The Wonders of the World, and the One That Survived

Game Gems Team · 2026-07-14

The seven wonders of the ancient world were essentially a tourist list, compiled by Greek writers for Greek travellers. Six of them are gone — earthquakes, fires, and the slow theft of useful stone.

The survivor is the Great Pyramid of Giza. It is also, by a wide margin, the oldest thing on the list. It was already some two thousand years old when the Colossus of Rhodes was built. It remained the tallest structure made by humans for around 3,800 years, a record no building has come close to matching since.

The myths worth killing

  • The Great Wall of China is not visible from space with the naked eye. It is long, but it is narrow and the same colour as the ground around it. Astronauts have said so repeatedly; the myth refuses to die.
  • The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 World's Fair and was meant to be temporary. Parisian artists and writers publicly loathed it. It survived largely because it turned out to be useful as a radio transmitter.
  • The Leaning Tower of Pisa did not lean by design. It began tilting during construction because the ground beneath one side was too soft — and builders kept going anyway, which is why it is also subtly curved.

Monuments to grief and power

The Taj Mahal is not a palace. It is a tomb — a mausoleum built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth. Twenty thousand or so workers, twenty-odd years, and a building whose entire purpose is to say that someone was loved.

The Colosseum, by contrast, held something like fifty thousand spectators and was built for spectacle and control. Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes, was built in the fifteenth century and — crucially for the quiz round — was never found by the Spanish.

The gift

The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, dedicated in 1886. It arrived in crates. She is green because copper oxidises; she was originally the colour of a new penny.

Every one of these has a fact attached that most people get wrong. That is what makes them such reliable quiz material.

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