THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD, THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS AT EPHESUS

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was dedicated to the honour of the Greek goddess of hunting, wild nature, and fertility.

Ephesus was an ancient city in what is now modern Turkey near to the town of Selcuk.

The reason that a temple dedicated to lesser god, and compared to Zeus, Hera and Athena Artemis was a lesser god, was elevated to be one of the seven wonders is that it was the most beautiful structure on earth.

The construction of the temple began in around 550 BC and was designed by the Greek architect Chersiphron and was sponsored by Croesus the Lydian king neither architect or sponsor saw the project completed as it took about 120 years.

The magnificent Temple was decorated with bronze statues reputedly sculpted by some of the most skilful artists of their time such as Phradmon, Polycleitus, Kresilas, and Pheidias who also crafted the statue of Zeus at Olympia.

The temple was both a marketplace and a religious sanctuary a place visited by people from every corner of the ancient world and beyond and from every walk of life from kings and princes to paupers and vagabonds.

It was on the night of Alexander the Greats birth the 21^st July 356 BC, a man named Herostratus burned down the temple to ground in an attempt to immortalize himself which in a way he succeeded in doing.

When Alexander later conquered Asia Minor and he reached Ephesus he visited the site of the damaged temple and at once offered to have it rebuilt but it wasn’t until after Alexander’s death in 323 BC that work began on its restoration.

St Paul visited Ephesus to preach Christianity in the first century AD but the Ephesians were resolute in their devotion to Artemis.

It was in 262 AD when the next significant visitors to Ephesus arrived and they were the Goths who destroyed the temple.

By the time the crusaders came in the fourth century AD the old religions of ancient Greece had fallen from favour and most Ephesians’ had converted to Christianity.

The final nail in the temple’s coffin came when in 401 AD the once beautiful Temple of Artemis was torn down by the knights of St John.

Ephesus was then deserted, and the temple lost it was only in the latter part of the nineteenth century the temple’s foundations were discovered in the Turkish swamps what an ignominious end for what was once the most beautiful structure on earth.