The Creation of the List of the Seven Wonders of the World

In this fifth of the 2017-18 Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) lectures, Dr. Jennifer Tobin explores the means by which the “wonder lists” of the 3rd century BCE helped situate the Greeks within a broader world where “otherness” threatened, by domesticating the wondrous and foreign into manageable catalogs. This presentation also investigates how the emergence of a limited list of wonders, the canonical seven, was used to assert cultural dominance in a multicultural world.