Colossus of Rhodes

Rhodes, allied with Ptolemy I of Egypt, was besieged for about a year by Demetrius I of Macedon, son of Antigonus I Monophthalmus, who sought to punish the island for refusing to join his father's war against Ptolemy. In 304 BC a relief fleet sent by Ptolemy arrived and Demetrius abandoned the siege, leaving behind most of his siege equipment. The Rhodians sold it for 300 talents and used the proceeds to build a colossal bronze statue of Helios, the sun god they credited with their deliverance.

Construction began in 292 BC under Chares of Lindos, a native sculptor who had trained under Lysippos, the maker of a 22-metre bronze Zeus at Tarentum. Ancient accounts describe an iron tie-bar frame clad in bronze plates, its interior packed with stone as the work rose from a marble pedestal near the harbour entrance; much of the metal was reforged from weapons Demetrius's army left behind. Philo of Byzantium wrote that Chares cast the statue in horizontal sections, burying each finished part under a mound of earth before working on the next, so that by the end he was building blind, with the whole figure buried inside an artificial hill later removed. After twelve years, the statue was completed in 280 BC, standing about seventy cubits, some 33 metres, tall, by most contemporary accounts the tallest statue of the ancient world.

The statue stood for fifty-four years until the earthquake of 226 BC, which devastated much of Rhodes, including its harbour and commercial buildings. The Colossus snapped at the knees and fell onto land. Ptolemy III offered to pay for its reconstruction, but the Oracle of Delphi's warning left the Rhodians fearing they had offended Helios, and they declined to rebuild it.

The broken statue lay where it fell for more than 800 years, and even ruined it drew travellers to see it. The geographer Strabo, writing around the turn of the era, described it lying on the ground, "thrown down by an earthquake and broken at the knees," and still counted among the Seven Wonders by common agreement. Pliny the Elder wrote that few men could clasp its thumb in their arms, that its fingers were larger than most whole statues, and that vast caverns gaped where its limbs had broken away.

In 653 an Arab force under the general Mu'awiya I raided Rhodes. According to the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, the statue's remains were broken up as booty and sold to a merchant of Edessa, who carried the bronze away loaded onto 900 camels, a story repeated by the thirteenth-century writer Bar Hebraeus. Theophanes is the only source for this account, and modern scholarship treats it warily: the historian L. I. Conrad has argued that, given the island's continuing importance to Byzantium well into the ninth century, the tale of the dismantling is more likely propaganda against the Arab conquests than a record of what actually became of the bronze.