Seven wonders
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The list varied from book to book, but the best-known version included the following sights:
- The Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt is the oldest of the wonders and only one that survives today.
- The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were in what is now Iraq. There is debate, though, about whether these gardens existed and what they looked like if they did exist.
- The Colossus, a great statue that straddled the harbour entrance at Rhodes in the Greek Islands. In modern times, a proposal was made to build a new Colossus of Rhodes. The original Colossus was the inspiration for the fictional Titan of Bravos in the Game of Thrones books and TV series.
- Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in what is now Turkey
- Mausoleum at Halikarnassus in what is now Turkey
- Lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt
- Statue of Zeus at Olympia
At the time the Wonders were first listed, the Hellenic (Greek) culture extended far beyond the current boundaries of Greece. Alexander the Great had created a huge empire and, though that empire soon split up, Greek influence continued in many areas for centuries. All these wonders were in the Hellenic regions; see Ancient Greece.
None of these but the Great Pyramid — which ironically was the oldest of the seven wonders at the time the list was made — has survived to the present day.
In subsequent eras, there have been various proposals for lists of "seven wonders" in various regions or worldwide; occasionally, a landmark is proposed as an "eighth wonder" of the world. With no universally-defined criteria for which places to include, the selection of seven destinations for these lists tends to be arbitrary and variable, and none of them have been widely accepted.