Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined today as always by trustee
Speaker 1: staff writer Josh Curious like a cat Clark. Okay, how
Speaker 1: are you your favorite moniker? You know, Candice, I was
Speaker 1: just just under one year old the first time the
Speaker 1: world almost ended. You want to hear about that. Sure,
Speaker 1: So this guy named Marcus Garvey, who was a Jamaican
Speaker 1: civil rights leader, entrepreneur and all this, who eventually became
Speaker 1: a basically a prophet to Rastafarians, UH famously predicted that
Speaker 1: when two sevens clash, chaos is going to ensue, right,
Speaker 1: So everybody's kind of thinking about this, listening to reggae
Speaker 1: hanging out right, And July seven, nineteen seventy seven, rolls around,
Speaker 1: and everybody in Jamaica for freaks. Well hold the phone short,
Speaker 1: two sets of seven it is, which is why they
Speaker 1: were really really freaked. Yeah, it could have happened anytime
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven, I think most people thought. But
Speaker 1: when July seventh rolled around, it was like, Yeah, Kingston
Speaker 1: literally shut down. No one was out in the street.
Speaker 1: Everybody was just kind of hanging back, letting the day pass.
Speaker 1: See what happened. Um, nothing did happen, And even if
Speaker 1: it had, I wouldn't have been aware because, like I said,
Speaker 1: I was under one. But the next time some sevens
Speaker 1: rolled around, I was much more aware, and that wasn't
Speaker 1: much happier. Definitely was. But then people thought seven seven
Speaker 1: O seven was was a really lucky number. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's like hitting the jackpot as far as
Speaker 1: dates go. So how do we celebrate. Well, I'll tell you.
Speaker 1: Even Mongoria and Tony Parker got married and they're the
Speaker 1: best reception. It was wonderful. I did. I did? That
Speaker 1: was me and then then I still cha Anyway, Uh,
Speaker 1: something else really monumental happened and that was that. The
Speaker 1: New Seven Wonders Foundation announced the new seven Wonders of
Speaker 1: the World. Yeah, which which are pretty good. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't know if news the best word for him. I
Speaker 1: know that's not yours, but the the the wonders of
Speaker 1: the world that are on this list are actually pretty old,
Speaker 1: like Machu Picchu in Peru, Statue of Christ Redeemer in Brazil. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the one over Rio saying hey, hey, I'm looking out
Speaker 1: for you guys, check me out. I'm up here. Um
Speaker 1: cheetz Asa in Mexico. There you go, a great well
Speaker 1: of China, the call seem at Rome and the taj Mahal.
Speaker 1: There you go. I think that's seven, isn't it. I
Speaker 1: don't know. It sounds like seven to me. Um, But
Speaker 1: those are so they're all pretty old, but they're still
Speaker 1: around and they are definitely wondrous. Yeah, and the list
Speaker 1: is new. And if seven, seven or seven with a
Speaker 1: bad day for anyone, it probably was Egypt. And Egypt's
Speaker 1: Prime Minister even sort of you know, made a public
Speaker 1: announcement before the new Seven Wonders Foundation even collected they
Speaker 1: I think almost one hundred million votes cast for the
Speaker 1: new list via telephone and internet. He said, essentially, don't
Speaker 1: forget about Ufu. And the Great Pyramid of Coufu was
Speaker 1: the greatest of the great pyramids. It's by far the largest. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm still holding out for you Egypt. It's still the
Speaker 1: original seven wonder on in my buck. But um, not
Speaker 1: only is it still standing, it's the only one of
Speaker 1: the original seven Wonders of the Ancient world still standing.
Speaker 1: And furthermore, on that original list, it was the oldest
Speaker 1: by far, by several hundred years, right, Yeah, and we're
Speaker 1: talking about swirling sands and dust winds and blazing heat
Speaker 1: in Egypt, and it has stood the test of time,
Speaker 1: and yet it's not on the new list, it's a
Speaker 1: runner up. Well, um, do you want to talk about
Speaker 1: the ancient the ancient list? The original list that that
Speaker 1: that Cufu was rightly on. Yeah, that we had Cufu.
Speaker 1: We had the Mausoleum of Halicarnassis. You love that one,
Speaker 1: don't you. I just like saying it, the Colossus of
Speaker 1: Rhodes in the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Yeah, we had the
Speaker 1: statue of Zeus and the Temple of Artemis at a Fesis,
Speaker 1: And that's there's one more hanging gardens of Babylon, which actually,
Speaker 1: ironically I heard might not have actually existed. Is that
Speaker 1: factor fiction? You know? Anything I do? This is sort
Speaker 1: of a tough question to answer because opposing camps of
Speaker 1: scholars hold different points of view about it. And uh,
Speaker 1: let me try to debunk this as straightforwardly as I can. First,
Speaker 1: of all, gardens organic matter, it would have decomposed even
Speaker 1: if they existed. So even if somewhere there's a pile
Speaker 1: of rubble, which actually there is that some people reputedly
Speaker 1: claim is the ruins of the hanging Guardens of Babylon.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't have evidence of the gardens because the plants
Speaker 1: and flowers would have long withered. Yeah. Well, the other
Speaker 1: thing is the people who actually compose this list of
Speaker 1: ancient wonders. We're not sure who the author really is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's three guys who are in the running, Calimachus,
Speaker 1: uh Philo, and Herodotus. And what all three were his
Speaker 1: still Koreans, travel writers. What were they? Yeah, that's right,
Speaker 1: they had you know, they had day jobs to some
Speaker 1: of them, I think we're we're military men or welders.
Speaker 1: But essentially they went around their corner of the world,
Speaker 1: which stretched, you know, sort of from the Middle East
Speaker 1: to Egypt to Turkey to Greece. And these wonders were
Speaker 1: called the amatta, which translates as things to be seen,
Speaker 1: must see monuments. And the funny thing about the hanging
Speaker 1: Gardens of Babylon is that there are no records anywhere
Speaker 1: that it really existed outside of this list. And the
Speaker 1: man who is supposed to have built them, as Nebuchadnezzar,
Speaker 1: and supposedly, as the legend goes, he built them for
Speaker 1: his wife, Amatists, who was a princess from Iran, and
Speaker 1: she grew up near the Caspian Sea, so she was
Speaker 1: used to seeing a lot of green when she looked
Speaker 1: at her window. Not in not not where Nebuch, No,
Speaker 1: not in Iraq. That would have been a pretty dry region.
Speaker 1: He didn't want her to feel homesick, so he built
Speaker 1: the gardens. But here's where that part of the legend
Speaker 1: gets tricky. Nobucad knows. It was a pretty proud man,
Speaker 1: to say the least, and he recorded all of his
Speaker 1: accomplishments and an ancient form of record keeping called cuneiform.
Speaker 1: And there's no mention anywhere in his records about the palace. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which seems a little fishy. Yeah, So other scholars say
Speaker 1: perhaps it was a ruler from Ninevah or Assyria who
Speaker 1: built them. But here's another part that makes the hanging
Speaker 1: gardens battle on so unbelievable, and that is, how on
Speaker 1: earth would you have watered gardens that hung as high
Speaker 1: as some people say five stories into the air and
Speaker 1: the dry rock desert. Yeah, because I mean you'd think,
Speaker 1: well you could they just have rain do it right,
Speaker 1: But apparently not, because as you said, it's desert, it's desert.
Speaker 1: So some scholars proposed that there was an irrigation system,
Speaker 1: pretty sophisticated, built by drawing water from the Euphrates River
Speaker 1: and essentially piping it into a giant holding tank, and
Speaker 1: then something called I should diff which in my mind
Speaker 1: I imagine looks like sort of a hand cranked water
Speaker 1: wheel would have lifted the water water to the different strata.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm thinking in my head. Um it would
Speaker 1: have looked like that's how it could have worked. And
Speaker 1: today there's a new sort of innovative gardening in place
Speaker 1: called hydroponics, and this is being used around the world
Speaker 1: in different places. Disney's Epcot Center actually is one of
Speaker 1: the foremost purveyors of hydroponic gardens. It's not wild, but
Speaker 1: they can do amazing things like take a seed and
Speaker 1: have it grow into a giant head of lettuce within
Speaker 1: four weeks. And it doesn't use soil, right, No, no
Speaker 1: soil at all, just a very nutrient rich solution and
Speaker 1: they grow in the air like the gardens would have.
Speaker 1: And so this is a great solution for gardening and
Speaker 1: cities are in very hot climates. So is there evidence
Speaker 1: that the ancients were aware of hydroponics? A is a
Speaker 1: tool that grow crops. They could have been the forebears
Speaker 1: of the process. They could have invented it without even
Speaker 1: realizing it. So, um, rising buckets or hydroponics. Huh, there
Speaker 1: you have it. So the weird thing about the palace,
Speaker 1: if it really did exist, is that it started a
Speaker 1: prophecy among Babylonian rulers and Nebuchadnezzar again I mentioned he
Speaker 1: was a pretty proud man. Supposedly, on his other palaces,
Speaker 1: he built them with bricks ascribed with the sentiment Nebuchadnezzar,
Speaker 1: King of Babylon from seeds c. And when Babylon came
Speaker 1: crashing down, someone else, many many centuries later, took out
Speaker 1: the crown, and I think you knew who I'm talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty contentious subject. But supposedly he wanted to rebuild his
Speaker 1: palace on the site where Babylon would have stood, and
Speaker 1: he inscribed bricks with a very similar sentiment about himself.
Speaker 1: And today, uh, the US is actually looking to turn
Speaker 1: that palace into a casino, because, as we all know,
Speaker 1: Saddama is no longer with us. Wow, well, Babylon's decadence continues.
Speaker 1: There you have it. You can read even more about
Speaker 1: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and whether or not they existed,
Speaker 1: as well as the other six sent wonder Brethren and
Speaker 1: how the Seven Wonders your being chient world work on
Speaker 1: how stuff Works for more on this and thousands of
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