The known history of the Colossus of Rhodes
New research provides a more detailed and realistic history of the 100-foot-high statue from the ancient world called the Colossus of Rhodes.
The Colossus was a 30-metre-high bronze statue of the god Helios, built to commemorate the victory of the Rhodians over Demetrius of Macedonia, and considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Completed in 282 BCE, it fell in an earthquake only 56 years later in 226 BCE. The usual story is that the fragments remained untouched for 880 years until the invasion by the Umayyad caliph Muawiya I. However, literary and geological evidence suggest a more complex, and more likely, story involving several reconstructions, finishing with a devastating earthquake in 142 CE.
No one knows what it looked like or even the exact place it stood. The research ties its history however to the known earthquakes and later that had taken place at Rhodes, and thus provides a reasonable timeline for its destruction and removal. It also debunks this bit of “misinformation”:
In popular imagination, the Colossus stood astride the harbour entrance with ships sailing between his legs. This idea was first mentioned by an Italian pilgrim in 1395, who wrote that the Colossus stood with one leg at the end of the mole with the windmills and the other near St John’s chapel, later a fort. These sites are 750 metres apart, necessitating a statue 1500 metres high — a truly colossal edifice even by modern standards
The reason we don’t know where the statue actually stood is because the bronze used to forge it was exceedingly valuable. Once it was determined it could not be rebuilt that bronze did not remain in place for long.
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New research provides a more detailed and realistic history of the 100-foot-high statue from the ancient world called the Colossus of Rhodes.
The Colossus was a 30-metre-high bronze statue of the god Helios, built to commemorate the victory of the Rhodians over Demetrius of Macedonia, and considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Completed in 282 BCE, it fell in an earthquake only 56 years later in 226 BCE. The usual story is that the fragments remained untouched for 880 years until the invasion by the Umayyad caliph Muawiya I. However, literary and geological evidence suggest a more complex, and more likely, story involving several reconstructions, finishing with a devastating earthquake in 142 CE.
No one knows what it looked like or even the exact place it stood. The research ties its history however to the known earthquakes and later that had taken place at Rhodes, and thus provides a reasonable timeline for its destruction and removal. It also debunks this bit of “misinformation”:
In popular imagination, the Colossus stood astride the harbour entrance with ships sailing between his legs. This idea was first mentioned by an Italian pilgrim in 1395, who wrote that the Colossus stood with one leg at the end of the mole with the windmills and the other near St John’s chapel, later a fort. These sites are 750 metres apart, necessitating a statue 1500 metres high — a truly colossal edifice even by modern standards
The reason we don’t know where the statue actually stood is because the bronze used to forge it was exceedingly valuable. Once it was determined it could not be rebuilt that bronze did not remain in place for long.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
From what I’ve read, Rhodes’ great 7-Wonders Helios statue wasn’t built de novo out of nothing, but rather was adapted around one of Demetrius’ huge surviving, abandoned siege towers.
Harry Turtledove’s historical “Greek traders” series of (5) novels, by the way, covers Rhodes (and the rest of the Mediterranean) over the half-decade leading up to Demetrius’ incursion into Rhodes. The last novel came out only a couple of years back—including the preceding (Cyprus) Battle of Salamis. The next should give us a look at the actual invasion.
MIchael McNeil: At the article I link to, the use of the siege towers to build the statue is discussed, at some length.
If it is true (as indeed seems likely now) that the Colossus of Rhodes was as small as 30 meters, it would no longer be even the largest statue of antiquity. The Colossus of Nero in Rome (1st C. AD) was 36 meters tall, and the Leshan Giant Buddha (8th C. AD) was (and is) 71 meters.
Neither, of course, had quite the cultural impact or fame as the Colossus of Rhodes, even within their immediate ambits. Even if it wasn’t big enough to straddle the harbor entrance! (Nero’s infamy isn’t a full explanation here: After his disgrace and death, Vespasian had it renamed and refigured to represent the Roman sun god Sol, and it somehow lasted intact even beyond the fall of the Western Empire.)
The Roman sun god “Sol”—same as the Greek “Helios”—was basically the monotheistic God of All in late Greco-Roman religion—though other late Classical cults substituted their own chief deity, such as Isis—but they were all fundamentally the same, monotheistic, God.
@Michael McNeil
Totally wrong actually. The king / father of the gods was Zeus. Helios was tasked with driving the sun across the sky. When Zeus was handing out land, he missed Helios, who was working.
Realizing his mistake, Zeus made the island of Rhodes rise from the sea, and blessed it with the best climate in the Greek empire, gifting it to Helios. This is why Helios is special to Rhodes. Indeed his image is on most coins from the ancient period ( along with a rose… An ancient pun on the islands name, and a hat tip to the pretty wild roses that still grow today )
It makes nothing but sense that the.folk believed the island emerged from the ocean. There are very young fossil beds all over the island, which would be better described as sea shells embedded in very soft sandstone.
I lived on Rhodes for 3 years back in the 90’s , and holiday there regularly, and also collect ancient coins from the island (c.450BC thru 100AD)…they are incredibly beautiful, with an artistry just not found today.
I would hav e loved to have seen this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_of_Alexandria
Totally wrong actually.
No, I’m actually totally right—and you’re totally wrong in declaring that I’m totally wrong.
On the other hand, you’re right basically in the rest of what you had to say—for the time period that you’re writing about: say, around 300 B.C.—which is in the vicinity of the timeframe during which the Colossus of Rhodes got built. Yes, early Classical Greco-Roman paganism was like that, pretty much.
But I’m right too about the time period which I’m talking about—namely, half a millennium later—by 200 or 300 A.D. You’re wrong because you didn’t notice my specifying late Greco-Roman religion and late Classical cults; moreover, if you think that “nothing changed” over that half millennial timeframe, then you’re hugely wrong yet again—because a vast amount changed.
In this regard, historian T.M. Lindsay (in the Cambridge Medieval History) describes the metaphysical structure of the cosmos—summarizing the views of the new, Western (essentially monotheistic) Paganism that was powerful in the late antique Roman Empire—as it was ultimately planned and envisioned in this instance by the (last pagan) Roman Emperor Julian (during the 4th century A.D.): {quoting…}
The Neoplatonic thought of a Trinity of existence took the central place of the Christian {Trinity} in this new pagan theology.
Three worlds exist. First and highest is the realm of pure ideas where the Supreme Principle, the One, the Highest Good, the Great First Cause, lives and reigns. Below it is the intellectual world over which presides the same Supreme Principle, but now represented by an emanation from Itself, wholly spiritual, the Logos of the Platonic philosophy. The third is the world of sense existence, the universe of things seen and handled, and there, as beseems its surroundings, the ruler, the emanation from the Supreme Principle, assumes a visible form and can be seen while adored.
{/unQuote}
The latter, of course, being Helios (or Sol)—the (physical) sun in the sky. Thus, superficially at least, it would appear that the foregoing general religious principles didn’t and don’t leave much room for the traditional Greco-Roman gods and goddesses of Olympus (much less anybody else’s!).
One can read much more about this astounding historical situation in T.M. Lindsay’s entire (intensely interesting) chapter of the Cambridge Medieval History—which I’ve republished on X, entitled: ”Monotheistic Paganism – or, just what was it Christianity fought and faced”—here:
Link
https://x.com/MichaelEMcNeil/status/1774689582984122766