Survival of Wonders

[simon darkshade]

How can as many of the Great Wonders of the Ancient World survive to the present day?

What would the consequences be?

Specifically, what would be the result of a surviving Great Library?

[stevep]

Aug 3, 2021 11:12:01 GMT simon darkshade said:

How can as many of the Great Wonders of the Ancient World survive to the present day?

What would the consequences be?

Specifically, what would be the result of a surviving Great Library?

  Well I can't really see the Colossus of Rhodes surviving, nor the Pharos of Alexandria due to problems with earthquakes in those regions.  That's what gave the Colossus such a short life-span OTL. 

  Of the others the temples of Zeus and Diana/Artemis were religious so it really needs their religions continuing to survive.  Or at least not be replaced by a bitterly exclusive system like the Abrahamic faiths which would be committed to stamping out such alternatives as unacceptable to them.  Also Ephesus, where Artemis's temple was seems to have suffered from the silting up of the harbour so it could have ended up as a largely isolated backwater - which might have saved it from attack but left it somewhat dilapidated. 

  According to its wiki entry the Mausoleum_at_Halicarnassus was also destroyed by earthquakes although it seems to have lasted until the 12th-15th centuries.  Possibly again with more stability in the region might have helped.  Especially since much of the remains seem to have been plundered by the Knights of St John to build a fortress nearby to oppose the Turks from 1494 onward. 

Other that the Great Pyramid at Gaza, of the formal 7 ancient wonders that only leaves the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  Reading the wiki link for this its the only wonder that we don't know the location of for which there are three theories.

The Hanging Gardens are the only one of the Seven Wonders for which the location has not been definitively established.[6] There are no extant Babylonian texts that mention the gardens, and no definitive archaeological evidence has been found in Babylon.[7][8] Three theories have been suggested to account for this: firstly, that they were purely mythical, and the descriptions found in ancient Greek and Roman writings (including those of Strabo, Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius Rufus) represented a romantic ideal of an eastern garden;[9] secondly, that they existed in Babylon, but were completely destroyed sometime around the first century AD;[10][4] and thirdly, that the legend refers to a well-documented garden that the Assyrian King Sennacherib (704–681 BC) built in his capital city of Nineveh on the River Tigris, near the modern city of Mosul.[11][1]

  Assuming that they did exist then their survival would really need the survival of the city, either Babylon or Nineveh which would be a real challenge in the latter case given the violence of the destruction of the Assyrian empire.  If they actually existed in Babylon that might be the best option although apart from other items of decline I think the city was largely depopulated when the remaining population moved to the Seleucid capital of Seleucia in 275BC.

In terms of other great wonders of the ancient world a lot would depend on circumstances, especially political and religious. You mentioned the Library of Alexandria but there is uncertainty as to when it was destroyed and by whom. Again there are a number of problems here Library_of_Alexandria.

 

Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to Cyprus. Many other scholars, including Dionysius Thrax and Apollodorus of Athens, fled to other cities, where they continued teaching and conducting scholarship. The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library's resources.

The Library dwindled during the Roman period, due to a lack of funding and support. Its membership appears to have ceased by the 260s AD. Between 270 and 275 AD, the city of Alexandria saw a Palmyrene invasion and an imperial counterattack that probably destroyed whatever remained of the Library, if it still existed at that time. The daughter library of the Serapeum may have survived after the main Library's destruction. The Serapeum was vandalized and demolished in 391 AD under a decree issued by Coptic Christian Pope Theophilus of Alexandria, but it does not seem to have housed books at the time and was mainly used as a gathering place for Neoplatonist philosophers following the teachings of Iamblichus. 

  As such it appears that problems occurred even before Julius's accidental destruction of part of it in 48BC and a gradual decline followed.  You would need greater stability in Egypt, or whoever ruled the country and also a longer lasting prestige for the institution which is possible.  Possibly also differences in religious development as again Abrahamic faiths tended to be hostile to earlier teachings and sources.

  Anyway a longer post than I intended and it looks rather dubious that several of the wonders, or the Library could survive until the present day without major political/religious changes.  Earthquakes also seem to have doomed three of them although under different circumstances possibly the Mausoleum could have been repaired and maintained if protected.

  Steve