Alternative wonders of the world
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Djenn%C3%A9#Pr...
>Dubois revisited Djenné in 1910 and was shocked by the new building. He believed that the French colonial administration were responsible for the design and wrote that it looked like a cross between a hedgehog and a church organ. He thought that the cones made the building resemble a baroque temple dedicated to the god of suppositories. By contrast, Jean-Louis Bourgeois has argued that the French had little influence except perhaps for the internal arches and that the design is "basically African."
>French ethnologist Michel Leiris, in his account of traveling through Mali in 1931, states that the new mosque is indeed the work of Europeans. He also says that local people were so unhappy with the new building that they refused to clean it, only doing so when threatened with prison.
>Jean-Louis Bourgeois however, recorded that the rebuilt mosque was constructed by Djenné's traditional local guild of masons, traditionally responsible for the building and maintenance of the town's original mosque and of Djenné's other buildings, using traditional techniques and with minimal French involvement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpan_water_system
An artificial oasis city built in the Late Middle Ages* on the Taklamakan Desert for travellers along the Silk Road, it provided irrigation by having more than 5,000km of hand-dug underground tunnels to transport water from the mountains; an IMHO extremely impressive feat of geoengineering for the time.
* https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-00728-7_...
This was a very common form of water engineering for the region; the technology was thousands of years old at that point.
That being said - the point is that it should be relatively personal, and a good deal subjective - not entirely objective. To provide an "alternative" list means that one is seeking a rejection or counter opinion to what is seen as canonical... when no such canonical list exists. Even the original 7, where often not 7, and were not uniformly agreed upon ever.
There are a handful of modern wonders lists, and they (and other media) often focus on a few "usual suspects", like the Taj Mahal and Machu Picchu. So maybe in the spirit of the post it's "Some wonderful sites you may not have heard about", and that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
https://nitter.net/ulturaltutor/status/1553472360434515973
Make sure to check the replies, there are other amazing buildings in there.
If you’re in the US, try https://nttr.stream/ulturaltutor/status/1553472360434515973
Bayeux War Cemetery, Normandy, France
Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, DC, USA
I personally think it’s wondrous that anything at all survives from so long ago, let alone something of such staggering geometry.
That’s what is so cool about it. It’s more or less the shape of a naturally occurring mountain, which just so happens to be the shape most resistant to erosion.
Primitive interior arch-work and interior passageways notwithstanding.
It cannot be understated how little we know of our ancestors 2500 years ago, and how little remains we have, and the pyramids are even older.
Piles of dirt are also surprisingly stable. Around Stonehenge are mounds that are presumably 4 or 5 thousand years old.
I visited France a month or two ago, the first time since COVID, and ended up staying in Verdun for a couple of days. The sheer scale of the cemeteries, forts, battlefields, etc. is sobering. (At the same time, the city itself is a bit of a hidden gem, with nice parks and a beautiful river full of fish.) One thing I noticed was the handful of American monuments and cemeteries in that area were immaculately taken care of, even though the people buried there would be great-grandfathers by now and there were very few visitors to appreciate it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung
I'd put Gobekli Tepe/"The Other" Tepe's on the list as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
These sites literally inspire un-ending, immense wonder to any who care to probe their depths.
Is the internet itself a thing that could be listed? What about a city? The international road network? What about the anti-ice-age device we’ve been busy installing in the atmosphere?
> when is something a thing, rather than a collection of things?
That's a false dichotomy--a collection is itself a thing, of course. And most things are made up of other things. A building, after all, is itself a collection of structural system, building materials and individual.
A city is listed.
For a thing to be listed on a list of wonders, I'd submit that it has to have a well-accepted, reasonably unambiguous name for that thing. So "the international road network" is a no: but the U.S. Interstate Highway System--maybe.
Although the lighthouse at Alexandria was one of the original wonders, I'd submit that the Library of Alexandria could also be named as a wonder, despite being the most literal collection of things you could imagine. So why not the Internet Archive? That one, in particular, is wondrous because it's a collection--it doesn't simply contain the wonder of some other thing.
I'd also submit that a category or type of thing (so "the typewriter", "the lightbulb", "computers") are not a wonder, in this sense.
To be inspired by the wonders of the ancient world, they probably also have to be constructed; others have posited wonders of the natural world, but they do feel like they fall into a different category.
It started in 2000, back when the web still felt like a magical place of possibilities. There was this Organization to crown 7 New World Wonders and everyone can participate via the Internet!
Around the same time there was also an initiative to collect names and send them (via broadcast?) to space. I can't find references to this anymore, only to newer initiatives like with Artemis. But it was also pretty exciting.