awe-inspiring gardens. Interesting you mentioned Herodotus earlier because he's one of several people who visited

Babylon, knew that they were there, wrote about the walls in Babylon, but did not write about a garden. What do you make of that? How does that tell you? Yeah, it tells me that the walls were amazing. So, you know, the walls were definitely amazing, and we know that because they still exist. So there are still sections of the wall in Berlin, in Istanbul, and if you get the chance, just go and see them because they are incredible. They are these brightly blue colored blue glazed walls with these with white lions processing along them, dragons, you know mysterious creatures

and they are just exquisite. So here's my question if they're so amazing why is it that the guardians are worthy of being on the list of wonder but not the walls? Yeah, well the walls do appear in some lists really interestingly you get these slightly sort of alternative lists So the walls occasionally prop up Sometimes there's an obelisk that people say was taken from Egypt and also went to Babylon But the gardens are written about more often than they're included more often than they're excluded. I think it's because nature is beautiful. And if you think about it, these were really ambitious gardens. So the planting was very exotic.

We're told that there were whole mature trees that came from faraway lands. I have to just read you this one thing from a stele. So these were these stone inscriptions put into their palaces by King Sennacherib and by Nebuchadnezzar the Great. And you've got to think, basically, why are they doing this? Why are they inventing these incredible gardens? Obviously, they're luscious and beautiful. We all love being in a beautiful garden.

We're told that they were places of diplomacy where you could come and kind of do state affairs. Also, they were pleasure gardens. So there was archery there. There was swimming. There were these kind of pools with people frolicking around. I've learned since I came to the US and Canada not to call them Lylos. I've been talking about Lylos and people are like, we have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about Lylos and people are like, we have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. So Lylos basically are my 70s childhood. They're inflatable mattresses.

What would you call them? In a swimming pool. Yeah? Like inflatables. Inflatable, yeah. Yeah, basically. So they had those in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Not obviously made of plastic, but made of blown up animal skins so whole

inflated cows so they were these you know in a way how could you not write about them but they're also an expression of absolute power because this is where as the pyramid was built in the Bronze Age this is the Iron Age and the Iron Age does two things. It gives you iron technology, which means that you have much better weapons. So there's an arms race. And you have much better agricultural implements, which means that you can plough and furrow and plant the earth in a much more extreme way.

So we start to kind of interfere with Mother Earth in a different way. It's not a coincidence that when the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were being created, this is also the same time that the book of Genesis is being written down when we hear that man is given dominion over plants and animals. It's the time in the Greek tradition where Gaia, the mother goddess, so she wants to rid herself of the burden of humanity, because basically we're kind of meddling with the earth a lot more. And this happens to the power of X with these great kings.

So we have accounts of them importing, as I said, whole mature trees from different territories because if you think about it, you can enslave people, but if you can enslave nature, that really proves your power. And these kings write about this. So just listen, this is Nebuchadnezzar boasting about his dominion over the natural world. Strong cedars, thick and tall, of splendid beauty, supreme their fitting appearance, huge yield of the Lebanon. I bundled them like reeds and I perfumed the river with them.

I put them in Babylon like Euphrates poplars and then Sennacherib does something very similar. He says, I tore open mountain and valley with iron picks. I built palatial pavilions of gold, silver, bronze, carnelian, breccia, alabaster, elephant tusk, ebony, boxwood, rosewood, cedar, cypress, pine, elamaku wood and Indian wood. I brought whole trees for my royal abode." So specific, so specific and they're basically kind of extreme gardeners saying, look, you know, look what we can do. So I think that's why the hanging gardens definitely existed and that's one of the reasons that people

wrote about them. So what about looking at it from the vantage point of our time? What is this longing? I mean as you say it's the most popular of the list. What is this longing for the existence of this imagined beauty, say about us. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, ever since that time, we've been increasingly city dwellers. So we yearn for that beauty of nature. We yearn for nature which seems perfect and yet is also allowed to cascade because, as I said, they were built to look like mountains and there's this very sort of romantic story that Nebuchadnezzar built it for one of his wives who was pining for the mountains of her homeland and beautiful things happened in these gardens. So there was this process called astral

Irritation where people would go and we think Alexander the Great himself actually probably went to the gardens of Babylon to have astral iridation, where they would lie under the stars and they would have amulets that had been exposed to the stars at night and they'd be laid on you with this notion that it was kind of bringing this power, but that could only happen in a garden setting. So I, you know, I think just instinctively we know that gardens matter, we know that nature is, we know that nature is where we should be. And then we have this idea of this perfect paradisical nature, which as I said is controlled and yet allowed to kind of live on its own terms as well. And life doesn't get better than that.

So you were not able to visit the site of this particular wonder and for obvious reasons it's not very safe to travel to Iraq today still. Could you talk though, I mean, as I said earlier, the amount of detail you have there, not just from historical sources, but using your own eyes, being on the ground, could you talk about the importance of having a sense of place as a historian, even in a place that would have existed so many hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

Yeah. Well, I find that as a historian, I cannot write about history unless I go to the place where it happened. And I do that partly because you never know what evidence is going to appear. But it's also a mark of respect, because I think, you know, if somebody was to write your biography or anybody's biography in this room you would want that person to go to visit what the street where you grew up you you know you'd want them to inhabit your space and I feel that really passionately about the people of the

past I think you know I'm very lucky to be telling their story and you have to do it in a respectful way so So I always travel and you learn incredible things by travelling to these places. So, you know, just thinking for instance about... What about the Temple of Artemis? Yes, which is hardly there. Yes. I know. So going there, what do you see, what do you sense that helps you tell the story?

Well, the Temple of Artemis, so in Ephesus, modern day Turkey, has anybody been to Ephesus? Look at you all, you are so good. So as you know, it's a beautiful city, beautiful Greek, Carian, Roman city, incredible remains. The Temple of Artemis, some people might say it's disappointing. I didn't find it disappointing, but it's just basically a single column that's still standing. But there is something very special about that location and really there's all sorts of really interesting things. So it's where, it's still very marshy when you go and it's where originally the sea came much further inland and it was where the salt water met sweet water. So there were springs there and those are always special places in the ancient world and still have this kind of special atmosphere today. It's also almost directly on a fault line.

So the Temple of Artemis was felled by earthquakes probably ten times in its history, but the Ephesians refused to move it anywhere else. So for them, this place was so sacred, so important, it was the goddess's home, that they knew they couldn't move the temple. So they just developed all this anti-earthquake engineering. So in the base of the temple, there are sheep skins and then charcoal. They kept on thinking of all these different things to try to help it survive earthquakes. So there clearly is something a bit special going on there and I love it because of all of the wonders,

which as I said are all these sorts of huge monumental, kind of slightly virile erections on the earth. The Sanctuary of Artemis, which is also huge, as I said, double the size of the Parthenon, was a sanctuary with a capital S. So this was a place where there was a notion that Artemis, the great Eastern Artemis, who was protected both hunters and the hunted, that if you had just cause you could seek Sanctuary in her temple and it's a beautiful ancient Greek word Asylia which gives us our world word asylum. So there was this notion of asylum and Huge numbers of people go there for sanctuary. So by the time of the Roman period there are these the whole northeastern corner is basically dormitories for refugees and

People some people hate that, you know, and they talk about the asylum seekers being there like nesting birds and in the Roman period People are very kind of critical and saying the crime rates gone up with all these refugees, know in the sanctuary. I mean you literally couldn't make it up but it's but I love that I love the idea that people went there and felt that they were that they were safe. The other thing that you point out without any sense of irony about this being different than the other wonders is that at the center of it of that narrative, was a woman.

Could you just talk about how that might have affected how the place was regarded at the time as a place of wonder? Yeah. Well, it certainly didn't, didn't it? It certainly didn't make people think it was less of a wonder because it was in celebration of Artemis, of this female character. I mean she was a goddess not to be messed with, the great Artemis of Ephesus. I don't know if any of you have seen images of her, so if you say the goddess Artemis or Diana, so Diana in the kind of Roman tradition

who is the goddess of hunting, you might have in your mind this rather sort of wafty creature with a little kite on, artfully shooting a bow of arrow. No, no, no. Not the great Artemis of Ephesus. Go and Google it, but I'm gonna describe it as well. So she's called the polymastic Artemis. She's this ferocious creature and she looks like she has about 40 breasts on her chest. It's an... Look at it. You're not going to be able to lose that image from your mind, I promise you.

And all over her body, she's encrusted with these images of fertility and fecundity and the strangeness and beauty of nature. So there are goats and kind of mythical creatures and zodiacs are carved onto her body. And the notion of Artemis was that she was so potent, she didn't need to bother with sex to procreate. She could just go kind of, wah, you know, and amazing things would emerge from her body. So, you know, people went in there, they were awed by her. And on the top of the temple, as you went in over the pediment, there was a huge face

of Medusa, of one of these Gorgons, one of these female creatures whose stare could turn you to stone. So she, as I said, she wasn't... You didn't mess with her. Right. I wonder why you were gathering these stories and reading about that history, you know, that whole cult of worship around that particular goddess kind of made you think about what line we can draw from back then to, you know, women in the 21st century.

Is there anything that kind of resonated with you about that past? I mean, I suppose the fact that she loses her power, Artemis, you know, she's very popular and then there's this period, Paul goes and preaches in Ephesus, obviously very famously, and the people of Ephesus are very anxious about Paul coming. Interestingly there's a commercial anxiety that they have. It's not necessarily a religious anxiety because one of the reasons is that people made a lot of money in Ephesus from selling little statues of the goddess Artemis. So these were souvenirs. So it's like, you know, when you come and visit me next in London

and you get your little Big Ben or your little phone box. That's what visitors were all doing in Ephesus. But they were buying these little souvenirs either of the temple of Artemis or of Artemis herself in silver and Paul comes and says this is all nonsense and all the crafts people of Ephesus say no no no it's not nonsense you know she is a great artist because they were really really worried that they were going to lose their livelihoods but she is denied basically from about the fourth century onwards she survives really interestingly she survives as a figure who is worshipped but from the fourth century she's denied but what is fascinating about Ephesus is

that this is the first place in the world that there's a church built that is dedicated to Mary the mother of, who of course was another woman who was believed to procreate without having sexual intercourse, and Mary also a very powerful nurturing figure. And the church that was built to her, which you can still go and visit in Ephesus, is dedicated to Mary Theotokos, Mary the mother of God. And there is no doubt that that is actually a sign of respect both to Mary and to Artemis who went before her.

So the first church in the world dedicated to Mary. As you mentioned, the temple has been destroyed, was destroyed more than 2000 years ago. I'm wondering just if you, in your imagination, what you think the ancients would make of the idea that one of their major wonders no longer exists? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they would be horrified, wouldn't they? And they wouldn't, they would look at those people that destroyed it and just think, you

know, what's, they would imagine that they would be destroyed it and just think, you know, what's... They would imagine that they would be cursed, first of all, for attacking this sacred place. But it's like, it's very hard for us to imagine that, isn't it? I mean, I do think about this a lot. You know, I do imagine our worlds in 2,000 years' time or even in 4,000 years' time and what will be left. And one of the remarkable things is that whereas the ancient Egyptians would imagine 4,600 years time ahead, I'm not sure that even they would have thought that the Great Pyramid would still be standing.

And what are we making today that will still be standing in 4,600 years? Do you have an answer to that? Well, no. I mean, somebody said to me maybe the an answer to that? Well, no. I mean somebody said to me maybe that what's the hadron collider is becoming apparently built but I don't think there is anything else that we're creating. So you know that's again if you think about the level of skill involved in the manufacture of that and their certainty that they were creating something that had divine power has

actually been made manifest. This may be taking us into a different territory, but I still am curious what you think it says about our time and our world that there aren't things that you think that would last as long as the pyramid of Giza. Yeah, well, I mean, maybe I don't want to be down on us, but you know we do do incredible things, you know We're both kind of wise and foolish The internet Isn't working, but it is an incredible invention of ours

So I said I don't think that we should, I don't think that we should sort of knock ourselves down But what we do have to do is that we have to and knock ourselves down, but what we do have to do is that we have to accept that everything that we do has an impact on others. And I think that's... The ancient world, there was no sense of privacy, there's much less of a sense of the individual. They knew that they were operating within a culture. And I would say that's the one thing that we need to remind ourselves. You wrote that the purpose of your book was to ask, quote, why we wonder, why we create,

and why we choose to remember the wonder of others. Have you come up with an answer? Well, I suppose the one thing I... As I say, it was a very hopeful thing writing this book because what I've learned through the writing of this is that if we wonder, we engage, and if we engage, we connect, and if we connect, we understand, and if we understand, we care. So it feels to me that wonder can be a catalyst for caring. So I would say that's what I've learned, that as I said, it allows us to understand that if we collaborate, we can achieve extraordinary things. And I think

we all know that we're living in quite un-wonderful times, but this proves to us that we can privilege beauty and ambition and collaboration. And also wonders are a statement that there will be a future because there has to be a generation beyond the creation of a wonder who will appreciate it and adore it. And they knew that when they were building it. They built it for then, but they also built it for beyond. So they're acts of hope, these wonders. I did wonder whether, as you were writing it, you thought of both the act of, or the

word wonder, but also these wonders, were in some way an antidote, or a way to balance our opposite instinct as humans, which is one for destruction. Yes. And we see evidence of that all the time, including in our own... On the earth. Yes. Did you think of it that way at all? Yeah, I did. I did a lot.

And we do... We are a ridiculous species and warfare goes back, we now know 16,000 years, organized warfare. It's a terrible thing that we enjoy coalescing in order to fight. But we do not privilege destruction over creation because if we did none of us would still be sitting here you know we have to remember that that we are still here we have the ability to for for constant mass genocide and Most of us choose not to go down that path

So there is you know as I said I feel more hopeful about the future. As a historian, we have survived and we are still creating beautiful things and the wonders are almost a kind of touchstone of that, I think, for those generations of the past. Just a couple of last things. You dedicate this book to your parents who sadly died while you were writing the book. I'm very sorry for your loss. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what impact their deaths had on what you were writing and what you were kind of... how you saw your work and your understanding of your own work and the purpose of it.

Well, my father actually died when I was in the Great Pyramid and He was at very elderly, but it was unexpected to be you know It was one of those calls you don't want to take but it was an incredibly comforting thing because there I was in this huge tomb and Sorry, I'm gonna you know because it was It was so unexpected, but it it was as I said, hugely comforting, because you just knew that there were generations, you know, 4,000 years worth of people who suffered loss and have worked together to deal with that.

So, sorry to be, you know, emotional about it. But it really helped me, and he would have loved the beauty of the creation of that building. So it was a very hopeful and comforting thing even though it's making me cry. I'm sorry to hear that. No problem, no problem. But it was, as I said, I just knew that he had been wowed by the extraordinary engineering. He was an actor, but he was actually orphaned when he was 14, and he was in the blitz in the Second World War.

And he went and had to work as a draftsman, and he would have been amazed by the artistry and the engineering skill of that place. So I sort of felt very proud of him. Yeah. I'm sure he would be very proud of you. Thank you. I am...

As a last thing, of course, as you saw the hands go up and none of us have been to all of these, not even you because you can't go to Iraq yet. But what would you say to those of us who want to understand the wonder that we could contemplate in these places but cannot travel to those places? How do you capture that sense of wonder when you cannot go to these places? I think you read the accounts of them because that's one of the things, that's been one of the great joys of writing the book is that people For the last four thousand six hundred years have traveled to them have made pilgrimages to them and have written about their experiences

I mean there's um, there's a an incredible woman called a gerrilla. I don't know if anybody's come across gerrilla She should be a household name. So she's She was writing in the fourth century AD. She was a single woman who, we don't know whether she was a nun or not, but she seemed to belong to a kind of community of sisters in Portugal. And she travels to the Holy Lands and she writes about her experiences. And her writing is still in print. So if you go on Amazon tonight you

can get yourself a Geria's accounts of the of the Holy Lands and of the Great Pyramids and she writes I love her because I love you know her feistiness and I love the fact that she did this journey and I love the fact that we can still read about it. The only problem is that she she's one of those slightly sort of over excited travelers who who looks at the pyram problem is that she's one of those slightly sort of over-excited travelers who looks at the pyramids and because she's coming from this Christian tradition, she says, I know what these are, these are the granaries of Joseph. And ever since then, up until about 20 years ago, people have still thought that the pyramids were the granaries of Joseph. And if you go to St. Mark's Basilica in Venice and look at these beautiful golden mosaics

in the Zeno Chapel there, there's an image of the Great Pyramid and there's Joseph, there are his bushels of wheat and there are the little windows. So I love Aguera, but you don't believe everything that everybody wrote about the wonders. I just, as a final question, I'm asking you to imagine what you think the ancients would make of the fact that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years later, there was a woman by the name, a woman by the name of Bettany Hughes who's written yet another wonderful book about the list of seven wonders. What do you think they would make of that?

Gosh, I mean, that's a question I've never thought about because I'm just a kind of messenger of their world. I don't think of myself as in any way of their world. I don't think of myself as a, you know, in any way of any importance. And I genuinely mean that, you know, my job is to try to understand how other people lived and just to kind of translate that. But I think they would have loved the idea of connection across time and place. You know, that's again something when we think about the ancient world, they were traveling the whole time. They were imagining the future. You know, for them, this was...

They lived in a world, they really understood about the passage of time. And there's a brilliant... One of my kind of favourite anecdotes from the whole Seven Wonders story is that there's this very satirical, sharp writer called Lucian of Samistata, and he writes the world's first sci-fi novel in ancient times and he writes about an ancient astronaut who flies up to the moon, again this is saying you know we kind of imagined that these are these are notions that we've had they were thinking about that in the ancient Greek world, this ancient astronaut flies

up to the moon and he looks down at the planets and he realizes that he's looking at planet Earth Because he can see the Colossus of Rhodes and the lighthouse of Alexandria And isn't that incredible so I think they knew that these were things that defined Humanity so I think to be honest they would be delighted by the fact that you will come here tonight on whatever night we decided it was, Tuesday or Wednesday, to kind of sit and appreciate their efforts all those centuries ago. We appreciate your efforts to tell those stories. Thank you so much for taking my questions. What a joy. Thank you very much. Thank you.

So great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. PBS and streamed on Netflix. Her latest book is called The Wonders of the Ancient World,

an extraordinary new journey through history's greatest treasures. Special thanks to Sergio Elmir, Senior Producer of Event Programming at the Toronto Public Library. Thanks as well to Technician Ms. Fynn Baisaso and all the Toronto Public Library staff who supported this event. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas.

And I'm Nala Ayed.