I had finished my Machu Picchu scenes, as well as my interpretation of the Great Wall of China, and I was thinking about a fabulous garden scene to try. Well, that led me to the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and that reminded me of the Seven Wonders of the World (of which the Gardens were included). So I began wondering, could the Seven Wonders of the World be created in Bryce? 

I suggested to Scott a new marketing slogan for Bryce, "Bryce, the Eighth Wonder of the World (because with it, you can build the other seven)" and he kindly offered to pass the idea along to others in MetaCreations' marketing team. At that time, unknown to me, there were many changes in corporate management taking place, which may account for the lack of response. But as I continued using Bryce, the idea of creating the Seven Wonders became more intriguing to me, so I started researching what the Seven were (like many people, I couldn't remember all seven then).

The Lighthouse of Alexandria immediately fascinated me, so I began doing it on spec, sending frequent progress pictures to Scott and hoping that my idea might still be considered. When I finished the Lighthouse, I also sent pictures of it to Bill Allen of 3D Artist magazine, and he enthusiastically agreed to a "How To" article on it, which came out in issue #33.

I began working on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon next, still hoping to convince the people at MetaCreations that it would be a good way to promote Bryce. Finally, in the fall of 1998, I got to meet MetaCreations' CEO, Gary Lauer, and he was very supportive of my idea and agreed to sponsor the endeavor. I will always be deeply appreciative of his confidence in me and his willingness to lend the company's support to this endeavor.

At the time, we had envisioned the use of the "Seven Wonders" imagery for Bryce ads, but as I worked on the project, the company continued to grow, change and adjust its course to successfully advance in the ever-changing marketplace of computers and internet technologies. I won't try to second guess why the Bryce marketing plan changed, because I know they had many factors I was not aware of influencing their decisions. I will only say that they chose instead to use my imagery extensively in the Bryce 4 User Guide and promotional literature.

I did finish the project, not only the Seven actual Wonders, but the fictitious "Eighth Wonder", the Bryce Tower, and in doing so, I am more convinced than ever of Bryce's truly extraordinary capabilities. So I am very proud to show this collection now, as a testament to the awesome capabilities of Bryce. In my opinion, Bryce will always be the "Eighth Wonder of the World", because with Bryce alone, I built the other Seven.

 "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" edited by Peter Clayton and Martin Price (The most comprehensive by far of the three)

 "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" by Reg Cox and Neil Morris

 "The Seven Wonders of the World" by Kenneth McLeish

Also used for reference were:

 "The Epic of Man" Time Life books

 "Monuments to Civilization - Greece" by Bruno D'Agnostino

 "Pyramid"  by David Macaulay

 "Secrets of the Great Pyramids" by Peter Tompkins

 "Greece and the Hellenistic World" Oxford History of the Classical World Series.

According to my references, the list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is generally credited to the Greek poet Antipater, who wrote of his amazement of the many wonders of the world in the second century BC. But earlier scholars contributed to the idea, although we cannot say for certain to what extent their writings influenced Antipater.

Callimachus of Cyrene, a scholar at the Library of Alexandria a hundred years before Antipater, wrote a document entitled "A collection of wonders in lands throughout the world". We know of the document, but not of details of it's content. 

And Herodotus of Hallicarnassis, in the fourth century BC wrote his "Histories" and he documented his observations about magnificent and wondrous monuments of human endeavor. 

The final list is believed to have been widely accepted during the Renaissance, but the exact time, place, and persons finalizing it remains a mystery.

One of the sad things about the "Seven Wonders of the World" is the fact that all the seven were chosen from the monuments of the Mediterranean world. Asia was not well explored and the Americas were virtually unknown. Thus the list became "Eurocentric" and in modern times has created a mistaken illusion that the greatest achievements of human endeavor came only from the Mediterranean cultures. Subsequently other "lists" have been offered up (The Seven Wonders of the Medieval World, The Seven Wonders of the Modern World, etc.) but none has had the allure, the mystique of the Seven Ancient Wonders.

In researching these wonders, I came across several artist reconstructions previously published. Some were helpful to me and inspiring to my work. Others I found sadly lacking in design or concept. I encountered interpretations of some of the wonders that I frankly refused to believe were accurate, and in those cases I developed my own interpretations. In the cases where the wonder was historically well documented, I tried to stay faithful to those known facts.

In the individual notes below, I've tried to describe each wonder as I built it, explaining what is historically known and what parts I may have taken artistic license in depicting.

Historical Notes - The fabled Hanging Gardens are definitely one of the more well known Wonders to us today, and yet in terms of archaeological record, they are the most mysterious and most poorly documented. So little is known about them that all we can really say is that we know something fabulous existed, but we know nothing of exactly what that "something" looked like. So my design is purely speculative, more intent on conveying a feeling of enchantment than historical fact.

What we do know about the Hanging Gardens is that they were commissioned by Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of Babylon (modern day Iraq) to please his queen Amytis of Persia (modern day Iran). His queen came from the beautiful mountainous highlands of northern Persia, and was believed to be greatly unimpressed with the bland desert landscape of Babylon on the Euphrates river. She was homesick for the towering landscapes of her home, and the fabled Hanging Gardens were specifically built with towering structures and many terraced levels to suggest a mountainous terrain. The plants filling these terraces and rooftop gardens literally spilled over and down the sides on the terrace walls and the result was the "Hanging Gardens".

The fact that these gardens were built by a fabulously wealthy king to impress a queen, and the fact that their beauty was so legendary as to be remembered 2000 years later, prompted me to decide that my design should try to capture that legendary beauty as my highest priority.

Construction Notes - Building the gardens started out with a few simple blocks for towers and terraces, plus a few reflecting ponds, all arranged to be pleasing from a given camera view. In this case, I didn't build it first and then go looking for a nice view, but rather selected the view from the beginning and built it to look nice in that view. Luckily for me, nothing reliable was known about its architectural layout, so my guess was as good as anybody else's.

The famous Ishtar gate in Baghdad (where Babylon once was) is still standing, and it has a fabulously intricate mosaic tile work on it. So I wanted to do arches with splendid mosaic tile work. I had laid out several sizes of arches, and didn't want to take the easy way out by making one mosaic arch and just scaling some bigger or smaller, because the ancient craftsmen would have used the same size tile (and more of them) on the bigger arches, and the same size (but less of them) on the smaller arches. So I built four arching walls at different sizes and used flattened cubes as mosaic bricks for each, keeping the brick size constant and using more on the bigger arches. The biggest one had 7000 bricks. I then rendered out all four arches as Image Texture Maps and applied each to a wall of the same size.

You can see this in the center arch group, because the center arches are size 3 and some arches beside them are size 2 (smaller), and the patterns are slightly different but the brick tiles are the same size. It's more work doing several different variations of a texture map, but I feel the result is worth the extra effort.

My hanging vines are simply terrains with long eroded segments, and given the foliage texture. The flowers I struggled with quite a bit before finally just duplicating a vine terrain, erasing what was there, hitting the Spikes button in the TE, and then erasing any spikes that were not in the same general shape as the vine terrain I had duped. I gave the spike terrains a bright purplish or orangish color to suggest flowers. 

Historical Notes - The ancient Greeks are known for their temples and for their pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. Artemis (also called Diana by the Romans) was Goddess of the hunt, fertility, birth, the woodlands, and the creatures of the forests. In the rural areas of the Greek world, she was beloved by the common people who lived off the land and particularly revered in Ephesus. In the 6th century BC, King Croesus of Lydia, one of the richest rulers of the time, worshipped Artemis with particular devotion and chose to build a temple for her that demonstrated both his great wealth and his great respect for her honor. 

The resulting Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was undoubtedly one of the most spectacular accomplishments of the Golden Age of Greece. Most of us today, when asked to think of a Greek Temple, will think of the Parthenon still standing today at the Acropolis. But imagine a temple twice as high, eight times as large, a temple so big that a regulation NFL football field could fit inside. That's what Croesus imagined, and his fabulous wealth afforded. 

The Temple of Artemis was finished around 560 BC, and stood for two hundred years before being burned to the ground by a deranged man named Herostratos, who (according to history) did this horrible act of vandalism for the sole purpose of becoming famous for having destroyed it.

But Alexander The Great, believed to have been born on the day the temple was destroyed, grew to manhood and power enchanted by this lost wonder, and he finally ordered it rebuilt. It stood for another five hundred years, before being plundered in the third century AD. Today, the foundation still exists and one solitary column, broken at the top and extensively restored, still stands to remind modern visitors of the glory that once was.

This Wonder is well documented in its design and many of its details. The exact size, number, and arrangement of its incredible columns is well known. The front row of columns had ornate relief sculptures around the base, depicting human subjects in festive poses. One of these relief column sculpture pieces is well preserved in the collection of the British Museum. The Goddess herself, Artemis, was represented by a statue in the center of the ceiling panel, and copies of that statue are in several museum collections.

Construction Notes - In building this temple, I started with documented ground plans that showed size, position and arrangement of the foundation and all 127 columns. I laid out a simple primitive mockup at the scale of 4 Bryce Units equals one foot.

I immediately started with creating one detailed column, my master object from which I'd duplicate the rest. It is an Ionic column (has the scrolls on top), had several visible segments or blocks one atop the other, and it tapered slightly as it rose to it's height of about 60 feet. The scroll at the top was a symmetrical lattice, formed from a Light Map (also called a grayscale map) that I made by assembling various primitive objects in the desired shape and rendering out a black and white version of them. 

The tapering of the column required that my 20 negative cylinders cutting the flutes in the column be angled 0.5 degrees inward. The surface texture of the column was created by the negative cylinders and I used a texture map from another Bryce file to make the desired stone texture as well as the segment joints. I actually made four slightly different Image Texture Maps, keeping the joint seams the same but varying the texture of the stone for each. If you use only one texture map on all the negative cylinders, you will see the rock/stone pattern repeat with disturbing unnatural regularity. Using four images alternately, you don't see a repeating pattern.

Once the column master was built, I could position it in my master ground plan and duplicate it as needed. I didn't create all 127 columns, but rather just enough of them to make it appear all were there from a front or perspective view. If you looked around the back, you'd see the missing ones.

Next step was building the ceiling frame and some of the interior walls. Then I started laying out some of the outer stairs and surrounding grounds. The ornate statuary was last because I was experimenting with devices to create sculptured figures.

The statue of Artemis herself, centered in the ceiling panel, was well documented, so I tried to copy it faithfully. The remainder of the ceiling sculptures were more my imagination than historical fact. I chose the woodland scene and creatures because Artemis was goddess of the woodlands.

According to my references, Artemis supposedly rode in a chariot drawn by ivory stag deer, not horses, and the stags had golden antlers. So I thought I'd add sculptures of her chariot and stags standing ready at the front of her temple, in case she chose to step down from the ceiling panel and go for a trip. These are purely speculative. 

On the other hand, the human relief statuary around the front column bases is factual and well documented, so for these I tried to copy exactly the human figure and pose of the best preserved sculpture in my reference books. It was without a doubt one of the most strenuous lattice modeling projects I ever attempted in Bryce but I'm happy with the results.

Historical Notes - There are, of course, many pyramids in Egypt, but the uncontested great one is the Pyramid of Khufu (also known as Cheops) at Giza, where it stands today beside the pyramid of Khafre (also known as Chephren) and the smaller pyramid of Mykerinus. The pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) is the tallest of the three and generally regarded as the biggest single structure ever built by human endeavor.

Each pyramid actually includes numerous related structures, smaller pyramids for wives or honored members of the Pharaoh's court, the boat pits that held the boats that would (theoretically) carry the Pharaoh to his destination in the afterlife, the mortuary temple close to the pyramid base, a long causeway (a passageway, essentially) and the Valley Temple on the banks of the Nile where boats could dock when the Nile was at high water.

The great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) stood 481 feet high, measured 756 feet square at its base, and has been calculated to have been built with 5.4 million tons of stone. It was built over a twenty year period ending in 2570 BC.

It stands today essentially intact (the only one of the Seven that does), lacking it's smoothed limestone face stones, which is why today its stonework looks like many steps or plateaus. In its glory, it was smooth-faced.

Beside it is the Great Pyramid of Khafre, Khufu's son. Khafre chose to build his own pyramid ten feet smaller in height (out of respect for his father) but built it on ground twenty feet higher (out of respect to himself). So while the father's pyramid is bigger, the son's looks down on it still. The fabled Sphinx of Egypt is sitting beside the Valley Temple leading to Khafre's pyramid. From the view I chose, looking past the Valley Temple of Khufu to the three Pyramids, the Sphinx is far to the left and out of view.

The third Pyramid belongs to Khufu's grandson, Mykerinus, and is much smaller than the other two.

The pyramid complex has been measured and surveyed extensively, and I tried to build my scene faithfully to those dimensions. The Valley Temple of Khufu's Pyramid has never been fully excavated, so my design of it is pure speculation. The other structures in the image are all correct in size, position, and appearance.

Construction Notes - To begin, I took a survey map of the complex and assigned it a scale in feet (based on the scale bars in the map) and then rescaled it in Bryce Units (at the ratio of 4 Bryce Units equals one foot). I put the center of the great Pyramid of Khufu in a position of 1440 (X) and -1440 (Z). Everything else was then proportionately positioned.

I knew from the beginning that the Pyramids were so big, and their textural qualities so small by comparison, that I'd never get a great image of the pyramids alone. I knew I needed a smaller foreground structure so the giant pyramids could "loom" in the background. The Valley Temple of Khufu proved to be the perfect foreground piece, so I immediately locked onto that view and never significantly varied it throughout the time I was building this scene.

That decided, I started looking for ways to give the Valley Temple as much textural and architectural detail as possible. The Egyptian columns were very distinctive and so I set out to create one master column with hieroglyphics on it (done with an Image Map), and the palm leaf ornaments at the top (created with symmetrical lattices). And in a bit of whimsy, I put "Bryce 3D" in the hieroglyphics, although you can't read it unless you get "real" close.

Once the column master was created. I duplicated it on the site of the Valley Temple and began detailing it. The stonework textures are Image Maps I made in another Bryce file.

The surface of the Great Pyramid is a single 1200x1200 resolution Image Map applied to the pyramid from an Object Top mapping mode. The single Image map has the lower blocks of darker stone, the lighter face stones of the main body of the pyramid, the gilded top stones, and the actual entry to the pyramid, midway up the North Face (we mainly see the East Face, and a bit of the North Face). It also has the variations in stone block color, since the spaces between the stones are far too fine to be seen.

The Palm trees in the scene were created with a terrain for the base of the trunk, about a dozen spheres for the ribbed tree trunk higher parts, and groups of symmetrical lattices for the palm fronds (each frond having three or four lattices, which allowed me to bend the fronds). There are probably 60 lattices in each palm tree.

The crouching Jackals, symbols of the God Anubis and the House of the Dead, are a combination of terrains (the crouching bodies) and lattices (for the neck, head, and ears). The red collar around the neck is a torus.

The reeds in the water by the banks are symmetrical lattices, each lattice having 3 to 5 reeds.

Historical Notes - The island of Rhodes, in the Eastern Mediterranean, was frequently attacked by navies of rival islands, and one siege by the Greeks in the end of the fourth century BC dragged on for a year before the Greeks finally abandoned their attack and left the citizens of Rhodes in peace. Wishing to celebrate this victory, the citizens of Rhodes chose to build a giant statue of Helos, their God of the Sun and protector. 

Using in part the bronze from weapons and hardware left by the Greeks, they commissioned a huge bronze sculpture, with a wooden structural support inside, that would stand over a hundred feet high. It was completed in 280 BC.

We don't actually know exactly what it looked like, although we have some artifacts showing other sculptures of Helos and they sort of resemble our modern Statue of Liberty. We also don't know exactly where it stood, with several sites in Rhodes possible. I chose the site out on the tip of the harbor entrance, but he could have stood more inland or in the city center.

Sadly, a mere 50 years after he was built, an earthquake toppled him, and so he lay with his face in the sand for centuries after. After nine hundred years of laying in the sand, he was dismantled by the conquering Syrians and his bronze panels were melted into other metal objects.

Certainly the most popular myth of the Colossus was that he stood so tall, his legs straddled the harbor and ships sailed beneath him. But given he was only a bit more than a hundred feet tall, and the harbor was over a thousand feet wide, it was obviously impossible for him to do so.

But even with this myth discounted, the Colossus of Rhodes easily remains one of history's most famous and fascinating sculptures of a human figure.

Construction Notes - To start, I "borrowed" a human statue figure from my Temple of Artemis file so I could place a temporary mockup of the Colossus and start building around him. At first I tried a view from out to sea looking in at him and the harbor and city behind him. Then I changed my view and tried looking at him from the walkway leading to him from the city. Finally, not satisfied with either, I built a patio off to one side and chose the view looking out from the patio to see him towering over the harbor.

I used quite a few Light Maps (also called grayscale maps) which I built with primitives and rendered out with the Altitude Render feature to get shapes and heights correct, and them imported these grayscale maps into the terrain editor to shape terrains similarly. This process allowed me to "roughen" up the stonework, so it wasn't so perfect and its edges weren't so smooth.

The face of the Colossus was a head bust I did right after I finished the Hanging Gardens, before I knew I'd be able to do all Seven Wonders. It was my first test to see if I could create an acceptable human face sculpted in terrains and lattices. I used the head bust alone in the museum gallery image on the home page of my web site. The hands were formed from cylinders and spheres, the palms of lattices, and the arms were groups of spheres laid out like muscles. The wardrobe was more terrains.

I won't kid you and say this is how you should do human figures in Bryce. My sincere recommendation is you use Poser instead. But I was deliberately restricted to using Bryce alone to see what it was capable of. And while my human statuary didn't equal what Poser could do, I did find that I developed an even greater appreciation for the potential of Bryce's terrain/lattice modeling potential.

Historical Notes - The town of Hallicarnassis (modern day Bodrum in Turkey) was once considered a part of Caria, a portion of the Persian Empire. From 377 to 353 BC, Caria's ruler was King Mausolus. As with many rulers of history, Mausolus contemplated his own death and wanted to build a memorial to himself while he was still alive to insure it would be a fitting tribute to his greatness. So he planned and commenced the construction of a great tower that would be his tomb and forever remind the people of the land of his greatness.

Caria was a port of trade and Egyptian and Greek ships frequented the harbor. Indeed Caria almost seemed to be a melting pot of the three cultures (Carian, Egyptian, Greek) so Mausolus chose for his tomb design a structure that respected the three cultures. The stepped base was Carian, the column level was Greek (with Ionic columns), and the roof was a stepped pyramid suggestive of the Egyptian pyramids.

The structure towered over everything else in the city, but King Mausolus never saw it finished. He died during its construction and his Queen Artemesia supervised the completion of it. It stood for eighteen hundred years, before being toppled by an earthquake in the 1400's AD.

The tomb of Mausolus came to be called the Mausoleum, and even today the word "mausoleum" indicates a large, stately tomb of an important person.

The size and structure are reasonably well documented. Several of the lion statues that circled the roof are now in museum collections. The four horses that pull the chariot on the rooftop are also well documented and parts of the horses are also in museum collections.

Construction Notes - Since the structure was well documented in size, shape, and location in the city, I laid out the preliminary structure at the scale of 4 Bryce Units to 1 foot. As with my other Wonders, I looked to the feature that required one complicated object to be replicated, and that again was the columns. Since they were a variation of the Ionic columns (like the Temple of Artemis), I took one of the Temple columns and modified it so the top scroll design had scrolls facing four sides, not two sides like in the Temple.

Once the column was modified and scaled to this building, I positioned and duplicated the number of columns I needed for it to look complete from my chosen view.

The chariot on the roof is one of the more impressive features, and I had quite a bit of fun making the chariot itself modeling it from primitives using boolean groupings. The horses were created by sculpting with stretched spheres to create a single leg (front or back) or the torso or head. These sphere sculptures were rendered out in white against a black background to be used as Light Maps (also called grayscale maps) that I then used to shape lattices in the Terrain editor. So each horse is six lattices (four for legs, one for torso, and one for the head/neck). This allowed me some Freudian to pose the various horse heads at different attitudes up or down. I also had two variations on a front leg so I could get a bit of variety in leg postures.

The lions were similarly made with preliminary Light Maps used to shape lattices.

For this scene, I needed a town but I needed one that was simple in terms for polygons and object count so I could replicate the buildings in large numbers. What I did was first create Image Texture Maps of several sized tile roofs and several side walls of buildings (some with windows and doors, others with just windows). Then I built a module of buildings out of just cubes and pyramids, letting the Image Maps of walls and tile roofs provide all the detail. I then arranged these buildings in a module that was 2x3 proportional units, so I could put 2 the long way exactly beside 3 the short way. This allowed me to rotate the module for a variety of views that each made the buildings look different.

There are probably thirty or so modules in the town.

The view in the day scene I locked down very quickly and stayed with throughout the construction phase. Then I finally got adventurous and started looking for views from the other side, from the harbor looking into the town and the Mausoleum. The Twilight Scene is from this view, but once I positioned my camera there, I realized I'd only created columns to look good from the other side. So I selected all the columns, grouped them, and rotated the entire group so again, from this view, it appears that all the columns are there when in fact only a little more than half are.

I did the same thing with the Lion statues, selecting them all and rotating the group to my camera side.

Setting the lights for the Twilight scene was intriguing because I wanted just isolated points of light in the otherwise dark town. So I carefully set each light near a building to glow against a wall I could see from my view. 

To further enhance the sense of darkness falling on the town, I set two spotlights far off to the right set at No Falloff and intensities of -1. These negative lights darkened the right sides of the buildings, so the twilight coming from the left was emphasized. Then a added one spotlight (No Falloff, Intensity 1, tinted yellowish) far to the left, near the mausoleum, to shine back over the town like the last vestiges of sunlight creeping over the horizon.

Historical Notes - Greek Mythology was filled with Gods and Goddesses, but Zeus was the boss, the father, the king of the gods. Olympia was where the Gods were believed to live, and the great athletic competitions honoring the Gods became known as the Olympics (perhaps you've heard of them). So it sort of follows that the citizens of Olympia wanted the best temples honoring the Gods there, and the King of the Gods should have the most impressive temple. 

So, around 466 to 456 BC, they built the Temple of Zeus and fashioned a giant statue of ivory and gold to fill the interior. The sculptor Phidias was commissioned to design it and supervise its construction. The way it was designed, to be as big as possible, the sitting figure of Zeus was 43 feet tall, almost touching the ceiling of the temple. Visitors couldn't help but wonder if he were to stand up, he'd thrust through the roof, and perhaps the colorful phrase "raising the roof" (to describe a person enraged and strutting about) came from this curious situation (since if Zeus were to stand up in a burst of anger, he's raise the roof).

The statue stood for centuries, until the Christian Emperors of Rome banned the Olympic games and closed the temples. In the fifth century AD, the statue was dismantled and shipped to Constantinople. A massive earthquake triggered landslides that buried the temple ruins for a thousand years, but they have been excavated and studied in recent times. The building itself is reasonably well documented, but the statue itself exists only in historical descriptions.

Construction Notes -  The design and dimensions of the temple were well documented, and photographs of some of the ruins today also gave me a pretty clear idea about the temple itself. The columns here were Doric (simpler than Ionic, with no scrolls at the top). I wanted some colorful banners around these columns so the four image maps I made for these all had the banners and color rings in them. In this case, the cylinders cutting the column flutes had spheres at each end, and the column actually had two sections of fluting with a cube spacer between, for the lower segment and the balcony segment.

As soon as I had the temple interior and its columns in place, I started on Zeus' throne chair. Every reference illustration I looked at showed a very ornate chair and so I piled on the booleans and filled the chair structure with decorative clutter. It's really a beautiful chair, and I almost regretted that I had to put a man in it.

Greek temples were generally very ornately decorated inside, so I used quite a few decorative image maps to dress the walls, floor and ceiling. 

Finally I put Zeus himself in. Luckily he had his robe to hide most of his body, but still there was enough exposed anatomy to leave me constantly wishing I could cheat and sneak some Poser figure parts into the scene (I didn't). The wreath of ferns around his head are actually palm tree fronds from my Pyramids palm trees, recolored gold and wrapped around his head. 

The hardest part of this scene was the incredibly cramped interior shape I was trying to be faithful to, which left me with very few possible positions to view the statue from. 

Historical Notes - The Lighthouse was built around 280 BC under the reign of Ptolemy II. It is a fascinating structure, but I have strong doubts about the conventional designs of what it looked like. If you would like to read my notes on why I disagree with the conventional design, go to Lighthouse Design.

That aside, the Lighthouse was legendary in its time, a spectacular monument as well as a working structure. Descriptions in my three references vary as to size, but the Pyre is probably between 350 and 400 feet high.

Sadly, it seems that many of the Wonders were destroyed by earthquakes, and so it was the the Great Pharos too was toppled by an earthquake in the 14th century AD. Its foundation was cleared and a fort now stands today where the Pharos once stood.

I've been asked this before, so I thought I'd better answer it once again for all to read. "Pharos" is not mis-spelled. It is not the plural of Pharaoh (the God-Kings of Egypt). Pharos is the name of the island the lighthouse was built on, and the word "pharos" soon came to be the root word for a lighthouse which many of the cultures of the Mediterranean world adopted.

Construction Notes - I started building the Lighthouse from the top down, by putting a bowl about 400 feet in the air (at the Bryce scale of 2 Bryce Units to 1 foot) and then sort of filling in what was below it. My design is highly speculative, but I detailed it by imagining how it actually might work. So while the details themselves are speculation, I think this is an excellent example of how you might go about detailing a design by thinking through how it was really used by the people who lived or worked in it.

The tower is one pyramid primitive cut with about 67 negative cubes.

The large ramp has cubes at each corner and stretched, slanted cubes for each side segment of the ramp. The texture on them is the library material "Cracked Clay Pot" scaled smaller on X and Z axis but larger on the Y axis so the texture "streaks downward quite severely.

The trees were created using my Extra Tree technique as shown in the MDU Techniques page. Each tree is just four lattices.

Historical Notes - Since this scene was a purely fictitious piece of imagery, it has no history.

Construction Notes - My obvious influence in designing the Bryce Tower was the Eiffel Tower in Paris. What I did differently was design it with four pointed tops, so I had a wider space up the side of the tower to have room for the letters spelling BRYCE.

The Main Tower supports are one-quarter portions of torus primitives. There are three of them at each corner. The concrete base that each corner anchors into was my base for my Emeisham pagoda. Once the main corner supports were positioned, the reinforcing pipe structures had to be added. This construction is mostly cylinders and torii. Probably the hardest part was simply aligning parts to various curved sections. I did a lot of test renders to see how parts fit together.

I believe there's a "fly-around" animation of this tower on the Bryce 4 accessory CD. The tower is also pictured in the Bryce 4 User Guide.

Since I originally posted these notes in my Seven Wonders Gallery, two visitors have contacted me with note or corrections, and I'd like to express my appreciation to Janak and Yvan for their contributions. Among the comments was the observation that some of my facts were wrong, so I'd like to correct this first. My original notes described the dropoff of visual contact at about one foot per mile, and apparently that is seriously in error. So my previous observation (that a fire atop a 400 ft tower might be seen hundreds of miles away) is wrong, and a more realistic estimate is that a fire atop a 400 ft tower might be seen for about 25 miles.

Now this correction does not alter the fact that a fire atop a 400 ft tower can be seen much farther than a fire on the beach, so the conclusions of the advantage of a fire atop a tower remain as I argued. Essentially what has changed is simply the maximum distance the fire might carry. And the notes that follow reflect my revisions based on this new information.

Other information was provided about sailing during that era, and while it doesn't change my arguments, it is a fascinating bit of insight I enjoyed reading and decided to share. My original notes (with revisions) follow:

As I stated previously, and wish to repeat, my design of the Lighthouse is highly speculative. Traditional designs, as shown in most reference material about the Lighthouse, picture it quite differently. The reason I chose to do a speculative design instead of copying the traditional one is that I simply don't believe the traditional design is correct. The following are my notes on why I think the traditional design is incorrect, but in fairness let me emphasize that these are my opinions and I will be most interested to hear alternate opinions from any of you who might think otherwise and take the time to write to me.

The specific things I question about the traditional design are the following:

1. I doubt that the main tower had straight vertical walls, believing instead that they were tapering like a pyramid.

2. I believe the description of the mirrors at the top is incorrect, because everything I know about mirrors and reflectors suggests to me the mirrors would have been useless and unworkable.

3. I believe the designs showing a structure above the pyre either did not exist, or was a ceremonial piece made for it's debut and removed when it was used, or added after the Lighthouse ceased being a functional device and perhaps became a monumental ornament.

4. I question many of the descriptions of exactly what the Lighthouse did, and how it was operated.

In order to explain my opinions better, I need to offer up first some preliminary information. The point of a Lighthouse, as we know, is to give ships at sea a visual reference to find the shore, especially a harbor, when the night is dark (like a moonless night) or the atmosphere is hindering vision. To some extent, you can do this with a bonfire on the beach. Creating a huge fire on the beach, or on the natural cliffs along the shoreline (however high they may be), is certainly the easy way to do this, because it's easy to keep adding fuel to the fire without having to lift anything or climb very high. Plus, you don't have to build an extraordinarily expensive tower.

The only reason to raise the fire up high off the ground is to counter the curvature of the earth. Information provided by Janak (see his full note below) suggests that a fire on a 400 ft high tower might be seen for about 24 miles, while a fire on the beach might be visible only a few miles because the mass of the earth simply blocks your view. So, building fires on the beach only works when ships are a few miles out, but works well enough under those circumstances that only a fool would go to the awesome trouble of putting the fire 400 feet in the air if ships are close enough to see a fire on the beach.

I'm assuming that the plain simple reason to get the fire 400 feet high was to allow it to be seen by ships way out to sea so far away that they couldn't see any fire on the beach no matter how big or bright it might be. By the estimate above, that puts the ships more than twenty miles away. In theory, of course, a fire 400 feet high could be seen several hundred miles away, if it's bright enough, and we know from the NASA space program that astronauts orbiting the earth over a hundred miles up have seen oil well fires burning on occasion. So people can see a fire 24 miles away if you can just get the earth out of the way (A tower 400 feet tall does that nicely) and make it a pretty big, bright fire (which takes a lot of fuel and gets pretty hot if you're anywhere near it).

So, I'm assuming they built the Lighthouse because ships way out to sea could not see a fire on the shore, and I'm assuming that fire had to be a fairly large one, like 18 to 20 feet across at it's base (which I believe would be big enough to be seen that far away). If the goal was to guide ships less than a few miles away, there simply was no point in building a tower that tall (which, by the way, for that time was a virtual skyscraper for their engineering skills). Based on these factors, I believe the height of the tower and a huge pyre (where the fire burned) are so essentially related that the one (the height) virtually guarantees the other (the huge pyre).

So, based on that logic, we've got a huge pyre (like 15-20 feet in diameter) 400 feet in the air, which is what I made first to start my lighthouse. What I built next, the way I imagined the lighthouse designed, comes from that assumption (the size of the pyre). I didn't imagine anything around and arching over it, because the Egyptians had only stone and wood for construction materials (they had soft metals, like gold, silver, and bronze, but not for large structural engineering). Suffice to say an overhead structure could not be made of wood. The fire would roast it in the first hour of operation. I don't see it being made of stone because the arching shape it would have needed to be was unreinforced for lateral stress (when you pile things up and they get pretty heavy, if they can't push down as gravity wants to, they will push sideways if there is the slightest irregularity in how each one pushes the one below it, and an arch has an abundance of such irregularity if it doesn't have a massive side wall to resist the lateral stress. So I don't believe a stone arch would work over the fire.

What about a metal arching canopy? With a 15-20 diameter fire beneath it, I'm guessing it would be sufficiently hot to weaken, if not melt soft metals. So, no matter what you make that canopy out of, I just don't buy it, if the lighthouse really was for guiding distant ships. 

Now to the fun part, the mirrors. Legend has it that large metal panels were around the fire and could reflectively focus and magnify the light of a smaller fire, and reflectors can in fact do this. But in fact there are limitations to using reflectors that are ignored or unknown to people who've never actually used one. I've used quite a few, in my illustrious movie career, because they have been widely used for outdoor lighting throughout the movie making world.

These reflectors, 4' X 4' boards with foil covering, are used to reflect the sunlight and bounce it to fill shadowed areas or people. To use one, you must be able to see your target (what you are trying to reflect the light onto). If you can't see your target, it's pretty useless trying to aim the reflector. To aim the reflector, assuming the target isn't moving and you can't move the sun, you must be able to freely, easily move the reflector. And a flat board only reflects parallel light well (the sun is so far away, it's light rays are almost parallel). But reflecting light from a nearby source requires a curved reflector, not a flat panel, and focusing is even more precise and complicated because of those curves. If the light source is in a fixed place (like the lighthouse pyre) and the ship is in a fixed place (far away, it seems to just sit there in one spot), then you must be able to freely, easily move the reflector to aim it. The reflector must be curved, not a flat panel, and you absolutely MUST be able to see your target!

So, how do you see a ship miles away in the dark of night? Realistically, you don't. And if you can't see the target, you can't aim the reflector. Further, aiming the reflector would require being able to slide, rotate or tilt it. Ropes pulling it here or there would burn immediately, and any human up there trying to tilt or rotate mirrored panels would be similarly roasted. So as romantic and mysteriously enchanting as the mirror legend is, I just don't buy it. And if you eliminate the mirrors (to focus a smaller fire's light), then you are left with a big fire, as I'm assuming. 

I think a lighthouse needs a big fire (like 15 to 20 feet wide and tall) radiating light equally in all directions, unobstructed by any surrounding posts, arches or panels. I think such a fire is so intense that no human could get within 30 feet of it for any length of time, and no structural material should be above it or even level with it. The only place I can imagine humans safely being is under it, insulated from the heat by the stonework supporting the huge pyre bowl.

And that brings me to the next intriguing question, how do you "throw another log on the fire"? What I made in my Lighthouse scene were a pair of counterbalanced boom arms that normally rested on the deck below the fire and could briefly be rotated up so a log or fuel-filled object could then roll off the boom arm into the pyre bowl and the boom arm would then quickly swing back down below the pyre before it roasted. The mechanism is simple and well within the technological capabilities of the times.

Now, about the shape of the tower itself, it is generally pictured as straight up and down, with true vertical walls. The problem I have with this is that I don't know of any similar stone tower of that time that tall, that skinny, with true vertical walls. Above I mentioned lateral stress, the sideways force caused by gravity pulling something down and an irregular resistance to the downward pull. Essentially, the force of gravity looks for the weakness on one side and pushes the load sideways when it can't go down. If stones are piled high one atop the next, sooner or later one will push sideways and the pile collapses. 

The Egyptians were exceptionally knowledgeable about Lateral stress, because with their incredible history of stonework, they experienced many collapses of structures due to lateral stress (including one Pyramid, the Medium Pyramid). So for their massive structures, they routinely built tapering walls, with the stones actually slanted inward to use lateral stress to fortify the wall. But this trick doesn't work with a hollow structure.

So basically, I doubt the Lighthouse had true vertical walls and a hollow interior. That's why I made mine with tapering walls and the spiraling ramp on the outside.

Now that I've gotten intrigued by the design of the Lighthouse and have profound doubts about the conventional shape it is described as having, I know I'll continue to research this and I would certainly welcome any information, ideas, or opinions (concurring with or disputing my ideas) that you might care to send me.

The following are complete versions of letters sent to me by Janak and Yvan. Janak's correction of my error estimating the earth's curvature is especially interesting (and I've corrected my notes above accordingly). Yvan's two notes about sailing during that time are also fascinating. Thank you both for your contributions.

 Subject: Your observations on the Lighthouse of Alexandria
 Date:  Sun, 13 Jun 1999 08:55:56 -0700 (PDT)
 From:  Janak
 To:  wmunns@gte.net

"Hello, maybe you remember me, my name is Janak Alford, we spoke a while back about the 7 Wonders project. I stopped in your gallery a few days back and I must say they all look very good (although a bit different than I would have done them) Anyway, I read your observations on why the lighthouse of Alexandria couldn't have been as it was written in the history books (400 feet tall with a fire and mirrors on the top, also with a hollow middle) and I must say I don't agree with it. You said "In theory, of course, a fire 400 feet high could be seen several hundred miles away" which is not correct (as far as I know). By our calculations here, if you had a lighthouse 400 feet tall then it wouldn't be visible for more than 24 (or so) miles. 

    X^2 + Y^2 = R^2 standard formula for a circle where R is the radius of the Earth.

    R = 3895 miles   400 feet=.07576 miles 

"We can pick any point on the Earth for our starting position. For simplicity sake imagine we start at the equator, then X = R = 3895 miles and Y = 0 miles. We can re-arrange the circle equation to solve for Y.

    Y = square_root of ((Radius^2) - (Radius - 400 feet)^2)
    Y = sqrt     (3895^2   - (3895 - (400/5280))^2) Y = 24.3 miles 

"Another way to achieve the same answer is to use the formula

    X = R cos(angle)
    y = R sin(angle)

"If the earth simply fell 1 foot per mile we would end up with a slope, but Earth is not a slope. For close distances try .6777 * miles ^2 (this will not work for great distances because of an increasing error which is very small at close distances).

"About putting wood on the fire, if the person was wearing wet clothes and and cloth over his face, it wouldn't have much effect on him. To try this, take plastic lunch bag and fill it with cold water. If you hold a flame right below the bag (and do not let the actual match or piece of burning wood touch it) the bag will not melt. Another example would be a fire fighter trying to re-direct a forest fire. You have probably seen them digging feet away from the fire in nothing more than overalls and a shirt.

"I cannot really comment on the lateral force on the building, I don't know much about that, but I do know the farmer down the road has a silo that is made of cement and its walls are 8 inches thick and it is over 125ft high. I have no idea on the quality of the cement back then, and I doubt that was as good as now, but the Greeks and Egyptians were expert stone workers.

"Once again, your pictures of it are quite good, I just thought I would give my input on your Notes."

Janak
(end)

And from Yvan:

 Subject: Reflections on reflectors
 Date:  Wed, 9 Jun 1999 03:35:19 -0400
 From:  Yvan
 To:  wmunns@gte.net

"Hello,

"I have been looking at your wonderful web site and I read the info on your wonders project. I agree that there are probably inconsistencies between the truth and speculation about the lighthouse. But I started thinking about the mirrors, and it occurred to me that maybe the mirrors were not used to reflect the fire at night. They may have only been used during the day, to reflect the sunlight so as to provide a glint at the horizon for distant ships. 

"It takes only a small surface area of reflected sunshine to create a glimmer that can be seen for miles, if you are in the direct path of the reflected light beam. Maybe a large hammered polished copper dome would have enough random facets to be visible for miles around on a sunny day. And they have lots of sunny days in the Mediterranean! The fact is, most Mediterranean traffic at that time occurred only during daylight hours, with most ships anchoring in sheltered bays over night. Without radar, who would want to sail close to shore at night!

"I'd have to look it up, but isn't the base of the lighthouse still there? It could be possible to extrapolate the height of the tower given the slope of masonry, given the methods used in that area at that time. Of course masonry techniques have improved greatly, and some medieval keeps were hundreds of feet high and had almost vertical walls. But that was one thousand years after the lighthouse was built, so maybe the lighthouse had a wide base like you show. After all, why build a wide base if all you need is a narrow footing like the tall medieval keeps?

"Finally, the roof issue. It is not needed to cover a fire, especially a big well fueled one, even when it is raining. If the fuel is dry and the fire already going, it can rain all it wants, the fire will keep on burning very brightly. So why build a roof, especially in the Mediterranean where it is rather dry? Also, the fire may have only been used in the evening when the sun was no longer providing enough light to glimmer off the sunlight reflectors (not mirrors), if there were any. Besides, all you can use the lighthouse for is to help the last few ships trying to get to port before darkness falls. All the lighthouse does is extent the sailing day a bit, we wouldn't be talking about 24 hour maritime traffic like today.

"One of the worst fears of sailors at that time was to find themselves stranded on the water after dark, with no way to set anchor. Steel Bruce anchors that can stop you dead in a storm weren't around then. Not to mention that aside from a narrow fringe near shore, the Mediterranean is over 600 feet deep, and with the 3 to 1 minimum rope to depth rule, few back then could even fathom that kind of water, much less set anchor. The best you could hope for was that the rope on the big stone drag anchor you were using was long enough to start dragging on the bottom before you wooden hull ran aground and splintered. Your drag anchor could only stop you if you were not exposed to strong wind or waves. Hence the need to find a sheltered bay before darkness. 

"So the lighthouse could help stragglers in bad weather, or provide a good beacon during clear day or night weather. If you've been anywhere at night where there is no atmospheric glow from a big modern city, you can pick out a 60 watt light bulb from several miles away! That means the fire doesn't have to be very big when visibility is good, but only when it is bad.

"In the end if they had a reflective dome of some kind on the top of the tower, -beside- or -behind- the fire, to provide daytime glitter, people on the ground and incoming ships could presume that the fire was roofed over, when in fact it may have been level with it. This confusion would create the myth that the fire was roofed, -and- that there was some kind of mirror used to focus it, both of which don't seem very practical. As you mentioned, no one can focus a mirror if you can't see the target!

"Well now that I've babbled semi-coherently about obscure ancient maritime problems far longer than I planed, I'll stop. Hope you find some of this of interest. I have found your illustrations of the seven wonders very interesting indeed. The effort you have put into those incredible illustrations is not wasted, I can assure you."

Yvan

(Second letter from Yvan follows):
 

"Hello,

"Well after digging around even more, I found clues that may indicate that there was a certain amount of straight across traffic between Alexandria and Crete! That means you original concept is correct. Also, by the time the lighthouse was built, merchant ships had grown to such a size that they were no longer rowed much, and got around under sail as much as possible. Only war ships were rowed much.

"I also found a reliable source stating that the light house may have been up to 440 ft high, so that would definitely help when stuck in the middle mediterranean at night!"

(end, Yvan's second note)

If anyone would like to contribute to this discussion, I welcome your comments.

Render times here are estimates based on an image size of 800x600 and a Pentium 333 MHz CPU and 128 MB RAM.

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