Greek writers drew up the first lists of wonders as must-see guides for travelers, and only the Great Pyramid survives from the famous seven. These stories run from those ancient wonders to the 2007 vote for new ones, the natural marvels of land, sea and sky, and the engineering behind famous landmarks: a logbook kept by pyramid builders, a statue struck by lightning, a cave found by a man escaping the rain, and a swimmer who paid 36 cents to cross the Panama Canal.
Every tile in a Wonders of the World game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Ancient Wonders
nine stories
1The pyramids were not built by slaves
On the tile: Pyramid CrewsFourth DynastyMyth busted
Many people picture the pyramids being built by slaves, and Cecil B. DeMille's films reinforced that image. The evidence points elsewhere. In 1990 a tourist's horse stumbled on a buried mud-brick wall near the Giza pyramids, and it led to a cemetery of the builders themselves, buried in their own tombs beside the king's monuments. Egyptologist Zahi Hawass argued that slaves could never have been given such graves. The workers ate meat regularly and were rotated through in shifts of about three months.
2Cosmic rays revealed a hidden space in the Great Pyramid
On the tile: Pyramid Void2017
The Great Pyramid still held a secret in 2017. The ScanPyramids team placed detectors inside and outside it to catch muons, particles produced by cosmic rays that stone only partly absorbs, so an empty space lets more of them through. Three different kinds of detector found the same thing: a void at least 30 meters long above the pyramid's Grand Gallery. Writing in the journal Nature, the team called it the first major inner structure found in the pyramid since the 1800s. They had no information about what it was for.
The story goes that King Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for a wife who missed the green hills of her homeland. Proof is the problem. Babylon's own records describe the king's building projects down to street names, yet never mention a garden. Herodotus described the city's walls without them, and excavations have not found them. Some scholars think the gardens stood at Nineveh, built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, and others doubt they existed at all. They are the only ancient wonder whose existence is disputed.
The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, dedicated around 430 BC, stood more than 12 meters tall, with skin of ivory and robes of hammered gold. The statue is long gone, but its maker's workshop was found. In the 1950s archaeologists excavated the studio of the sculptor Phidias and uncovered tools, clay molds and a simple cup inscribed "I belong to Phidias." The workshop has the same dimensions as the inner room of the temple, which suggests the giant figure was first assembled there in pieces before being rebuilt in the temple.
By the 1800s the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus had vanished so completely that European travelers could not find its site. John Turtle Wood, a British engineer who had come to the Ottoman Empire to design railway stations, took up the search in 1863 with backing from the British Museum. His clue was a Roman inscription describing a procession that carried statuettes from the temple through the city's Magnesian Gate. Wood found the ancient road leading from that gate, followed it, and on December 31, 1869, reached the temple, buried about five meters deep.
When Mausolus, ruler of Caria, died around 353 BC, work on his tomb at Halicarnassus carried on under his sister and wife, Artemisia. The monument was so huge and so crowded with sculpture that it joined the Seven Wonders, and his name became the word for any grand tomb. It probably collapsed in the Middle Ages. Around 1494 the Knights of Saint John built pieces of it into their castle at Bodrum. Many of its sculptures, found in 1850s British excavations or pulled from the castle walls, are now in the British Museum.
Famous old pictures show the Colossus of Rhodes astride the harbor entrance, with ships sailing between its legs. That image is a medieval invention, spread by oft-reprinted drawings. For a bronze figure about 33 meters tall, a pose wide enough for ships to pass beneath is highly unlikely and contradicts every ancient account of its size. The statue of the sun god Helios probably stood beside the harbor. The Rhodians paid for it partly by selling siege equipment an enemy army had left behind, and an earthquake toppled it after little more than 50 years.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria rose on the island of Pharos around 280 BC. More than 100 meters tall, with a fire at the top to guide ships past the reefs, it stood for over 1,600 years, damaged by earthquakes and repaired again and again. It grew so famous that the island's name became a word: pharos is still the word for a lighthouse in many languages. Earthquakes finally brought it down, probably in the 1330s. In the 15th century its granite foundations were reused for the Qaitbay Fort, which stands on the site today.
There was never one official list of the Seven Wonders. The Greeks spoke of theamata, "things to be seen," in effect a list of must-sees, and writers disagreed about what belonged on it. The poet Antipater of Sidon, who lived in the second century BC, left out the Lighthouse of Alexandria and counted instead the walls of Babylon, along which, he wrote, chariots could race. The lineup most people learn today was fixed only many centuries later. Of those seven, only the Great Pyramid still stands.
1The vote that made the pyramids an honorary wonder
On the tile: New 7 WondersJuly 7, 2007
In 2000 the Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber launched a private campaign to choose seven new wonders of the world by popular vote. People voted online and by cellphone text message, and organizers reported about 100 million votes, though they admitted they had not checked for repeat voting. The winners were announced in Lisbon on July 7, 2007. Egypt objected that its pyramids should not have to face a vote at all, so organizers gave them an honorary place. UNESCO declined to collaborate, saying the result would reflect only people with internet access.
A 1932 Ripley's cartoon called the Great Wall of China the only work of humankind visible to the eye from the moon, decades before anyone could go and look. Astronauts and remote-sensing experts say it is false. NASA notes the wall is not visible from the moon and is difficult or impossible to see even from Earth orbit without powerful lenses. When China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, returned in 2003 and admitted he had not seen it, the Ministry of Education moved to revise school textbooks.
3The explorer who talked his way into Petra with a goat
On the tile: PetraAugust 22, 1812
For centuries the people around Petra guarded its valley from outsiders, and the last Europeans to see the city had been Crusaders. In 1812 the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, dressed in Arab style and calling himself Sheikh Ibrahim, heard local people praise its ruins. He claimed he had vowed to sacrifice a goat at the tomb of Aaron, on a mountain beyond them, and on August 22 he passed through Petra. Afraid of being taken for a magician hunting treasure, he wrote notes only in private, sacrificed the goat and left.
The famous Inca city in Peru may not have been called Machu Picchu by the Inca. In 2022 historian Donato Amado Gonzales and archaeologist Brian Bauer reviewed Hiram Bingham's field notes, old maps and land records. A 1904 atlas, published seven years before Bingham arrived, mentions ruins called Huayna Picchu, and a landowner's son told Bingham in 1912 that the ruins went by that name. A late 1500s Spanish account describes local people considering a return to a site they called Huayna Picchu. Machu Picchu is the name of the highest mountain nearby.
The Kukulkan pyramid at Chichen Itza is about 30 meters tall, and it is really three pyramids in one. Archaeologists found an older pyramid hidden inside it in the 1930s. In 2016 researchers announced a third, about 10 meters tall, nested inside that one. They found it without digging, using electrical tomography, which sends small currents into a structure to map its interior. The smallest pyramid dates to roughly AD 550 to 800, and the outer one was finished between about 1050 and 1300. One researcher compared it to a Russian nesting doll.
The Colosseum was built as the Flavian Amphitheater. Its better-known name came from a neighbor: a bronze colossus of the emperor Nero, said to be 120 feet tall. After Nero's death, Vespasian turned it into a statue of the sun god, and around AD 128 Hadrian had it moved beside the amphitheater, reportedly still upright, with the help of 24 elephants. The statue is long gone, but its name stuck to the arena. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance the Colosseum itself became a quarry, and some of its stone went into St. Peter's Basilica.
One of the artists behind the Taj Mahal left his name in its marble. Abdul Haq, a calligrapher who came to India from Shiraz in 1609 and was known by the title Amanat Khan, is linked to its Quranic inscriptions, and historians believe he chose the passages too. Near the base of the interior dome a line reads "Written by the insignificant being, Amanat Khan Shirazi." The lettering hides a trick of perspective: panels placed higher up use slightly larger script, so the words do not look skewed to a visitor below.
The Altar Stone at the heart of Stonehenge, a finalist in the 2007 New Seven Wonders vote, weighs about six metric tons and was long thought to have come from Wales, like the bluestones around it. In 2024 a team led by Anthony Clarke, a Welsh PhD student born in Pembrokeshire, reported in Nature that it came from the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland, more than 700 kilometers away, the longest known journey for any stone in a monument of that period. "I don't think I'll be forgiven by people back home," Clarke joked.
A popular myth says Jørn Utzon solved the Sydney Opera House roof while peeling an orange. The Opera House disagrees. Every shell in his design differed, so builders could not reuse formwork, and by late 1961 three years had passed with no way to build them. Utzon said he was stacking the shells of a model in his office when he saw how alike they looked: each could come from the surface of one sphere. The fruit trick was Eero Saarinen's: the architect once cut into a grapefruit over breakfast to explain a thin-shell roof.
On February 20, 1943, farmer Dionisio Pulido and his wife, Paula, were burning brush in their cornfield in Michoacán, Mexico, when the ground swelled, cracked and began to hiss and smoke. Within 24 hours a cone 50 meters tall stood in the field. Parícutin erupted for nine years, and lava and ash buried most of two villages until only the church towers of San Juan showed. When it stopped in 1952 it stood 424 meters high. It was the first time scientists could watch the complete life of a volcano, from birth to extinction.
Climbers who reach the top of Mount Everest are standing on old seafloor. The summit rock is limestone laid down in a warm, shallow sea some 450 million years ago, and it still holds fossils of marine animals such as brachiopods and crinoids. Those layers formed long before India began colliding with Asia about 55 million years ago. That slow collision thrust the ancient sea bottom upward until it became the highest point on Earth. Geologists established that the summit rock dates from the Ordovician Period in the 1970s.
Victoria Falls, on the Zambezi River, is the largest curtain of falling water in the world: about 1,708 meters wide, with up to 500 million liters a minute pouring over the edge. It has not always been in the same place. Below the falls the river zigzags through a series of steep gorges cut into basalt, and seven of them once held earlier versions of the waterfall. The erosion has not stopped. At the Devil's Cataract, on the Zimbabwe side, the river has already begun cutting back toward a new falls.
Late one night in June 1770, James Cook's ship Endeavour struck a reef in the Great Barrier Reef and stuck fast. As water poured in, the crew threw ballast and six cast-iron cannons overboard and worked nonstop for 24 hours to keep her afloat. To slow the leak they hauled a sail covered in oakum, wool and sheep dung under the hull. The ship limped off to find a place for repairs. In 1969 a team sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia recovered all six cannons from the spot, so crusted with coral they were hard to recognize.
On the tile: Finn McCoolc. 60 million years agoLegend
Legend has it that the Irish giant Finn McCool built the Giant's Causeway to cross the sea and face his Scottish rival, Benandonner, who ripped it up as he fled home. Causeway guides in the 1700s and early 1800s told another version, preserved in a poem written in 1830: Finn built it to reach a Scottish maiden he loved, and his grandmother's magic storms kept tearing it apart. Geology tells a third story. Its roughly 40,000 basalt columns formed just under 60 million years ago, when lava cooled slowly, contracted and cracked into regular shapes.
6A pilot's plane sat on a mountaintop for 33 years
On the tile: Angel Falls1933-1970
American pilot Jimmie Angel was flying alone over Venezuela's Auyán-tepui on November 18, 1933, when he saw an enormous waterfall, now called Angel Falls, pouring off the mesa. At first he was not believed. On October 9, 1937, he landed a party of explorers on top of the tepui, but the wheels ran into soft mud and the plane pitched onto its nose, never to fly again. The group needed 11 days to hike out. The plane stayed up there for 33 years, until 1970, when it was taken apart and ferried down by helicopter.
Around 1990, a local man named Ho Khanh was in the jungle of Vietnam's Phong Nha-Ke Bang area when he headed for a limestone cliff to escape rain. He found an opening with clouds billowing out of it and heard a river roaring inside. Frightened, he left. He later told British caver Howard Limbert about it, and in 2008 Ho Khanh searched alone until he found the entrance again. In 2009 he led Limbert's team there. Son Doong proved to be the largest cave passage in the world, with jungle growing where its ceiling collapsed.
8A balloonist's idea reached the ocean's deepest point
On the tile: Mariana TrenchJanuary 23, 1960
The first people to reach the deepest known point of Earth's oceans rode in a craft that began as a balloonist's idea. Swiss physicist and balloonist Auguste Piccard first studied the concept for the bathyscaphe Trieste in 1937, and construction began in Trieste, Italy, in 1952. The U.S. Navy acquired it in 1958 and fitted a stronger sphere made by Germany's Krupp works. On January 23, 1960, Piccard's son Jacques and Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh took it about seven miles down to the Challenger Deep, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench.
When the Great Trigonometrical Survey identified the world's highest mountain in the 1850s, it was known as Peak XV. George Everest, the survey's former chief, had retired to Britain in 1843. Much of the calculating passed through the Calcutta office of chief computer Radhanath Sikdar, whose exact role historians still debate. In 1856 surveyor general Andrew Waugh proposed naming the peak for Everest, saying no local name could be found. Everest objected that local people would struggle to pronounce it. In 1865 the Royal Geographical Society adopted it anyway, though Tibetans called the mountain Chomolungma.
1The swimmer who paid 36 cents to cross the Panama Canal
On the tile: Panama CanalAugust 1928
In August 1928 the travel writer Richard Halliburton swam the length of the Panama Canal. He did it in stages over about 10 days, with roughly 50 hours in the water, and became the first swimmer taken through all three sets of locks. An expert rifleman came along to protect him, and newspapers reported alligators shot along the way. His toll followed the canal's tonnage rate, and at 150 pounds Halliburton owed just 36 cents. Guinness World Records lists it as the lowest toll ever paid on the canal.
The Golden Gate Bridge's famous color started as a coat of primer. Its steel, made by Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, arrived coated in red lead. Consulting architect Irving Morrow saw the towers rising as he commuted by ferry and was inspired. His color studies also weighed black, gray and aluminum: black would be unattractive and make the bridge look smaller, and aluminum would leave the towers looking tiny. In his 1935 report he chose International Orange, because it blends with the hills and contrasts with the ocean and sky.
Toronto's CN Tower got its top from the air. The builders even studied using a giant balloon before bringing in Olga, a Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter, which in 1975 lifted the 39 pieces of the antenna into place. Olga's first job nearly went wrong. It was to carry off the boom of a construction crane, a task expected to take 10 minutes, with only about 50 minutes of fuel aboard. The pins holding the boom twisted and jammed, and Olga hovered for half an hour or more while ironworkers burned them out with torches.
In 1929 Alfred E. Smith, head of the investors building the Empire State Building, announced it would grow by 200 feet so a mooring mast for dirigibles could crown it. Passengers, he said, would walk down a gangplank and be on the street seven minutes later. Hugo Eckener, commander of the Graf Zeppelin, dismissed the idea as impractical. A 1930 news photo of an airship docked at the tower was a manipulated fake. The real thing came in September 1931, when a privately owned dirigible docked for just three minutes in a 40-mile-per-hour wind.
5The engineer's wife who rode across the bridge first
On the tile: Emily Roebling1883
When chief engineer Washington Roebling was left nearly paralyzed by decompression sickness while building the Brooklyn Bridge, his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, stepped in. She visited the site daily, attended meetings, wrote the correspondence and learned enough engineering to answer builders' questions, while keeping her role quiet. As the bridge neared completion, Washington wanted her to be the first to ride a carriage across. She carried a rooster as a symbol of victory while workers cheered. At the opening on May 24, 1883, Congressman Abram Hewitt praised her.
The Eiffel Tower was not built to last. Gustave Eiffel had only a 20-year permit for the land, and on January 1, 1910, the tower would pass to the City of Paris, which in 1906 had decided to destroy another building from the 1889 fair. Eiffel went looking for a scientific use. In 1898 Eugène Ducretet made the first radio contact between the tower and the Panthéon, and Captain Gustave Ferrié later used it for wireless experiments, reaching 6,000 kilometers by 1908. The tower's strategic value won Eiffel a 70-year extension starting in 1910.
A persistent tale says workers who fell into wet concrete are still entombed in Hoover Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation says no one is. The dam was poured as interlocking blocks five feet high, and each bucket of concrete raised a block's level only two to six inches while crews called puddlers packed it down, with several men watching every placement. The official count of men who died at the dam site is 96. Higher figures such as 112 include other deaths, even two surveyors who drowned in 1922, years before construction began.
The original Delta Plan for the Netherlands called for sealing off the Eastern Scheldt estuary with a solid dam. Critics warned that closing it would turn the salt water fresh and drive out shellfish, seals and birds, and environmental groups and fishermen protested until the government paused the work. In 1976 construction resumed on a completely different design: a barrier 9 kilometers long, with 62 huge sluice gates between 65 concrete pillars, left open so the tides still flow and closed against dangerous high water. Queen Beatrix opened it in 1986.
9Egyptians may have wet the sand to halve the work
On the tile: Pyramid Sledge2014
A painting in the Egyptian tomb of Djehutihotep shows workers dragging a huge statue on a sledge while a man at the front pours water onto the sand. In 2014 physicists at the University of Amsterdam tested the idea with a model sledge in trays of sand. With the right dampness, tiny water bridges bind the grains, the sand becomes about twice as stiff, and it stops piling up in front of the sledge. The pulling force drops by half, which the researchers say would have let the pyramid builders halve the number of workers.