Ideas - The Seven Wonders of the World: A Bucket List for Ancient Travellers

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

More than 2,000 years ago, someone sat down and drafted a list of what they thought were the seven man-made wonders of the ancient world. From the Pyramid of Giza to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, historian Bettany Hughes shares her enthusiasm for the monumental achievements brought into existence by ancient cultures.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. 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. 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. 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 latakuli 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 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 love a list. I write lists. It's so familiar. 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, I mean, he literally says, don't go and dock at that harbour in Rhodes, otherwise pirates will steal all your luggage, you know, 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, you know, 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, that 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 you know ancient planning committee rooms with people sitting around tables and going it will never work you're going to put this you know bronze statue over a hundred 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 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

their significance and that's why you know you're all here on a 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 yeah i mean they made the choice of these seven wonders why yeah i 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 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 think they've got 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 shape know a god-given shape and then much less romantically um i was talking about this book in dorset in the beautiful west country of england and somebody um 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 but um anyway so, so Seven, you know, if you, I think, if you list 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 it's, 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 going to 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? 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 know about as many years it was i did the spartans film yeah probably about 20 and um it's you know it's made of six and a half million limestone uh blocks in in heaven is 2.3 million individual blocks six and a half million tons worth of 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, 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-Jaf, 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.

Banish 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 Pyramid 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 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 extraordinary and awesome as it was being built. And the process

would have been extraordinary and awesome of building this building. Yeah. Can you talk about that? Just more than 20 years it took to put it together. Yeah, more than 20 years. So a lifetime, you know, a generation's worth. Probably 20,000 labourers on the Giza Plateau at any one time. And, you know, 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 claustrophobic. I know.

How do you, as a claustrophobic... 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 I'm not scared of match, but I am scared of small, dark spaces. So I thought, you know, that'sft 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'd spend my life doing is but you went to

them i had yeah i did go and you know i have friends so i'm there's often one person they're going come on come on it's it'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 talking about it. 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, and you are experiencing one thing that those men and i think it was almost certainly men you know would have experienced so so i know it's built by i know it's built by humans um 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 this is a 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 harbour, which is huge, this site covers about six miles,

on the edge of the harbour 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 1,000 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 written by a man called Mera who was a sort of foreman of this group called Asar 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 things like, you 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. You know, 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. pyramid so that the king could be buried so that the world could keep turning because you you know 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 and then the river nile would keep flooding you know the pomegranates would keep ripening on the on the trees so it really really matters to them it was

definitely a common purpose yeah as you mentioned the average lifespan which is quite shocking to contemplate was it 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 how the role it plays in society? Yeah. Well, death was all around, as you say.

So, you know, for some of the groups, the average age of death is 19. For some, it goes up to 30, 35. But it's still, you you know 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 the people talk about the Egyptians being obsessed with death and that's a nonsense they're actually obsessed with the possibilities of of life and they love life so much they think that life is going to carry on if everything's done properly beyond so they it's not an afterlife it's a it's

a second life that people can end up inhabiting you you you write that we have um 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 i this is one of the reasons that i love what i do so much because you're 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, you know, 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 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 oppressive in any way.

It was this extraordinary resurrection machine. And we used the word pyramid the whole time which is actually a greek word we shouldn't really call it a pyramid um 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 right let's call it a period the enormous enormous bun thing on the giza plateau for but the ancient egyptians called it that it transliterates as mer which means a place of ascension so so that's 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 kind of rehabilitation and renovation 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 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 and said, so tell me, my fine man,

what is this writing, this mysterious writing on the pyramid? And the guide said, ah, it's the numbers of the amount of beetroot, onion and garlic that the builders of the pyramid ate when they were building it. And Herodotus goes, amazing. You know, that's fascinating and writes it down in his histories. And I'm sure it was just someone who was going like, I don't know, you know, it's hieroglyphs. I can't read. Let's just tell him what he thinks. But he wasn't awed by the place, well he was he was awed by it really fascinatingly 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 they talk about them as being the kind of grand fancies of dictators you know with this notion that they're either a republic or it's it's a benign uh imperial power rome and they've you know they're sort of slightly dismissive of the pyramids so um so let's flip the page to something that 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 um there are many accounts of them but there's no physical evidence uh that they ever existed um 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 Yeah, if they did. And it's the million dollar question because of all of the seven wonders, they're probably the most famous. You know, if you guys go and have, you know, a meal with friends and you say, you know, tell me the seven wonders, nine times out of 10, 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, particular the fact that they kind of rose 82 feet above the palace the royal palaces of babylon um i there's some descriptions of these like almost kind of giant window boxes that were um had waterproof material put in them with whole trees being planted there and it looked like 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 spent a lot of time in Iraq. In Iraq, not in Babylon, but 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. I'm 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 a name for the wider region. And if you think about it, kind of the clues 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, Bethany Hughes. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, radio across North America on Sirius XM, 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 Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. More than 2,000 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? What 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 coloured blue glazed walls 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. And 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 lilos. I've been talking about lilos and people are like, we have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. So lilos basically are my 70s childhood. They're kind of 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, in a way, how could you not write about them? But they're also an expression of absolute power because this is whereas 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, says 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, 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 so specific it's 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 him 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 iridation 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 think just instinctively, we know that gardens matter. 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, you know, 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 the street where you grew up. 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 I always travel and you learn incredible things by traveling 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? 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're so cool. 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 saltwater 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 10 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, you know, 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 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,

asilia, which gives us our 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 north eastern corner is basically uh dormitories for refugees and people some people hate that you know um they talk about the asylum seekers being there like nesting birds um and in the roman period uh people are very kind of critical and say the crime rate's gone up with all these refugees, you know, in the sanctuary. I mean, you literally couldn't make it up.

But I love that. I love the idea that people went there and felt that they were safe. 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 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 dint 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 you know artfully shooting a bow of arrow no no no not not the great Artemis of Ephesus um go and google it but I'm going to describe it as well so she's called the polymastic Artemis uh she's this ferocious creature and she looks like she has about 40 breasts on her chest. 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, you know, 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. 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 uh i mean i suppose the fact that uh she loses her power artemis you know she's very popular and then there's this period it's paul goes and preaches in ephesus obviously very famously and the people of ephesus are very 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 um in silver and paul comes and says this is all nonsense and all the craftspeople 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 Jesus, 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 2,000 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 they would look at those people that 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 illustrative 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 their certainty that they were creating something that was that had divine power has actually been made made manifest this this may be taking us into 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 don't I mean maybe I don't want to be down on us but I you know we do do incredible things you know we're we're both kind of wise and and foolish uh 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, I don't think that we should sort of 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 is 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 unwonderful 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 that 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 the word wonder but also these wonders were in some way an antidote or um you know a way to balance our opposite instinct as humans which is one for destruction. And we see evidence of that all the time, including in our own, you know, on the earth. 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, you know, warfare goes back. We now know 16,000 years organized warfare. You know, it's a terrible thing that we enjoy

thousand years organized warfare you know it's a terrible thing that we 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 about the future as a historian you know we 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 yeah just a couple of last things. You dedicate this book to your parents. Yes. Who sadly died while you were writing the book. Yeah. 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 yeah well my father actually died when i was in the great pyramid and he was a 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 um 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 was it really helped me and he would have um 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 no problem no problem no but it was you know as i said it was i just knew that 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 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. 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. No. 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 4 600 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 agaria i don't know if anybody's come across agaria She should be a household name.

So 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 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. 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's one of those slightly sort of overexcited travellers 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, you know, 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, you know, there are the little windows

so so i love agaria but you know you don't believe everything that everybody wrote about the wonders i'm just as a final question i'm asking you to imagine what you think the ancients would make of the fact that 2000 you know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years later, there was 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 in any way of any importance. And I genuinely mean that. 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 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 that they lived in a world they really understood about the passage of of time and there's a

brilliant one of my kind of favorite anecdotes uh from the whole seven wonders story is that there's a this uh very satirical sharp writer called lucian of samastata and he writes the world's first sci-fi novel uh uh in and ancient times and he writes about an ancient astronaut who flies up to the moon again there's this thing you know we we kind of imagine 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 roads 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've all come here tonight on whatever night we decided it was tuesday or wednesday to to kind of sit and appreciate their 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 my questions. What a joy. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. So great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Bettany Hughes is a historian, author, and documentarian. Her television documentaries have been broadcast on the BBC, 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 Elmer, Senior Producer of Event Programming at the Toronto Public Library. Thanks as well to technician Miss Finn Baisasso 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 Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.