As a kid I was fascinated by the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. They were wondrous creations, all right: the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the Colussus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon… I studied their pictures in old National Geographic magazines and thought about the lives of the people who built those incredible testaments to human engineering capabilities.
With the exception of the Great Pyramid at Giza – “Man fears Time, yet Time fears the Pyramids” – all the Wonders of the Ancient World are gone now, fallen to natural disasters or the ravages of man.
Down through time there have been other lists of wonders of the world: the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages (including Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa), the Seven Wonders of Engineering (the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Channel Tunnel), and the Seven Natural Wonders (the Grand Canyon, Mt. Everest, Victoria Falls). Links to all of these can be found at the first link above.
Now the New7Wonders Foundation, created by Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber in 2001, is giving people around the world the opportunity to vote for the New Seven Wonders of the World. Starting with a selection of 177 candidates for the title, twenty-one finalists were announced in January, 2006. On July 7, 2007 (07/07/07) the finalists will be announced in Lisbon, Portugal. For the next 80 days you can vote for your choices in this landmark event via the website or by phone, and multiple votes are accepted.
An interesting map of the finalists shows the majority clustered in Eurasia; a single finalist, the Statue of Liberty, is in the United States. Other finalists include Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Chichen Itza (Mexico), the Great Wall (China), Hagia Sophia (Turkey), Neuschwanstein Castle (Germany), the Taj Mahal (India), and of course the venerable Pyramids of Giza (Egypt).
