Etc.

July 11, 2007

Possibilities were many for 'new' seven wonders of world

Four men – the historian Herodotus, a scholar named Callimachus of Cyrene, the poet Antipater of Sidon, and a Greek engineer, Philo of Byzantium – are variously credited with choosing the original Seven Wonders of the World. But the most recent of these lists was compiled 2,200 years ago. Now, millions of people have picked seven wonders of the modern world. The nonprofit New7Wonders Foundation of Swizerland conducted what it called the first global vote and came up with a far more geographically diverse list than the first set, all of which were in or near the Mediterranean Sea. The Great Wall in China and India's Taj Mahal were among the winners, beating out the only surviving ancient wonder (Egypt's Pyramids of Giza) along with a host of other candidates, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Kremlin, England's Stonehenge, and the Sydney Opera House in Australia, to name a few. The new seven wonders:

• The Great Wall of China
• Petra in Jordan
• Brazil's statue of Christ the Redeemer
• Peru's Machu Picchu
• Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid
• The Colosseum in Rome
• India's Taj Mahal