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Where Is God’s Church Today?
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Jesus said, “I will build My Church…†There is a single organization that teaches the entire truth of the Bible, and is called to live by “every word of God.†Do you know how to find it? Christ said it would:

  • Teach “all things†He commanded
  • Have called out members set apart by truth
  • Be a “little flockâ€

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Part 2

Thousands of years ago mankind designed and built the most spectacular works of architecture and sculpture ever seen on Earth!

In part one of the Seven Wonders series, we examined the earliest two wonders—The Great Pyramid at Giza and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—how these projects were constructed, what obstacles the builders and designers overcame—and how they affect our world today.

Once again, let’s journey back thousands of years and skirt the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, to about the time of Alexander the Great. The next great wonders, sometimes rooted in myth almost as much as truth, will reveal certain bedrock principles that modern designers still employ today.

#3 Statue of Zeus at Olympia

Greece, in 483 B.C.: the Olympic Games were at their apex. Great crowds turned out at their favorite events to see athletes compete. In Greek culture, these games were so important that wars halted across the Greco-Macedonian Empire so that people could travel to take part in the Olympic festivities.

Dominating the games was the pagan worship of Zeus, whose temple towered over the playing fields. Pilgrims, who credited Zeus as overseer of the festival, would ask for his blessing before participating or even viewing the events. Mobs visiting the temple at Olympus inspired the rulers to commission the sculptor Phidias to design a statue of Zeus to stand inside the temple. Phidias, the “Michelangelo of the Classical Greek age,†set out to conceive the most stunning statue ever created.

 

Source: Art Today, Inc.

Phidias imagined his statue sitting in the temple, a focal point of worship, where Zeus would be 40 feet tall—totaling 70 feet if standing.

The statue was too massive to be made of solid ivory (of which most statues of the day were made), so Phidias devised a system: a wooden framework laid with thin sheets of ivory molded and fitted over the framework. To this day, his exact molding technique remains unknown.

The system likely involved slicing sheets of ivory with hand tools, and submerging them in boiling water. When removed, the ivory was malleable and could be formed by hand to appear as a flowing robe, an outstretched arm, or a man’s face.

After seven years of construction inside the temple, the statue was completed. The seated figure, composed of hundreds of custom-molded pieces of ivory, towered over 45 feet tall.

The calm expression on the statue’s face became a hallmark of the classical style, from which emerged Michelangelo’s David to almost every Greek statue and bust afterward. Early “traditional†Christians also copied the style. Icons, statues and stained-glass-window images use the proportions, methods and ideas taken from this early Greek wonder.

The most notable example is the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The statue of the 16th U.S. president exactly copies the calm, restful expression, as well as the proportions and composition, of the statue of Zeus. While the Lincoln statue is massive and made of 28 pieces of marble, it stands at half the height of the Zeus statue.

The pagan statue was removed when the false Christian church banned the practice of Greek religion, and closed the temple. After this time, collectors sought it, most notably, the violent Roman ruler Caligula, who ordered the statue to be brought to Rome, where he planned to replace the head of Zeus with his own. He was assassinated before this could be completed.

Finally, Luasis, a high official from Constantinople, disassembled the statue and rebuilt it in his private collection—800 years after its original construction. Despite its long life, a catastrophic fire cremated the statue, along with many other priceless artifacts.

#4 Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

Despite a bitter rivalry between Persian and Greek states, both sides regularly borrowed from each other’s artistic and architectural styles.

 

Source: Art Today, Inc.

The fourth wonder was set in what is today the little-known city of Halicarnassus in present day Turkey, which was once the capital of a powerful sea empire in the fourth century B.C. It was here that King Mausolus (with his sister, Queen Artemisia) began their tyrannical rule in 377 B.C.

In the coastal city, located by the Mediterranean Sea, he constructed a mighty navy of 100 ships to conquer foes and consolidate his power. After finishing his sprawling fortress palace, he turned to other ways to enshrine his legacy. He copied King Cyrus and, following the Persian tradition, set out to build a grand tomb for himself.

King Mausolus commissioned Greek architect Pythis to design the structure. Defying conventional styles of the time, Pythis created a multi-tiered Greek temple, which was adorned with hundreds of statues, and stood at the height of a 14-story building—twice the height of any building in the Western world for millennia.

The unique combination of tiered levels, lined with temple columns, was copied thousands of years later by the Freemasons at their headquarters lodge in Washington, D.C., and for the Remembrance Shrine in Melbourne, Australia.

Incorporating a vast array of classical Greek styles and column designs, Pythis pioneered several new techniques in statue detailing, with each of the several hundred statues double the size of a person.

However, the most outstanding statue was on top of the tomb: a golden representation of Mausolus and his wife riding in a chariot pulled by four horses.

Until that point, no one had attempted to display such a massive statue on a structure so tall. This concept was intended to display the power of the king’s might and his civilization.

Gigantic statues mounted on the top of landmarks point back to this wonder, with this still being done today. Statues of political and military leaders riding chariots pulled by four horses are found on triumphal arches in Berlin and Munich, Germany; Paris, France; Ottawa, Canada; London, England; Lisbon, Portugal; and even in New York City in the U.S.

Another feat King Mausolus had to surmount was building on top of an existing royal burial site. The soft earth required that foundations be dug 20 feet into the ground to root the structure. While this was not possible without disturbing the burial ground, the architect devised a system using dowels and dovetails embedded in stone blocks. These iron connecting bars joined the over 12,000 tons of structural block, which had been laid for the foundation and eliminated the need for mortar between blocks. This practice of metal joints in stone block is the same system used for precast concrete today.

Upon death, Mausolus was entombed. Just as the king intended, his name lives on, thousands of years later in the word mausoleum, which describes the ornate structures of above-ground tombs we know today.

#5 Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

Sitting off the Aegean Sea, Ephesus was the most prosperous city in Asia Minor. King Croesus, ruler of the city, believed that such prosperity was a direct result of the blessings of the false god of fertility, Artemis.

In 550 B.C., the king hired Chersiphron, who was skilled at temple construction, to build a temple dedicated to Artemis. This Greek architect had built many temples, but had never attempted a project so massive as what the king demanded.

Determined to gain unparalleled fame, Chersiphron undertook the task, designing the temple to have a finished height of over 60 feet. It had 126 parallel columns in a double row surrounding the cella—or interior of the temple. It became the largest marble temple ever built.

The sheer size and beauty of its finished marble attracted thousands of pilgrims across Greece. Surrounded by wide plazas, the temple’s footprint measured 100,000 square feet—over twice the size of a football field. The Greeks used it as a center of their culture, and gathered there for religious ceremonies and trade purposes.

The biggest design challenge Chersiphron faced was moving the enormous amount of materials to the site. With the marble quarry seven miles away, each stone was cut to weigh roughly 40 tons. Chersiphron moved several of these blocks at once, by designing a series of rollers pulled by oxen. Tying several massive logs together, he created a movable rolling pad (180 feet by 360 feet) tethered to dozens, if not hundreds, of oxen. The animals plodded under the burden, transporting the blocks to the construction site.

Even more ingenious was the architect’s use of cantilever cranes to hoist lintel blocks high into the air and set them on the individual columns. A cantilever crane is a long, thick, wooden, truss-like shaft set atop a tall mound of earth. When a lintel was hooked on one end of the crane, a counterweight was attached to the other and hoisted from the fulcrum. Once the crane arm was raised, it could be swiveled to the top of the temple, where the lintel was unloaded.

This required workmen with supreme skill, since any wrong move by crane operators would slam the crane arm into one of the 60-foot-tall columns, toppling the project like a house of cards. After 50 years of construction, the temple was finished. Hundreds of 40-ton blocks of rough-cut marble were lifted in the air well over 70 feet and set on a building that rivaled the size of most football stadiums.

The temple at Artemis is considered to be one of the earliest examples of a modern construction project. Equipped with iron tools, masons, crane operators, oxen drivers, and sculptors organized onsite. “Modern cranes†hoisted blocks high in the air to build columns. Teams of oxen constantly unloaded the new “raw materials†to the jobsite.

Two Wonders Left

Armed with little more than his own ingenuity, man has shown he was far more advanced in ancient history than most people today believe. While the massive civilizations that created the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World may be long extinguished, the ambitious (but largely misguided) projects still impact the structures built in this modern age.

Two wonders remain to be discovered…

[Read Part 3]