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The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

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The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

By: Bettany Hughes
Narrated by: Bettany Hughes
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About this listen

 The Sunday Times Bestseller

'A wondrous wonderful achievement' STEPHEN FRY

Longlisted for The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2025

The Seven Wonders of the World were staggeringly audacious impositions on our planet. They were also brilliant adventures of the mind, test cases for the reaches of human imagination.

Now only the great pyramid remains fully standing, yet the scale and majesty of these seven wonders still enthral us today. In a thrilling, colourful narrative enriched with the latest archaeological discoveries, bestselling historian Bettany Hughes walks through the landscapes of both ancient and modern time. This is a journey whose purpose is to ask why we wonder, why we create, why we choose to remember the wonder of others. She explores traces of the Wonders themselves, and the traces they have left in history. A magisterial work of historical storytelling, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World reinforces the exciting and nourishing notion that humans can make the impossible happen.

'Fantastic...a joy from the outset' PETER FRANKOPAN

'Fascinating...all told with Bettany's natural sense of wonder and adventure' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE©2024 Bettany Hughes Ancient Archaeology Egypt Europe Middle East Ancient Greece Africa Mythology Ancient History Middle Ages Ancient Egypt Greek Mythology

Critic Reviews

Bettany Hughes is the most perfect tour guide I know. Her boundless enthusiasm, clarity and learning combined with a matchless gift for storytelling bring the Wonders of the World leapingly alive. A wondrous wonderful achievement.
A thrilling armchair journey from a very wise woman. Bettany Hughes is the eighth wonder of the world.
A lively exploration of the ancient world, this fascinating book is brimming with stories of people and places, all told with Bettany's natural sense of wonder and adventure.
Taking us on a truly fascinating journey through the ancient world, Bettany Hughes not only rebuilds the wonders themselves in the reader's imagination, but also vividly conjures up the culture and environment in which they existed. It is a tale of people as well as places, and I loved learning about what the wonders meant to those who built and visited them, their stories told by Bettany Hughes with trademark passion and humour.
This is an entrancing book, at once a love letter to the ancient world and a learned introduction to some of the most astonishing feats of imagination and engineering in human history. It is a pleasure to wander lost realms and inspect (mostly) vanished marvels through Bettany Hughes' bright and erudite writing.
So vividly written that it is as if the reader is there, discovering the Seven Wonders first hand. The stories behind them are endlessly fascinating, often surprising, and stay in the memory long after the last page has been turned. A dazzling achievement.
Every page of this generously illustrated travelogue yields a treasure house of information and reflection on Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek masterworks of architecture, urban planning and sculpture.
Informed by careful research and enriched by inspired prose, this book is itself a wonder. Bettany Hughes has given new and powerful meaning to the ancient world's most iconic monuments.
Thrilling, epic, exciting, Bettany Hughes' gripping and scrupulously researched Seven Wonders takes you as if by magic to the great, lost sites of ancient genius, these incredible feats of human imagination and breadth. With skill, scholarship and brilliant writing, Bettany Hughes explores these majestic sites in detail. A magical, sweeping, dazzling book.
Egypt's The Great Pyramid, the only one of the Seven Wonders that survives virtually intact, reminds us of the overwhelming human desire to collaborate and create "beyond the possibilities of the individual," states Bettany Hughes in her rich historical study The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on The Hanging Gardens of Babylon and learned that "paradise" comes from the Persian word for a beautiful walled garden (Martin Chilton)
All stars
Most relevant
I absolutely loved this book, I enjoyed it as much as Istanbul and can’t wait you get my hands on another one by Bettany Hughes

Absolutely loved every minute

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Excellent subject knowledge on all the wonders and very well narrated so as not to get lost with all the information provided

Subject knowledge and narration

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I want Bettany’s job. I just need to be a brilliant historian and storyteller. The detail and insight is exceptional and her stories about her adventures in researching the book are compelling.

Loved It.

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I'm something of a pop history book-o-phile, and it's not often that I find a book which I'm ready to listen to again as soon as I finish it. But this is one such book. Bettany's masterful guide to the seven ancient marvels of the ancient world is optimistic, exciting, reverent and playful. She has a knack for coaxing vivid and beautiful imagery out of your mind's eye, and at times I could easily imagine I was standing right beside her in a tranquil Greek valley or on the burning sands of Giza, gazing at the masterworks of bygone times. The wonders themselves are described in excellent detail, their conception, construction, adoration, destruction, and legacies all spelled-out for the reader to revel in and appreciate for themselves. I can't recommend this book enough and thank Bettany for a lovely read (and performance!).

A thoroughly wonder-full book!

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Ms Hughes is overblown in dialogue. Where 2 words would suffice 50 are used.

Factually incorrect in places ie: ‘ The sea peoples were Phoenician Pirates’. No one knows exactly who they were and more likely a mixture of peoples.

More of an ancient travelogue a la Herodotus than history,

A travelogue more than history

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