The Seven Wonders
of the World, explained

Fourteen structures across two lists, three continents and more than 4,000 years of building.

Table: The ancient and new Seven Wonders, with dates and current status (UNESCO and historical sources)

Ancient wonders still standing

1 of 7

The Great Pyramid, oldest of all

c. 2560 BCE

Great Pyramid's original height

146.6 m

New Seven Wonders announced in Lisbon

7 July 2007

The ancient Seven Wonders: a Mediterranean travel list

1Great Pyramid of GizaGiza, Egypt · standing2Hanging Gardens of BabylonBabylon, Iraq · lost3Statue of ZeusOlympia, Greece · lost4Temple of ArtemisEphesus, Turkey · ruins5Mausoleum at HalicarnassusBodrum, Turkey · ruins6Colossus of RhodesRhodes, Greece · fell 226 BCE7Lighthouse of AlexandriaAlexandria, Egypt · lost

Great Pyramid of Giza (c. 2560 BCE)

The Great Pyramid was built for the pharaoh Khufu of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty around 2560 BCE, traditionally under his vizier Hemiunu. It rose about 146.6 metres from some 2.3 million limestone blocks and was the tallest human-made structure on Earth for around 3,800 years. Its sides are aligned to the cardinal directions with remarkable precision, and its smooth outer casing of white Tura limestone, now mostly gone, would have made it shine. UNESCO lists it within the "Memphis and its Necropolis" World Heritage Site¹.

Hanging Gardens of Babylon (c. 600 BCE?)

The gardens were said to have been built by Nebuchadnezzar II for his wife, terraces of trees and plants watered by machinery lifting water from the Euphrates. The problem is evidence: Greek and Roman accounts were written centuries later, no Babylonian text mentions the gardens, and excavations have not found clear remains. The Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has argued that they were real but at Nineveh, built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, whose inscriptions do describe gardens and a water-raising screw.

Statue of Zeus at Olympia (c. 435 BCE)

The sculptor Phidias made a seated Zeus about 12 metres tall for the temple at Olympia, of ivory over a wooden frame with gold drapery, a technique called chryselephantine. Archaeologists found Phidias's workshop at Olympia, including clay moulds and a cup inscribed with his name. The statue was lost in the 5th century CE, possibly in a fire after being moved to Constantinople.

Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (c. 550 BCE)

The temple, funded in part by King Croesus of Lydia, was one of the first great marble temples, with more than 100 columns. A man named Herostratus burned it in 356 BCE to make himself famous; it was rebuilt on the same scale, damaged by raiders in the 3rd century CE and later quarried for stone. Today a single column has been re-erected from fragments on the marshy site.

Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (c. 350 BCE)

The tomb of Mausolus, a Persian satrap of Caria, was so famous that his name gave us the word mausoleum. Designed by the Greek architects Satyros and Pytheos, it stood about 45 metres tall, a temple-like building on a high base topped by a stepped pyramid and a chariot sculpture. Earthquakes damaged it, and from 1494 the Knights of St John used its stones to build Bodrum Castle, where pieces can still be seen.

Colossus of Rhodes (c. 280 BCE)

After surviving a siege, the people of Rhodes commissioned Chares of Lindos to cast a bronze statue of the sun god Helios, about 33 metres high, the height of a ten-storey building. It took around 12 years and stood for only about 54 before an earthquake in 226 BCE broke it at the knees. The famous image of it straddling the harbour comes from later artists; ancient bronze casting could not have supported that pose.

Lighthouse of Alexandria (c. 280 BCE)

Built on the island of Pharos under the Ptolemies and credited to Sostratus of Cnidus, the lighthouse was a three-stage tower, square, then octagonal, then cylindrical, estimated at about 100 metres or more. A fire at the top, reflected by mirrors according to later accounts, guided ships into one of the busiest ports in the world. Earthquakes in the 14th century brought it down, and in 1477 the Mamluk sultan Qaitbay built a fort from its stones on the same spot.

How 16th-century artists imagined the lost wonders (Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, 1572)

The New Seven Wonders were chosen by a public vote run by the Swiss-based New7Wonders Foundation, founded by Bernard Weber, and announced in Lisbon on 7 July 2007⁹. The organisers reported about 100 million votes cast online and by phone. UNESCO took no part; it said the campaign could not be compared with the scientific process behind its World Heritage List. The Great Pyramid was given honorary status as the only surviving ancient wonder.

The New Seven Wonders, and the surviving ancient one

1Great Wall of ChinaChina · largely Ming, 1368–16442PetraJordan · c. 1st century CE3Christ the RedeemerRio de Janeiro · 19314Machu PicchuPeru · c. 14505Chichén ItzáMexico · 9th–12th century6ColosseumRome · 80 CE7Taj MahalAgra, India · 1631–16488Great Pyramid (honorary)Giza, Egypt · c. 2560 BCE

Great Wall of China (7th century BCE–1644 CE)

The Great Wall is not one wall but many, built and rebuilt by different states and dynasties over about 2,000 years to defend against northern peoples. The brick-and-stone sections most visitors see, such as Badaling and Mutianyu near Beijing, are largely from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Earlier walls were often rammed earth: layers of soil pounded hard inside wooden frames. UNESCO inscribed it in 1987³. The often-repeated claim that it is visible from the Moon is false; astronauts have said it is hard even to see from low orbit without aid.

Petra (c. 1st century CE)

Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, Arab traders who controlled incense routes. Its most famous monument, Al-Khazneh ("the Treasury"), probably a royal tomb, was carved directly into the rose-red sandstone cliff, from the top down, around the 1st century CE. The Nabataeans also engineered the desert: dams, cisterns and channels collected flash-flood water for a city in an arid valley. UNESCO inscribed Petra in 1985⁴.

Christ the Redeemer (1922–1931)

The statue on Corcovado mountain above Rio was designed by the French sculptor Paul Landowski with the Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa, with the face sculpted by Gheorghe Leonida. It was built of reinforced concrete, then a modern material, and covered in a mosaic of thousands of small triangular soapstone tiles. It stands about 30 metres, or 38 metres with its pedestal, with arms spanning 28 metres, and was inaugurated in 1931. It is part of UNESCO's "Carioca Landscapes" World Heritage Site⁸.

Machu Picchu (c. 1450)

Machu Picchu was built around 1450 as a royal estate, probably for the Inca emperor Pachacuti, on a ridge 2,430 metres above sea level. Its finest walls are ashlar masonry: granite blocks cut to fit so tightly without mortar that a knife blade cannot pass between them, a technique that lets the walls shift and resettle in earthquakes. Hidden engineering does as much work: terraces and around 130 drainage channels keep the city from sliding off its mountain in heavy rain. The American explorer Hiram Bingham publicised it in 1911; local farmers already knew it. UNESCO inscribed it in 1983⁵.

Chichén Itzá (c. 9th–12th century)

Chichén Itzá was one of the largest Maya cities of the Yucatán. Its central pyramid, El Castillo or the Temple of Kukulcán, is a calendar in stone: four stairways of 91 steps plus the top platform make 365. Around the spring and autumn equinoxes, the late-afternoon sun casts a series of triangular shadows down the northern staircase that join a carved serpent head at its base, a "serpent" descending the pyramid. UNESCO inscribed the site in 1988⁶.

Colosseum (70–80 CE)

The Flavian Amphitheatre was begun by the emperor Vespasian around 70–72 CE and opened by his son Titus in 80 CE. It is an engineering system as much as a building: a concrete-and-travertine oval about 189 by 156 metres, with some 80 entrances and stairways designed to fill and empty a crowd of around 50,000 quickly, and a retractable awning, the velarium, worked by sailors. Earthquakes and centuries of stone robbing removed much of its outer ring; it is part of UNESCO's Historic Centre of Rome site⁷.

Taj Mahal (1631–1648)

The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal in Agra as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth in 1631. UNESCO dates the mausoleum's construction from 1631 to 1648²; the wider complex was finished by about 1653. The chief architect is generally identified as Ustad Ahmad Lahori. It is built of white Makrana marble from Rajasthan, inlaid with semi-precious stones in the pietra dura technique, and set at the end of a charbagh, a garden divided into four parts by water channels. Its four minarets lean very slightly outward, which is usually explained as a way to make them fall away from the tomb in an earthquake.

Every wonder on both lists combined three things: a powerful patron, a material pushed to its limit, and a problem of scale solved by organisation as much as by tools.

These buildings were also designed for people moving through them: the Colosseum's numbered entrances and the Taj Mahal's axial approach, revealed through a gateway, are wayfinding design. The same principles guide people through a well-designed app, a subject we cover across our Laws of UX library.

Dates and descriptions of the surviving and new wonders come from UNESCO's World Heritage Centre records for each site; the 2007 vote from the New7Wonders Foundation. Accounts of the lost ancient wonders follow the standard historical sources and current scholarship, including the debate over the Hanging Gardens; ancient heights are estimates. Images are from Wikimedia Commons and its partner institutions (including the Rijksmuseum, the Library of Congress and the Scottish National Gallery), credited under each. Last reviewed October 2026.