House of ZAN Forum

[Ravage]

Dana and I were looking at this several months ago, but I finally remembered it and went and voted. It's pretty cool, you should all do it!

Basically, since 6 of the 7 wonders of the Ancient World are long destroyed, they want to form a new list of 7 Wonders. They started with around 200 monuments and other manmade landmarks, and allowed people to start voting on them. I believe the count is down to the final 20 or so, now. This is just for fun, but it's really cool...go check it out

http://www.new7wonders.com/

For the record, I picked the Pyramid at Giza (the only remaining original wonder), The Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, The Statues at Easter Island, Christ the Redeemer Statue, the Statue of Liberty, and the Colisseum.

[Dana]

I voted on this back when we first looked at it, and I voted for the same ones, except I voted for the Acropolis and not the Christ the Redeemer statue. The architecture of the Parthenon itself is amazing enough, let alone the rest of the ancient city.

Besides, I already had a statue (the Statue of Liberty) on my list... and I think it's fair to say Lady Liberty is a little more well-known than the Redeemer statue. She's also older and is a symbol of how America became so great -- people who left their old oppressive countries came here to start a new life, and the statue was one of the first things they saw when they got to New York. Yeah, she was built by the French, but that was back when the French still had something to offer the world besides food.
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[Ravage]

Yeah, I voted for The statue of Liberty for the same reasons, as well as paralleling the Colossus of Rhodes. The Christ the Redeemer I picked as being particularly unique to some of the others on the list. I honestly struggled the most between it, the Colosseum, the Acropolis, Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, and Macchu Pichhu.

I figured the Colosseum was a more well-known landmark than the Acropolis. However, I wasn't going to pick two wonders that were basically from the same culture/architecture style.

The more I think of it, the less I like Stonehenge/Easter Island in that list. They're two of the great mysteries of Earth, but I dunno about their "wow" inducing factor. I picked them, though, so I'm stickin' with 'em.

[Dana]

Stonehenge and the Moai (statues) of Easter Island get their "wow" factor from the fact that nobody really knows how (or why) they were built. They know where the stones at Stonehenge came from; what they can't figure out (or decide upon) is how they were transported to the Salisbury Plain and what they were originally used for.

The origins of the Moai are slightly less of a mystery -- they know exactly where they were carved, because there are still dozens left in the "quarry" of volcanic rock that were left half-finished or never got transported to their destinations. We still don't know who they represent or why they're placed the way they are. The islanders who created them all died when the island could no longer support their numbers and they started a civil war amongst themselves.

But yeah, they definitely don't have the same kind of "wow" factor as something like the Great Pyramid at Giza (the last ancient Wonder still standing) or the Colossus of Rhodes.
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[Ravage]

Yeah, I wasn't even comparing them to such cool things as the Colossus or the Pyramid...I was even thinking their "wow" value paled in comparison to the Kremlin, Taj Mahal, Neustanschwien Castle, Petra and most of the others. Obviously, though, there's little mystery to most of those newer wonders.