| Researcher(s) | Janric van Rookhuijzen |
| University | Leiden University |
| Degree | PD |
| Date Range | January 2026 - Present |
| Supervisor(s) | Prof. Ineke Sluiter |
The Seven Wonders of the World are usually treated as timeless icons of antiquity. This project approaches them instead as changing monuments and changing ideas. Using the concept of Anchoring Innovation, it examines how new buildings, meanings, and traditions were made credible by being linked to an authoritative past.
The Seven Wonders of the World are among the most familiar legacies of Classical Antiquity. Modern scholarship and popular culture usually treat them as a fixed canon inherited from the ancient world. This project starts from the opposite assumption. It argues that both the list of Wonders and the monuments it contains were the result of long processes of selection, reinterpretation, and reinvention.
The project applies the concept of Anchoring Innovation to study how these processes worked. It combines literary analysis of ancient texts, inscriptions, and travel accounts with archaeological evidence. The first part of the project reconstructs how different lists of Wonders circulated from Antiquity onwards, often with varying contents and numbers. It shows how authors anchored new selections in older traditions in order to present innovation as continuity, and how the canonical list of seven Wonders emerged only gradually, reaching its present form in the Early Modern period.
The second part of the project consists of detailed case studies of individual Wonders in religious contexts, where continuity and change are especially visible. Sites such as the Altar of Horns on Delos, the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and the Artemision at Ephesus reveal how sacred landscapes integrated material remains from the past into new architectural and ritual presents. By treating the Wonders as evolving monuments rather than static masterpieces, the project offers a new understanding of their role in ancient cultural change and demonstrates the broader value of Anchoring Innovation as a tool for historical analysis.
