Louise Finnamore, age 10, of Fredericton; N. B., Canada, for her question:
Why are the Pyramids called Wonders of the World?
Mankind is a born traveler and the human family loves to take vacation trips to other places on our planet. A few roam idly from one place to another, but most of us prefer to plan our tours and look forward to visiting, say, the Pyramids or some other wonder of the world.
Right now, thousands of families are planning to take summer vacation tours to vi¬sit places far from home. We tend to think that this kind of touring was invented along with trains and buses, planes and automobiles. Not at all. Our ancestors who lived in the earliest settled communities also liked to take trips once in a while. They traveled on horses and camels, donkeys and often on foot to visit neighboring cities. Some trudged thousands of miles through strange and faraway countries.
The times change, but human nature changes very slowly through the ages. Like us, the tourists of the ancient world longed to visit other places and like us, they re¬turned with a fuller understanding of their home communities. News also traveled around in those days, though more slowly. Returning tourists told of wondrous places they had visited. The ancient Greeks had guide books for hopeful tourists, just as we do. To them, there was something magical in the number seven. So their guide books included a list of seven wondrous places that every well traveled tourist should visit.
These fabulous places were known as the Seven Wonders of the World. All of them were breath taking, man made structures in lands near the Mediterranean Sea where our Western civilization was born. A well traveled tourist of 2,000 years ago did his best to visit all Seven Wonders of the ancient world. But the only one remaining to this day is the sturdy Pyramids of Egypt. Those massive tombs have been visited by admiring tourists through more than 4,000 years. Though now a bit worn by the weather, we still refer to the great buildings as one of the wonders of the world.
The other six wonders disappeared long ago from the list of tourist attractions.
At Ephesus in Asia Minor, the lavish temple to the goddess Diana was destroyed by a fire¬ bug in 262 A.D. The Greek temple at Olympia lost its immense gold and ivory statue of Zeus in the Middle Ages. The wondrous Hanging Gardens of Babylon have long since crumbled to dust. In Asia Minor, only a few relics of the stupendous tomb of King Mausolus can be found. Tourists of the ancient world sailed from afar to a Greek island where a bronze statue of Helios the sun god stood 105 feet tall, guarding the harbor. In 224 B.C., this famous Colossus of Rhodes was toppled by an earthquake:
In 955 A. D., another earthquake toppled the sixth of the ancient wonders. This was the Pharos of Alexandria, an elegant lighthouse of gleaming white marble which held its warning beacon 400 feet above treacherous shoals in the sea.
Of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, only the Pyramids of Egypt still sur¬vive. Several lists of Seven Wonders in our modern world have been suggested, includ¬ing a subway, some tall buildings and a sewage system. As of old, these tourist at¬tractions are all man made structures. Meantime nature has been providing millions of wonders for mankind to behold. The stupendous scenery in our National Parks has been there for millions of years. Some of our Big Trees were living giants when tourists set forth to visit the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.