July 27, 2023 • 38 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Michael Denis Higgins, Professor Emeritus of Earth Science at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and author of the new book “The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World Science, Engineering and Technology.” What was the Colossus of Rhodes, why did it impress the ancient Hellenistic world and how might we recreate it in the modern world?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Everyone knows the renowned Seven Wonders of the world, but
few have set eyes on them. For in order to
do so, you have to arrange a long journey to
the land of the Persians on the far side of
the Euphrates. You have to visit Egypt. You must then
change direction and go to Ilia in Greece. Then you
(00:22):
must see Halakarnassis, a city state in Karia, and Ephesus
in Ionia. And you have to sail to Rhads, so that,
being exhausted by lengthy wanderings over the Earth's surface and
growing tired from the effort of these journeys, you finally
fulfill your heart's desire only when life is ebbing away,
(00:44):
leaving you weak through the weight of years.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Those are the words of Felo of Byzantium,
promoting the idea of the Seven Wonders of the World.
On today's episode, I'm going to be chatting with Professor
Michael Dennis Higgins, author of the new book The Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World, Science, Engineering, and Technology, out
(01:23):
now from Oxford University Press in both physical and digital formats.
It's an absolutely wonderful book and we've actually used it
already as a source on the show in our series
on mud, specifically in our section on mud bricks. So
I'm delighted to have the author on the show. When
we set this up a couple of weeks ago, we
decided to just focus on a single wonder as opposed
(01:46):
to all seven of the Wonders of the world, so
we're going to be talking about the Colossus of Rhodes.
Let's get right to the interview. Hi, Michael, thanks for
coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
It's my pleasure to be alone.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
The book is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Science, Engineering,
and Technology. It's a terrific read. Tell us how did
this project come together?
Speaker 4 (02:09):
Well, the project was actually inspired many years ago by
my father. My father was a curator at the British Museum.
After he died, I started thinking about what he had done,
and he had written on a chapter on the Colossus
of Roads for a book on the Seven Wonders of
the Ancient World, and so I thought, well, why not
(02:30):
update it a bit because there'd been nothing really done
seriously on the Seven Wonders in almost forty years, So
hence my book.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Now we're only going to be focusing on the one
particular wonder for today's conversation, the Colossus of Rhodes. But
I thought you might remind our listeners where and when
this whole concept of the seven Wonders of the ancient
world comes from.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
Well, the idea broadly comes from the third century BCE.
It's a sort of a kind of modern life, a
modern bucket list of things to see before you die.
And it may seem rather surprising that these kind of lists,
you know, existed at that time. Now, it's true that
there wasn't very much tourism in ancient Greece, and that
(03:15):
was partly because travel was by sea and there was
a lot of problems with pirates. But into Roman times
there was a well established a tourist industry in Greece
and Egypt and Roman and all the rest of it.
We actually have a tourist guide from the second century
BCE where he describes all the places he went to.
(03:36):
There were many lists, but the most popular and the
one that's come down.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
To us now.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
It starts, of course with the Pyramids you can't avoid them.
The Gardens of Babylon, the walls of Babylon as well,
although that was subsequently are replaced by the Phiahs, the
Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the tomb of King Marsolis,
the Temple of Artemiss and of course the Colossus of Roads.
(04:02):
And the question always is why were these things chosen?
And they were probably chosen for their size, their beauty,
and their engineering challenges. But also there's another aspect that
almost all of them have some kind of indirect or
direct link with Alexander the third of Macedon. He was
(04:25):
the great conqueror who was known as the Great by
those who were not unfortunate enough to have been conquered
by him.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Now narrowing in on the Island of Roads where the
Colossus of Rhodes is or wise position now, Unfortunately, the
Island of Roads is currently in the news due to
destructive wildfires, so a refresher might not be as essential
for listeners as as it normally would be. But could
you go ahead and position roads for us geographically? And
(04:54):
I guess geologically, well.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
It's a Biggish Greek island in the south east GNC.
It's near the Turkish Turkish coast. In antiquity it was
known as a warm, sunny island, and in fact it
was sacred to the sun god Helios. And the story
is that that Zeus had divided up the world between
his brothers, but Helios was away and when he came
(05:20):
back he found that that he hadn't been allocated anything.
I guess they perhaps held the meeting during the night,
so he wasn't there. But serious offered to redivide up
the world. But Helius saw an island appearing in the
south and asked for it, and that was Rhodes. And
so in a sense that people still worship the sun there.
(05:40):
Of course, it's a major holiday destination. Unfortunately, it is hot,
it's sunny, it's dry for a huge amount of a
very large amount of time every year, and so it's
very susceptible to fires, which we're seeing now with the
hot weather and that throughout Greece. And it's also suceptible
to earthquakes, which come into the story of the Colossos
(06:04):
quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Now. Yeah, turning to the colossus itself, I think many
of us have seen illustrations of it, but really, what
was this colossus, So what do we think it looked like.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
Okay, it was a huge statue, probably thirty three meters high,
because we have some descriptions which say how big it
was as one hundred feet and it was made of bronze.
Now we don't have any really detailed description. Most people
seem to say, well, everybody knows what it looks like,
so there's no point in talking about it, and we don't.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Have any images of it.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Although the Rodians actually put on their coins the head
of Helios. Now Roman in ancient coins were obviously they
were used for money, but there was also essentially made souvenirs,
and so they often had on their coins things that
would encouraged tourism, and one of them was this image
(07:03):
of Helios with curly hair and sun rays coming out
of a kind of diadem. Now many people have suggested
that the image of the head and perhaps of parts
of the body was actually inspired by the statues of Alexander,
(07:24):
because the sculptor who created the colossos was a pupil
of the official sculptor of Alexander. And as for the
rest of the statue, well, the most people think that
he probably the god probably stood upright. He was holding
a spear in one hand. This was partly, of course,
(07:46):
to stabilize the statue, and he may have held a
torch above his head. So if you want to think
of what it looked like, well you know clearly the
Statue of Liberty was inspired by the idea of what
the statue looked like, and it was created to commemorate
(08:07):
a very important event in three hundred and five BCE.
Now this time, Rhodes was a quasi independent kingdom and
it was caught between two major powers which were ruled
by the successors of Alexander. So Alexander had died some
(08:31):
time before, and he just his empire had been divided up,
and two of the big chunks were Egypt to the
south and Macedonia to the north, and Rhodes was kind
of caught in a proxy war between these two major states,
and Macedonia attacked roads with a fleet of ships. The
(08:53):
Egyptians came to the rescue and defeated the Macedonians, and
when the Macedonians left, they based sickly, just ran as
fast as they could, and they left behind most of
their military equipment, including some huge siege towers and These
were towers that were built of wood and iron and bronze.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Some of them.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
Maybe up one hundred and fifty feet high fifty meters high,
and that perhaps come back into the story a bit later.
So these towers had rams at the base of them.
They were covered in iron plates to prevent fire arrows
setting fire to the whole wooden structure. And the story
goes that when the Rhodians finally defeated the Macedonians, that
(09:41):
they sold off a lot of the siege towers. But
I think actually they probably were wise enough to recycle
a lot of the material into the statue that makes sense,
and perhaps sell off other materials they didn't need.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
So that was it.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Now you discussed that of the three surviving descriptions of
the statue, the longest description, like the most detailed description,
also seems to present a detailed but implausible construction method.
What are we to make of this?
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Yes, it's a bit curious.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
The description you're talking about is by Philo of Byzantium,
who is a third century BCE engineer, and he was
the one who may have written the original description of
the Seven Wonders, although that's somewhat debatable. Now he talks
about how the statue had a framework of iron and stone,
(10:37):
which is okay so far it would have had to
have been built on a framework. But then he goes
on and talks in great detail about how the bronze
was poured on layer after layer, a bit like casting concrete,
you know, putting one layer on, waiting a fort to solidify,
and then putting another layer on. But it's a very
(10:57):
brutal way of making a statue and would have required
a gigantic amount of metal, and it would have produced
an incredibly heavy statue that would have probably had problems
standing up. It's much more likely that the colossus was
actually made like smaller statues because they hadn't made one
this high one hundred feet high before, But they'd made
(11:18):
statues that were thirty forty feet high, so I mean
they knew how to make big statues. This one was
just even bigger. Now, the first stage in all of these,
making any of these statues was to build a full
sized model. So this would have had a frame of
wood or iron. We don't know whether it's the final
frame or not, or whether it was some kind of
(11:39):
temporary affair. So they would have built a frame of
wood and put struts and other bits on it, and
finally smaller and smaller pieces of wood until they could
cover the whole thing with plaster and make an exact
model of what they wanted in the final structure. So
(12:02):
they must have needed cranes and a shelter to produce
this huge structure because it would have taken years to do.
And one possibility is that they used the old siege
tower or one of the old siege towers, or at
least its framework. Now we know these siege towers were
maybe thirty or forty feet wide and one hundred feet high.
(12:24):
They were made of wooden frames like I mentioned, covered
with metal. So what they could have done is dismantled
a siege tower, moved it and re erected it on
the base for the statue, and then they would have
used that frame for hauling things up, and also they
(12:47):
could put a roof on it so they would be
sheltered while they were doing the construction because they're building
the statue probably took about ten or twelve years, so
it's kind of nice to think that they were recent Michael,
and perhaps the size of the original siege tower, which
would have been large enough to reach out over the
(13:09):
walls so that they could attack the city. Perhaps this
is what inspired the size of the actual statue itself.
So the next stage after they'd produced that that model
was casting the bronze first light. Say you know what
is bronze? As people are often get confused with all
these different alloys, it's it's an alloy of copper and
(13:33):
tin and usually lead. Now, the reason why they mixed
up these metals was that all alloys melt at lower
temperatures than pure metals, so it's less energy, it's easier
to pour and bronze this mixture of mostly copper like
ninety copper tin and two few percent lead. That also
(13:55):
flows more readily than pure copper, so it was a
much better material.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
It was harder.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Now copper was available from Cypress. Cypress, in fact, even
takes its name from the ancient Roman name for copper,
and there are huge deposits there which were exploited until
quite recently. Still they may still be exploited because Cypress
(14:22):
is actually a section of the seafloor that many many
years ago was thrust up above sea level or to
make new land. But I'm sure that many people have
seen pictures of black smokers. There's hot springs on the
ocean floor. The smoke that comes out is actually contains
(14:45):
copper sulfide, and so that's how those deposits on Cypress formed.
And so copper from Cyprus was no problem. It had
been exploited for thousands of years before then, and it
was exploited for many years afterwards. Now tin is a
much more of a mystery. We don't know when people
discovered that tin. Addition of tin to copper would make
(15:10):
it melted at a lower temperature and make a harder material,
but it was certainly something extremely important. But the problem
is where the tin came from, because there isn't a
single source like Cyprus. Heroditis, who was writing in the
fifth century BCE, talked about the Casiderites islands far off
in the Atlantic, and that may have been England, Southwest
(15:33):
England or Brittany.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
But it's also.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
Possible that the tin actually came from the far East,
because we know that the gem material lap Is Lazuli
was actually imported from Afghanistan to Europe for a very
long period of time. It's present in ancient Egypt, so
we know there were long distance trade routes all the
(15:57):
way as far as the as far as Afghanistan, and
it's possible that the tin came from there, but there
may have been just many, many, many different sources. It
was obtained by washing river sediments a bit like gold
place of gold, and it may have been essentially a
byproduct of gold explotation in some places. Now, the third
(16:20):
component was lead that was added to further reduce the temperature,
but it was also to stretch the metal because it
was incredibly cheap, and the reason was that it was
a waste product from the silver mines near Athens, near
near Lavrion, which was the source of the of the
(16:41):
wealth that built the Parthenon and the other monuments of
classical grease. It was silver, so there was pars of
lead there. So they would import these these materials and
perhaps recycle a bit, and then they had to cast it.
So the way of it is most likely that they
(17:01):
cast it was that they would have taken a section
of the full size model, maybe up to two or
three meters wide two or three meters deep, and they
would have covered it with wax. This would have been
bees wax, maybe a quarter inch thick. Five milimeters. Then
(17:22):
they would have carefully removed the wax model covered it
in clay and baked it to make a mold, so
the wax would have drained out.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
It would have been recycled because it.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Had a lot of value, and they would vend it
up with a clay mold with a hole in it
very very narrow width, just like I said, a quarter
of an inch. So then melt metal and pour it
into the mold, and then once it was cool, you
would break up the mold and clean up the casting
because of course it would probably have holes in it
(17:55):
and other little bits and pieces that need fixing. And
then you'd fix their metal sheets onto the framework the
framework of iron, and would probably mostly iron. And the
total amount of metal in the in the statue was
probably the order of like one hundred and thirty one
hundred and fifty tons something like that. So it was
(18:16):
it was a significant amount, but it wasn't It wasn't gigantic.
They probably would have produced that much copper in Cyprus
every year, or or perhaps every six months, so it
was it was not. It's not an impossibly large amount
of material.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
How would it have looked from Afar?
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Would it.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Do you do we think it would have like gleamed
in the sun. Would it have been like really splendid
to behold?
Speaker 4 (18:37):
I think initially it would have gleamed in the sun,
but of course it would have.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
It would have had a.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
Green pattern that developed quite fast. I don't think anybody
has ever suggested that it was covered in gold. You
could have put a thin coating of gold on it.
It was sometimes done, but it probably wouldn't last that long.
I mean, remember that it was put up beside the sea,
and so there was a certain amount of.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Sea spray which would have corroded it.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
So I think, you know, it would have looked green,
and it would have been seen from some distance out
to sea. So it was a kind of It was
a kind of beacon to welcome boats into the harbor,
as well as a symbol of yes, look we can
stand up to ourselves against the against the Macedonians, even
(19:23):
if it was our friends the Egyptians who helped us
on this one.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Now, one of the big mysteries with the Colossus of Roads,
as you discuss and this is there's similar mysteries with
with other of the ancient wonders concerns that the location.
So we don't know exactly where the Colossus of Roads
stood right right exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
We don't.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
We don't have any fragments of it. We don't we
haven't actually found where the metal was cast, which would
actually probably be something easier to find than the fragments
of the statue itself, because you know, an old factory
is something that nobody particularly wants, so you should be
(20:13):
left remains of it.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
And it's a bit of a.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
Mystery as to why we've never actually found anything of
where it was. But there's something that is clear is
that there's an image which is endlessly recycled of the
Clossos straddling the harbor as this giant statue with his
(20:35):
legs apart and ships sailing happily between his legs. Well,
there is absolutely no suggestion that that was correct. It's
completely the fantasy of a sixteenth century illustrator. But I
think because of the power of the illustration, you know,
it's it's a bad idea that you just can't get
rid of. It would have been technically impossible to actually
(20:58):
build a statue with the legs apart like that, And
also if the statue was thirty three meters high. It's
one hundred feet high including the spear and torch. Then
the crotch would have only been at about thirty five
feet and it's supposed to straddle the military harbor, and
none of the military boats of navy boats could have
(21:19):
got in because it would have been too small.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
So there is no way it stood like that.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
It's much more likely that it stood on a low
mound near the edge of the harbor, that's to say,
between the current harbor, which still exists, and the city itself.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
In fact, the place where we think it stood.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Is actually covered by the Palace of the Crusader Knights,
which was erected essentially in medieval times, although what you
see now is essentially a modern reconstruction because when Roads
was part of the part of Italy briefly during Miscellini's time,
(22:01):
it was reconstructed as a palace for Mussolini, so unfortunately
that's what happened now. So there are certain advantages being.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Near the harbor like this.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
First of all, it was on a low hill, so
it was visible from further out.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
It was also useful.
Speaker 4 (22:21):
For shipments of metal coming in because they had a
lot of weight of metal and being natural harbor, they
could store it there. They could have put workshops very
easily around the harbor itself, and perhaps the old seage
engine was nearby, so they had plenty of space for construction.
And also it was far from the corrosive effects of
(22:41):
sea spray, because sea spray obviously creates bronze very readily.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Now you mentioned that. Of course, you mentioned that the
stance of the statue, and how we think that it
was likely legs together as opposed to the legs apart.
That is a fantasy of illustration. One thing I kept
wondering about the reading the chapter is that a lot
of us still have that vision stuck in our minds
when we just think of the Colossus of Rhodes, this
(23:07):
huge metal colossus, you know, straddling the bay right up there,
you know, next to the water, and we think of
that and we think, well, that just sounds audacious. Of
course it fell down because we don't have I don't
see statues like that in the world today. You know,
why would they be able to get away with it
(23:28):
back then? And I was just wondering, if do you
think that these sorts of images in this line of thinking,
does it make us sort of take for granted the
skill that they would have had in constructing it. Like
how you mentioned that this was basically a larger version
of statues that they were already building. So was it
truly on an audacious project or was it maybe not
(23:50):
as audacious as we might think?
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (23:53):
I think it was definitely audacious. I mean it really
was considerably bigger, probably two or three times bigger than
anything they'd constructed before.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
And remember that.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
It was a very impressive construction, and it was much
imitated afterwards. There were other statues of this size that
were built. One of them will come into the story
a little bit later, but it was the Colossus of
Nero that was built at Rome, and it was constructed
next to the Flavian Amphitheater, which most people, of course
(24:23):
know as the Colosseum. And the Colosseum was not named
because it was colossal. It was named for the colossal
statue of Nero that stood nearby.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
But the problem always with.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
Large constructions in an area like roads, which is particularly
susceptible to earthquakes, is that it collapsed. It collapsed, in fact,
only sixty years after it was finished, in two twenty six,
so the problem was that there was an earthquake. There
(24:56):
was not, perhaps by Rodian standards, are very big earth quake,
but the land went down by one meter. And the
problem was that the wealth of roads essentially was derived
from its trading activity, and the harbor went down one meter.
So all the keys are underwater, the military ship sheds
(25:19):
where they stored the boats. Because boats, the military boats
were always hauled out of the water except when they
were needed. They were all submerged. And this international trading
hub just simply collapsed to that point. And there were
many cities which needed that trade, including Egypt, and so
there was a kind of international effort to try and
(25:41):
help roads and re establish the trade. So it was
not entirely altruistic that they were doing it. For instance, Egypt,
we know they offered ninety tons of bronze work, workmen
and money to restore the harbor and the statue. Now
we don't know if it was accepted immediately or accepted
at all. What we do know is that the Rhodians
(26:04):
consulted the oracle of Delphi, who said do not rebuild. Now,
I probably think that the Oracle of Delphi was a
bit like modern management consulting companies. People consult them to
consolidate the idea that they've already had in their mind,
but whether they did or did not accept the Obgyptian
(26:25):
offer is unclear. But the story that has followed on
from that was that the remains of the statue lay
on the ground for nine hundred years, nobody stole any
of it until the Arabs invaded and sold off the
money to a Jewish trader who hauled it away on
(26:48):
one hundred and thirty five camels. This story seems extremely unlikely.
I can't imagine anywhere in the ancient world where you
could have that amount of metal, the amount of wealth
in a big pile around for nine hundred years without
anybody stealing it. But that's become again it's it's the
story that's off to repeat it. But there's another possibility.
(27:11):
There was a Roman historian called Eusebius writing in three
hundred and eleven CE, and he it's a kind of
chronicle year by year that he describes, and for about
four times he describes in this kind of year by
year listing that the Colossos was rebuilt. The problem is
(27:36):
that we don't know whether he's talking about the Colossus
of Rhodes or the Colossus of Nero, because he was
actually based in Rome, so hence the problem. But of course,
if you could have restored the Colossos of Nero, which
was almost exact copy of the Colossos of Rhodes, except
of course with near his head on the top, if
(27:58):
you could restore that one, then you could restore the
Colossos of Roads too. So it seems quite likely that
many of the Roman emperors did in fact restore the Colossos,
and in fact it may have been rebuilt two or
three times. Whether it was built in exactly the same
form rebuilt, we don't know, and we don't know how
(28:19):
much of the damage was. But I imagine that the corrosion,
probably of the statue with an iron core and a
bronze exterior, would have corroded quite readily, and so even
relatively small earthquakes would have certainly damaged it partly brought
it down. So I like to think that that Ucbius
(28:39):
was probably right and that it was actually restored, because
it certainly was something that was incredibly important in people's consciousness,
and Roman empress did sometimes do these kind of altruistic
moves just to re establish their power too. So which
case when did it finally fall and was not restored, well,
(29:02):
probably one two CE, so this is like four hundred
years after it was built. There was a huge earthquake
in Roads. Now we know about this earthquake because the
land was uplifted by four point eight meters that's what
fourteen feet, and imagine that the size of an earthquake
(29:24):
needed to push the land up fourteen feet. And we
know how much the land went up and when that
happened from looking at sea level notches along the northeast
coast of Roads. Now, the Mediterranean, as most people know,
has very little tide, so when the waves hit on cliffs,
(29:48):
they create a notch, They rode away the cliff at
a level, and they create a platform. Because the century
no tide, so the waves always attacking the same level.
So during an earthquake, the land will move up or down.
In this case, it moved up and we have the
old kind of notch. The old sea level is still
(30:09):
visible and those that visit Roads City, Northern Roads can
still see these things along all the beaches, this old
notch up on it and it gives you the whole
history of it, and it certainly was a gigantic earthquake.
The trade must have completely been eliminated. The harbor was
just kind of wiped out. It would have taken a
(30:30):
tremendous It did take a tremendous amount of effort to
re establish trade. But if the colossus fell at that point,
it probably was not restored, simply because there were so
many other things to do. Were after such a huge earthquake,
the distraction of the city would have been almost total,
as well as all the buildings and the rest of it.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Now, in the last chapter of the book, you discuss
the idea of reconstructing modern replicas of the Seven Wonders,
which which I thought was a wonderful way to round
out the book, especially given you know, the book has
this has this great focus obviously on geology, often bringing
up the aspects of of of the local geology and
(31:21):
the sourcing of materials for the different Wonders that I,
you know, I'd never really considered before, I guess i'd,
you know, and often focused more on just sort of
the historical tidbits. I loved all of that, and I
love the focus on the engineering. So with the Colossus
of Rhodes in particular, how colossal of an undertaking, if
you will, would it be to rebuild it today, and
(31:43):
to do it right?
Speaker 4 (31:44):
I don't think it would have actually been particularly difficult
to do. To rebuild now. I mean we we do
have the Statue of Liberty, which is a little smaller,
but not not that much smaller. The Statue of Liberty
is built again on our metal frame. It's made of copper,
it's not bronze. But of course the Statue of Liberty
(32:05):
is not in an earthquake zone, whereas Roads we definitely
know it is. There is a plate tectonic boundary, probably
about ten kilometers south of Roads, where the floor of
the Mediterranean drops down from the kind of platform which
Roads is on right down into the deep ocean. So
(32:27):
it's a place where we regularly get big earthquakes, and
like I said, we can have ones with fourteen feet
of displacement, which is a huge earthquake. So you need
to build an earthquake resistant structure. There certainly are there's
a lot of expertise in building such structures, especially in
places like Chile where they regularly have very large earthquakes.
(32:50):
And I think the way to do it would be
to build a platform, a metal platform, and isolate it
seismically from the underlying rock.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
So you would have a slab of concrete, you'd have rubber.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
Blocks, and then on top of that there would have
been a metal frame, and the metal frame.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
Could be relatively rigid.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Then the statue would have a framework which would be
built onto that base. Again, it would have to have
a certain amount of flexibility so that the amount of
vibration that did get transmitted through there would not make
the plates of bronze come off the framework. They'd have
to be carefully design in that way, but I don't
(33:37):
think it would be a particularly big challenge to do.
The big challenge would be that everybody would expect to
rebuild it as a statue straddling the harbor. And so
when I've seen pictures of reconstructions that they're going to do,
it's been announced several times that they're building a reconstruction.
(34:00):
It's you know, often portrayed as straddling the harbor. Now
it is actually a harbor that's used now. So the
choice is you then have to build a much bigger colossos,
which I think is what they what they're thinking of.
Doing one that would be not one hundred feet high
but three hundred feet high. Then of course it gets
to be a little bit more complicated. But you know,
(34:20):
the question is do they want to rebuild it as
something that is somewhat resembles what it was in antiquity,
or do you want it as a model symbol of roads,
in which case it doesn't have to resemble anything that
it did. Did it look like an antiquity But it's
an interesting problem. It's more of a political problem than
anything else. I mean, I rather hope that none of
(34:42):
it is ever reconstructed, because I rather like visiting roads,
and Roads is a rather nice place on its own
without a very large statue in it.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
The fact that it was there was ever it was
ever built at all? You know what, what what does
this reveal about? Like the nature in the scope of
the original construction and about the place of roads in
the ancient world.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
I think it was it celebrated their worship of Helios,
and Helios is as a Greek god is somewhat neglected.
I mean, nowhere else in Greece do you find statues
or worship of Helios in any significant So it was
essentially their own kind of personal island god. I mean,
(35:29):
his place of Helios is usually taken by Apollo, who
had a similar kind of responsibilities. Now Helios, we always
talk about the sun god. Actually he is not quite that.
He was the guy in charge of transporting the sun,
so he dragged it on a chariot across the sky
and then kind of pushed it through hades and pulled
it up on the other side. So it was more
(35:51):
of a kind of wagoneer than a than a god.
But you know, every city of community wants to have
its kind of what was it starchitect building now, and
this was their starchitect building from the third century BC,
and perhaps nothing really has changed. People want to have
(36:13):
a symbol of their town, something they can put on
their coins, something they can use to attract tourists. And
that's what it was at those times, I say, and
not unusual when you look at the other wonders they
were essentially perhaps partly there to attract tourists too, but
also for worship as well. I mean, the Zeus statue
(36:35):
of Zeus was certainly a very very important destination for
people to view the mausoleum. The was a similarly in
that kind of way, and of course the pyramids still
are the greatest symbol of Egypt.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Well, Michael, thanks again for coming on the show to
discuss the book again. The title is The Seven Wonders
of the Ancient World, Science, Engineering and Technology. Courage listeners
to check this book out because it has the history,
it has the mythology, it has the engineering and the geology.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
It's just a treat Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Thanks again to Professor Michael Dennis Higgins for chatting with
us today. The book again is The Seven Wonders of
the Ancient World, Science, Engineering and Technology from Oxford University Press.
It's available now in hardback and as an ebook. I
highly recommend it. I think you can love it. If
you want to listen to other episodes of Stuff to
(37:32):
Blow your Mind, well just find us in the Stuff
to Blow your Mind podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.
We have core episodes of the show on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
listener mails on Mondays, short form artifactural monster fact episodes
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema. Thanks again to the excellent JJ Possway for
(37:55):
producing the show, and if you would like to get
in touch with us, well, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Everyone knows the renowned Seven Wonders of the world, but
few have set eyes on them. For in order to
do so, you have to arrange a long journey to
the land of the Persians on the far side of
the Euphrates. You have to visit Egypt. You must then
change direction and go to Ilia in Greece. Then you
(00:22):
must see Halakarnassis, a city state in Karia, and Ephesus
in Ionia. And you have to sail to Rhads, so that,
being exhausted by lengthy wanderings over the Earth's surface and
growing tired from the effort of these journeys, you finally
fulfill your heart's desire only when life is ebbing away,
(00:44):
leaving you weak through the weight of years.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Those are the words of Felo of Byzantium,
promoting the idea of the Seven Wonders of the World.
On today's episode, I'm going to be chatting with Professor
Michael Dennis Higgins, author of the new book The Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World, Science, Engineering, and Technology, out
(01:23):
now from Oxford University Press in both physical and digital formats.
It's an absolutely wonderful book and we've actually used it
already as a source on the show in our series
on mud, specifically in our section on mud bricks. So
I'm delighted to have the author on the show. When
we set this up a couple of weeks ago, we
decided to just focus on a single wonder as opposed
(01:46):
to all seven of the Wonders of the world, so
we're going to be talking about the Colossus of Rhodes.
Let's get right to the interview. Hi, Michael, thanks for
coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
It's my pleasure to be alone.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
The book is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Science, Engineering,
and Technology. It's a terrific read. Tell us how did
this project come together?
Speaker 4 (02:09):
Well, the project was actually inspired many years ago by
my father. My father was a curator at the British Museum.
After he died, I started thinking about what he had done,
and he had written on a chapter on the Colossus
of Roads for a book on the Seven Wonders of
the Ancient World, and so I thought, well, why not
(02:30):
update it a bit because there'd been nothing really done
seriously on the Seven Wonders in almost forty years, So
hence my book.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Now we're only going to be focusing on the one
particular wonder for today's conversation, the Colossus of Rhodes. But
I thought you might remind our listeners where and when
this whole concept of the seven Wonders of the ancient
world comes from.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
Well, the idea broadly comes from the third century BCE.
It's a sort of a kind of modern life, a
modern bucket list of things to see before you die.
And it may seem rather surprising that these kind of lists,
you know, existed at that time. Now, it's true that
there wasn't very much tourism in ancient Greece, and that
(03:15):
was partly because travel was by sea and there was
a lot of problems with pirates. But into Roman times
there was a well established a tourist industry in Greece
and Egypt and Roman and all the rest of it.
We actually have a tourist guide from the second century
BCE where he describes all the places he went to.
(03:36):
There were many lists, but the most popular and the
one that's come down.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
To us now.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
It starts, of course with the Pyramids you can't avoid them.
The Gardens of Babylon, the walls of Babylon as well,
although that was subsequently are replaced by the Phiahs, the
Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the tomb of King Marsolis,
the Temple of Artemiss and of course the Colossus of Roads.
(04:02):
And the question always is why were these things chosen?
And they were probably chosen for their size, their beauty,
and their engineering challenges. But also there's another aspect that
almost all of them have some kind of indirect or
direct link with Alexander the third of Macedon. He was
(04:25):
the great conqueror who was known as the Great by
those who were not unfortunate enough to have been conquered
by him.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Now narrowing in on the Island of Roads where the
Colossus of Rhodes is or wise position now, Unfortunately, the
Island of Roads is currently in the news due to
destructive wildfires, so a refresher might not be as essential
for listeners as as it normally would be. But could
you go ahead and position roads for us geographically? And
(04:54):
I guess geologically, well.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
It's a Biggish Greek island in the south east GNC.
It's near the Turkish Turkish coast. In antiquity it was
known as a warm, sunny island, and in fact it
was sacred to the sun god Helios. And the story
is that that Zeus had divided up the world between
his brothers, but Helios was away and when he came
(05:20):
back he found that that he hadn't been allocated anything.
I guess they perhaps held the meeting during the night,
so he wasn't there. But serious offered to redivide up
the world. But Helius saw an island appearing in the
south and asked for it, and that was Rhodes. And
so in a sense that people still worship the sun there.
(05:40):
Of course, it's a major holiday destination. Unfortunately, it is hot,
it's sunny, it's dry for a huge amount of a
very large amount of time every year, and so it's
very susceptible to fires, which we're seeing now with the
hot weather and that throughout Greece. And it's also suceptible
to earthquakes, which come into the story of the Colossos
(06:04):
quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Now. Yeah, turning to the colossus itself, I think many
of us have seen illustrations of it, but really, what
was this colossus, So what do we think it looked like.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
Okay, it was a huge statue, probably thirty three meters high,
because we have some descriptions which say how big it
was as one hundred feet and it was made of bronze.
Now we don't have any really detailed description. Most people
seem to say, well, everybody knows what it looks like,
so there's no point in talking about it, and we don't.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Have any images of it.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Although the Rodians actually put on their coins the head
of Helios. Now Roman in ancient coins were obviously they
were used for money, but there was also essentially made souvenirs,
and so they often had on their coins things that
would encouraged tourism, and one of them was this image
(07:03):
of Helios with curly hair and sun rays coming out
of a kind of diadem. Now many people have suggested
that the image of the head and perhaps of parts
of the body was actually inspired by the statues of Alexander,
(07:24):
because the sculptor who created the colossos was a pupil
of the official sculptor of Alexander. And as for the
rest of the statue, well, the most people think that
he probably the god probably stood upright. He was holding
a spear in one hand. This was partly, of course,
(07:46):
to stabilize the statue, and he may have held a
torch above his head. So if you want to think
of what it looked like, well you know clearly the
Statue of Liberty was inspired by the idea of what
the statue looked like, and it was created to commemorate
(08:07):
a very important event in three hundred and five BCE.
Now this time, Rhodes was a quasi independent kingdom and
it was caught between two major powers which were ruled
by the successors of Alexander. So Alexander had died some
(08:31):
time before, and he just his empire had been divided up,
and two of the big chunks were Egypt to the
south and Macedonia to the north, and Rhodes was kind
of caught in a proxy war between these two major states,
and Macedonia attacked roads with a fleet of ships. The
(08:53):
Egyptians came to the rescue and defeated the Macedonians, and
when the Macedonians left, they based sickly, just ran as
fast as they could, and they left behind most of
their military equipment, including some huge siege towers and These
were towers that were built of wood and iron and bronze.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Some of them.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
Maybe up one hundred and fifty feet high fifty meters high,
and that perhaps come back into the story a bit later.
So these towers had rams at the base of them.
They were covered in iron plates to prevent fire arrows
setting fire to the whole wooden structure. And the story
goes that when the Rhodians finally defeated the Macedonians, that
(09:41):
they sold off a lot of the siege towers. But
I think actually they probably were wise enough to recycle
a lot of the material into the statue that makes sense,
and perhaps sell off other materials they didn't need.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
So that was it.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Now you discussed that of the three surviving descriptions of
the statue, the longest description, like the most detailed description,
also seems to present a detailed but implausible construction method.
What are we to make of this?
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Yes, it's a bit curious.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
The description you're talking about is by Philo of Byzantium,
who is a third century BCE engineer, and he was
the one who may have written the original description of
the Seven Wonders, although that's somewhat debatable. Now he talks
about how the statue had a framework of iron and stone,
(10:37):
which is okay so far it would have had to
have been built on a framework. But then he goes
on and talks in great detail about how the bronze
was poured on layer after layer, a bit like casting concrete,
you know, putting one layer on, waiting a fort to solidify,
and then putting another layer on. But it's a very
(10:57):
brutal way of making a statue and would have required
a gigantic amount of metal, and it would have produced
an incredibly heavy statue that would have probably had problems
standing up. It's much more likely that the colossus was
actually made like smaller statues because they hadn't made one
this high one hundred feet high before, But they'd made
(11:18):
statues that were thirty forty feet high, so I mean
they knew how to make big statues. This one was
just even bigger. Now, the first stage in all of these,
making any of these statues was to build a full
sized model. So this would have had a frame of
wood or iron. We don't know whether it's the final
frame or not, or whether it was some kind of
(11:39):
temporary affair. So they would have built a frame of
wood and put struts and other bits on it, and
finally smaller and smaller pieces of wood until they could
cover the whole thing with plaster and make an exact
model of what they wanted in the final structure. So
(12:02):
they must have needed cranes and a shelter to produce
this huge structure because it would have taken years to do.
And one possibility is that they used the old siege
tower or one of the old siege towers, or at
least its framework. Now we know these siege towers were
maybe thirty or forty feet wide and one hundred feet high.
(12:24):
They were made of wooden frames like I mentioned, covered
with metal. So what they could have done is dismantled
a siege tower, moved it and re erected it on
the base for the statue, and then they would have
used that frame for hauling things up, and also they
(12:47):
could put a roof on it so they would be
sheltered while they were doing the construction because they're building
the statue probably took about ten or twelve years, so
it's kind of nice to think that they were recent Michael,
and perhaps the size of the original siege tower, which
would have been large enough to reach out over the
(13:09):
walls so that they could attack the city. Perhaps this
is what inspired the size of the actual statue itself.
So the next stage after they'd produced that that model
was casting the bronze first light. Say you know what
is bronze? As people are often get confused with all
these different alloys, it's it's an alloy of copper and
(13:33):
tin and usually lead. Now, the reason why they mixed
up these metals was that all alloys melt at lower
temperatures than pure metals, so it's less energy, it's easier
to pour and bronze this mixture of mostly copper like
ninety copper tin and two few percent lead. That also
(13:55):
flows more readily than pure copper, so it was a
much better material.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
It was harder.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Now copper was available from Cypress. Cypress, in fact, even
takes its name from the ancient Roman name for copper,
and there are huge deposits there which were exploited until
quite recently. Still they may still be exploited because Cypress
(14:22):
is actually a section of the seafloor that many many
years ago was thrust up above sea level or to
make new land. But I'm sure that many people have
seen pictures of black smokers. There's hot springs on the
ocean floor. The smoke that comes out is actually contains
(14:45):
copper sulfide, and so that's how those deposits on Cypress formed.
And so copper from Cyprus was no problem. It had
been exploited for thousands of years before then, and it
was exploited for many years afterwards. Now tin is a
much more of a mystery. We don't know when people
discovered that tin. Addition of tin to copper would make
(15:10):
it melted at a lower temperature and make a harder material,
but it was certainly something extremely important. But the problem
is where the tin came from, because there isn't a
single source like Cyprus. Heroditis, who was writing in the
fifth century BCE, talked about the Casiderites islands far off
in the Atlantic, and that may have been England, Southwest
(15:33):
England or Brittany.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
But it's also.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
Possible that the tin actually came from the far East,
because we know that the gem material lap Is Lazuli
was actually imported from Afghanistan to Europe for a very
long period of time. It's present in ancient Egypt, so
we know there were long distance trade routes all the
(15:57):
way as far as the as far as Afghanistan, and
it's possible that the tin came from there, but there
may have been just many, many, many different sources. It
was obtained by washing river sediments a bit like gold
place of gold, and it may have been essentially a
byproduct of gold explotation in some places. Now, the third
(16:20):
component was lead that was added to further reduce the temperature,
but it was also to stretch the metal because it
was incredibly cheap, and the reason was that it was
a waste product from the silver mines near Athens, near
near Lavrion, which was the source of the of the
(16:41):
wealth that built the Parthenon and the other monuments of
classical grease. It was silver, so there was pars of
lead there. So they would import these these materials and
perhaps recycle a bit, and then they had to cast it.
So the way of it is most likely that they
(17:01):
cast it was that they would have taken a section
of the full size model, maybe up to two or
three meters wide two or three meters deep, and they
would have covered it with wax. This would have been
bees wax, maybe a quarter inch thick. Five milimeters. Then
(17:22):
they would have carefully removed the wax model covered it
in clay and baked it to make a mold, so
the wax would have drained out.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
It would have been recycled because it.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Had a lot of value, and they would vend it
up with a clay mold with a hole in it
very very narrow width, just like I said, a quarter
of an inch. So then melt metal and pour it
into the mold, and then once it was cool, you
would break up the mold and clean up the casting
because of course it would probably have holes in it
(17:55):
and other little bits and pieces that need fixing. And
then you'd fix their metal sheets onto the framework the
framework of iron, and would probably mostly iron. And the
total amount of metal in the in the statue was
probably the order of like one hundred and thirty one
hundred and fifty tons something like that. So it was
(18:16):
it was a significant amount, but it wasn't It wasn't gigantic.
They probably would have produced that much copper in Cyprus
every year, or or perhaps every six months, so it
was it was not. It's not an impossibly large amount
of material.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
How would it have looked from Afar?
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Would it.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Do you do we think it would have like gleamed
in the sun. Would it have been like really splendid
to behold?
Speaker 4 (18:37):
I think initially it would have gleamed in the sun,
but of course it would have.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
It would have had a.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
Green pattern that developed quite fast. I don't think anybody
has ever suggested that it was covered in gold. You
could have put a thin coating of gold on it.
It was sometimes done, but it probably wouldn't last that long.
I mean, remember that it was put up beside the sea,
and so there was a certain amount of.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Sea spray which would have corroded it.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
So I think, you know, it would have looked green,
and it would have been seen from some distance out
to sea. So it was a kind of It was
a kind of beacon to welcome boats into the harbor,
as well as a symbol of yes, look we can
stand up to ourselves against the against the Macedonians, even
(19:23):
if it was our friends the Egyptians who helped us
on this one.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Now, one of the big mysteries with the Colossus of Roads,
as you discuss and this is there's similar mysteries with
with other of the ancient wonders concerns that the location.
So we don't know exactly where the Colossus of Roads
stood right right exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
We don't.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
We don't have any fragments of it. We don't we
haven't actually found where the metal was cast, which would
actually probably be something easier to find than the fragments
of the statue itself, because you know, an old factory
is something that nobody particularly wants, so you should be
(20:13):
left remains of it.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
And it's a bit of a.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
Mystery as to why we've never actually found anything of
where it was. But there's something that is clear is
that there's an image which is endlessly recycled of the
Clossos straddling the harbor as this giant statue with his
(20:35):
legs apart and ships sailing happily between his legs. Well,
there is absolutely no suggestion that that was correct. It's
completely the fantasy of a sixteenth century illustrator. But I
think because of the power of the illustration, you know,
it's it's a bad idea that you just can't get
rid of. It would have been technically impossible to actually
(20:58):
build a statue with the legs apart like that, And
also if the statue was thirty three meters high. It's
one hundred feet high including the spear and torch. Then
the crotch would have only been at about thirty five
feet and it's supposed to straddle the military harbor, and
none of the military boats of navy boats could have
(21:19):
got in because it would have been too small.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
So there is no way it stood like that.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
It's much more likely that it stood on a low
mound near the edge of the harbor, that's to say,
between the current harbor, which still exists, and the city itself.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
In fact, the place where we think it stood.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Is actually covered by the Palace of the Crusader Knights,
which was erected essentially in medieval times, although what you
see now is essentially a modern reconstruction because when Roads
was part of the part of Italy briefly during Miscellini's time,
(22:01):
it was reconstructed as a palace for Mussolini, so unfortunately
that's what happened now. So there are certain advantages being.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Near the harbor like this.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
First of all, it was on a low hill, so
it was visible from further out.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
It was also useful.
Speaker 4 (22:21):
For shipments of metal coming in because they had a
lot of weight of metal and being natural harbor, they
could store it there. They could have put workshops very
easily around the harbor itself, and perhaps the old seage
engine was nearby, so they had plenty of space for construction.
And also it was far from the corrosive effects of
(22:41):
sea spray, because sea spray obviously creates bronze very readily.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Now you mentioned that. Of course, you mentioned that the
stance of the statue, and how we think that it
was likely legs together as opposed to the legs apart.
That is a fantasy of illustration. One thing I kept
wondering about the reading the chapter is that a lot
of us still have that vision stuck in our minds
when we just think of the Colossus of Rhodes, this
(23:07):
huge metal colossus, you know, straddling the bay right up there,
you know, next to the water, and we think of
that and we think, well, that just sounds audacious. Of
course it fell down because we don't have I don't
see statues like that in the world today. You know,
why would they be able to get away with it
(23:28):
back then? And I was just wondering, if do you
think that these sorts of images in this line of thinking,
does it make us sort of take for granted the
skill that they would have had in constructing it. Like
how you mentioned that this was basically a larger version
of statues that they were already building. So was it
truly on an audacious project or was it maybe not
(23:50):
as audacious as we might think?
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (23:53):
I think it was definitely audacious. I mean it really
was considerably bigger, probably two or three times bigger than
anything they'd constructed before.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
And remember that.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
It was a very impressive construction, and it was much
imitated afterwards. There were other statues of this size that
were built. One of them will come into the story
a little bit later, but it was the Colossus of
Nero that was built at Rome, and it was constructed
next to the Flavian Amphitheater, which most people, of course
(24:23):
know as the Colosseum. And the Colosseum was not named
because it was colossal. It was named for the colossal
statue of Nero that stood nearby.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
But the problem always with.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
Large constructions in an area like roads, which is particularly
susceptible to earthquakes, is that it collapsed. It collapsed, in fact,
only sixty years after it was finished, in two twenty six,
so the problem was that there was an earthquake. There
(24:56):
was not, perhaps by Rodian standards, are very big earth quake,
but the land went down by one meter. And the
problem was that the wealth of roads essentially was derived
from its trading activity, and the harbor went down one meter.
So all the keys are underwater, the military ship sheds
(25:19):
where they stored the boats. Because boats, the military boats
were always hauled out of the water except when they
were needed. They were all submerged. And this international trading
hub just simply collapsed to that point. And there were
many cities which needed that trade, including Egypt, and so
there was a kind of international effort to try and
(25:41):
help roads and re establish the trade. So it was
not entirely altruistic that they were doing it. For instance, Egypt,
we know they offered ninety tons of bronze work, workmen
and money to restore the harbor and the statue. Now
we don't know if it was accepted immediately or accepted
at all. What we do know is that the Rhodians
(26:04):
consulted the oracle of Delphi, who said do not rebuild. Now,
I probably think that the Oracle of Delphi was a
bit like modern management consulting companies. People consult them to
consolidate the idea that they've already had in their mind,
but whether they did or did not accept the Obgyptian
(26:25):
offer is unclear. But the story that has followed on
from that was that the remains of the statue lay
on the ground for nine hundred years, nobody stole any
of it until the Arabs invaded and sold off the
money to a Jewish trader who hauled it away on
(26:48):
one hundred and thirty five camels. This story seems extremely unlikely.
I can't imagine anywhere in the ancient world where you
could have that amount of metal, the amount of wealth
in a big pile around for nine hundred years without
anybody stealing it. But that's become again it's it's the
story that's off to repeat it. But there's another possibility.
(27:11):
There was a Roman historian called Eusebius writing in three
hundred and eleven CE, and he it's a kind of
chronicle year by year that he describes, and for about
four times he describes in this kind of year by
year listing that the Colossos was rebuilt. The problem is
(27:36):
that we don't know whether he's talking about the Colossus
of Rhodes or the Colossus of Nero, because he was
actually based in Rome, so hence the problem. But of course,
if you could have restored the Colossos of Nero, which
was almost exact copy of the Colossos of Rhodes, except
of course with near his head on the top, if
(27:58):
you could restore that one, then you could restore the
Colossos of Roads too. So it seems quite likely that
many of the Roman emperors did in fact restore the Colossos,
and in fact it may have been rebuilt two or
three times. Whether it was built in exactly the same
form rebuilt, we don't know, and we don't know how
(28:19):
much of the damage was. But I imagine that the corrosion,
probably of the statue with an iron core and a
bronze exterior, would have corroded quite readily, and so even
relatively small earthquakes would have certainly damaged it partly brought
it down. So I like to think that that Ucbius
(28:39):
was probably right and that it was actually restored, because
it certainly was something that was incredibly important in people's consciousness,
and Roman empress did sometimes do these kind of altruistic
moves just to re establish their power too. So which
case when did it finally fall and was not restored, well,
(29:02):
probably one two CE, so this is like four hundred
years after it was built. There was a huge earthquake
in Roads. Now we know about this earthquake because the
land was uplifted by four point eight meters that's what
fourteen feet, and imagine that the size of an earthquake
(29:24):
needed to push the land up fourteen feet. And we
know how much the land went up and when that
happened from looking at sea level notches along the northeast
coast of Roads. Now, the Mediterranean, as most people know,
has very little tide, so when the waves hit on cliffs,
(29:48):
they create a notch, They rode away the cliff at
a level, and they create a platform. Because the century
no tide, so the waves always attacking the same level.
So during an earthquake, the land will move up or down.
In this case, it moved up and we have the
old kind of notch. The old sea level is still
(30:09):
visible and those that visit Roads City, Northern Roads can
still see these things along all the beaches, this old
notch up on it and it gives you the whole
history of it, and it certainly was a gigantic earthquake.
The trade must have completely been eliminated. The harbor was
just kind of wiped out. It would have taken a
(30:30):
tremendous It did take a tremendous amount of effort to
re establish trade. But if the colossus fell at that point,
it probably was not restored, simply because there were so
many other things to do. Were after such a huge earthquake,
the distraction of the city would have been almost total,
as well as all the buildings and the rest of it.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Now, in the last chapter of the book, you discuss
the idea of reconstructing modern replicas of the Seven Wonders,
which which I thought was a wonderful way to round
out the book, especially given you know, the book has
this has this great focus obviously on geology, often bringing
up the aspects of of of the local geology and
(31:21):
the sourcing of materials for the different Wonders that I,
you know, I'd never really considered before, I guess i'd,
you know, and often focused more on just sort of
the historical tidbits. I loved all of that, and I
love the focus on the engineering. So with the Colossus
of Rhodes in particular, how colossal of an undertaking, if
you will, would it be to rebuild it today, and
(31:43):
to do it right?
Speaker 4 (31:44):
I don't think it would have actually been particularly difficult
to do. To rebuild now. I mean we we do
have the Statue of Liberty, which is a little smaller,
but not not that much smaller. The Statue of Liberty
is built again on our metal frame. It's made of copper,
it's not bronze. But of course the Statue of Liberty
(32:05):
is not in an earthquake zone, whereas Roads we definitely
know it is. There is a plate tectonic boundary, probably
about ten kilometers south of Roads, where the floor of
the Mediterranean drops down from the kind of platform which
Roads is on right down into the deep ocean. So
(32:27):
it's a place where we regularly get big earthquakes, and
like I said, we can have ones with fourteen feet
of displacement, which is a huge earthquake. So you need
to build an earthquake resistant structure. There certainly are there's
a lot of expertise in building such structures, especially in
places like Chile where they regularly have very large earthquakes.
(32:50):
And I think the way to do it would be
to build a platform, a metal platform, and isolate it
seismically from the underlying rock.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
So you would have a slab of concrete, you'd have rubber.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
Blocks, and then on top of that there would have
been a metal frame, and the metal frame.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
Could be relatively rigid.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Then the statue would have a framework which would be
built onto that base. Again, it would have to have
a certain amount of flexibility so that the amount of
vibration that did get transmitted through there would not make
the plates of bronze come off the framework. They'd have
to be carefully design in that way, but I don't
(33:37):
think it would be a particularly big challenge to do.
The big challenge would be that everybody would expect to
rebuild it as a statue straddling the harbor. And so
when I've seen pictures of reconstructions that they're going to do,
it's been announced several times that they're building a reconstruction.
(34:00):
It's you know, often portrayed as straddling the harbor. Now
it is actually a harbor that's used now. So the
choice is you then have to build a much bigger colossos,
which I think is what they what they're thinking of.
Doing one that would be not one hundred feet high
but three hundred feet high. Then of course it gets
to be a little bit more complicated. But you know,
(34:20):
the question is do they want to rebuild it as
something that is somewhat resembles what it was in antiquity,
or do you want it as a model symbol of roads,
in which case it doesn't have to resemble anything that
it did. Did it look like an antiquity But it's
an interesting problem. It's more of a political problem than
anything else. I mean, I rather hope that none of
(34:42):
it is ever reconstructed, because I rather like visiting roads,
and Roads is a rather nice place on its own
without a very large statue in it.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
The fact that it was there was ever it was
ever built at all? You know what, what what does
this reveal about? Like the nature in the scope of
the original construction and about the place of roads in
the ancient world.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
I think it was it celebrated their worship of Helios,
and Helios is as a Greek god is somewhat neglected.
I mean, nowhere else in Greece do you find statues
or worship of Helios in any significant So it was
essentially their own kind of personal island god. I mean,
(35:29):
his place of Helios is usually taken by Apollo, who
had a similar kind of responsibilities. Now Helios, we always
talk about the sun god. Actually he is not quite that.
He was the guy in charge of transporting the sun,
so he dragged it on a chariot across the sky
and then kind of pushed it through hades and pulled
it up on the other side. So it was more
(35:51):
of a kind of wagoneer than a than a god.
But you know, every city of community wants to have
its kind of what was it starchitect building now, and
this was their starchitect building from the third century BC,
and perhaps nothing really has changed. People want to have
(36:13):
a symbol of their town, something they can put on
their coins, something they can use to attract tourists. And
that's what it was at those times, I say, and
not unusual when you look at the other wonders they
were essentially perhaps partly there to attract tourists too, but
also for worship as well. I mean, the Zeus statue
(36:35):
of Zeus was certainly a very very important destination for
people to view the mausoleum. The was a similarly in
that kind of way, and of course the pyramids still
are the greatest symbol of Egypt.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Well, Michael, thanks again for coming on the show to
discuss the book again. The title is The Seven Wonders
of the Ancient World, Science, Engineering and Technology. Courage listeners
to check this book out because it has the history,
it has the mythology, it has the engineering and the geology.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
It's just a treat Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Thanks again to Professor Michael Dennis Higgins for chatting with
us today. The book again is The Seven Wonders of
the Ancient World, Science, Engineering and Technology from Oxford University Press.
It's available now in hardback and as an ebook. I
highly recommend it. I think you can love it. If
you want to listen to other episodes of Stuff to
(37:32):
Blow your Mind, well just find us in the Stuff
to Blow your Mind podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.
We have core episodes of the show on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
listener mails on Mondays, short form artifactural monster fact episodes
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema. Thanks again to the excellent JJ Possway for
(37:55):
producing the show, and if you would like to get
in touch with us, well, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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