The Statue That Was Sold for Camel Loads

The Colossus of Rhodes was a bronze statue of the sun god Helios, approximately thirty-three meters tall, that stood near the entrance to the great harbour of Mandraki on the Greek island of Rhodes between approximately 280 BC and 226 BC. It commemorated the city’s defeat of the Macedonian general Demetrius I, whose two-year siege had ended in 304 BC and had been the largest siege operation of the early Hellenistic world. The Rhodians, having won, sold the abandoned siege equipment for scrap and used the proceeds to commission the statue. They hired the sculptor Chares of Lindos. The statue took twelve years to build.

It stood for fifty-four years. In 226 BC, an earthquake centered on the southwestern part of the island broke the statue at the knees and brought it down. It then lay where it had fallen, in pieces, in the public space near the harbour, for the next eight hundred and eighty years. The Rhodians had been offered substantial sums to rebuild it — Ptolemy III of Egypt sent envoys with a reconstruction subsidy soon after the fall — and had declined. An oracle, according to Strabo, had advised against re-erection. The statue lay in pieces, visible to every visitor to Rhodes, recognisable to every educated Mediterranean as one of the seven wonders, for almost three times as long as it had stood upright.

It was finally removed by the new Arab rulers of Rhodes in 654 AD, who sold the bronze, by the standard medieval Arab account, to a Jewish merchant from Edessa. The merchant, the same source claims, transported the metal home on the backs of nine hundred camels.

What the wonder actually looked like

There is no surviving Greek or Roman image of the Colossus that can be confidently dated to the period it stood. The famous Renaissance and modern depictions — most notably the seventeenth-century engraving by Maarten van Heemskerck, which shows a colossal nude figure straddling the entrance to Mandraki harbour with ships sailing between his legs — are entirely imaginative reconstructions. The straddling-the-harbour image is medieval fantasy. No ancient source claims the statue stood that way. The harbour entrance at Mandraki is approximately three hundred meters wide; the statue, at thirty-three meters, would have had to be nearly ten times its actual height to bridge it.

What the contemporary sources actually say is sparse. Philo of Byzantium, writing about fifty years after the statue’s construction, gave the most detailed surviving account in his treatise On the Seven Wonders — a description of the construction technique (the statue was built from the feet up, with each section completed before the next was added, and a great ramp of earth was banked around it during construction). Philo gives the height as seventy cubits (approximately thirty-three meters). He does not describe the pose.

Strabo, visiting Rhodes around 25 BC — two and a half centuries after the fall — describes the statue as lying in the open near the temple of Helios. He gives no overall impression of its appearance because there was none to give; the statue was in pieces, broken at the knees, and what stood was only the lower limbs and the stub of the torso. The arms and the head had detached on the fall and lay separately.

Pliny the Elder, writing around 70 AD — three centuries after the fall — repeats Strabo’s account and adds that the bronze of the broken statue was so massive that few people could put their arms around any of the larger pieces, that the broken sections revealed an internal framework of iron and stone, and that the fingers were larger than most full-sized statues. The Pliny passage is the closest thing to a Roman-era visual report. It describes ruins, not a standing wonder.

How it was built

The construction technique, reconstructed from Philo and from modern engineering analysis, was sophisticated. The statue was assembled on a thirty-meter-tall white marble pedestal at the public square near the harbour. Chares of Lindos and his workshop — funded by the proceeds from selling Demetrius’s siege equipment, which had included siege towers, catapults, and the massive helepolis battering tower — built a wrought-iron internal skeleton, then applied the bronze plates over it, working upward from the feet.

A ramp of earth was banked around the construction site as each new section was added, allowing the workers to reach the next level. By the time the head was being installed, the statue and ramp together formed a small earthen mountain in the center of Rhodes city. When the bronze was finished, the ramp was removed.

The total weight has been estimated at between two hundred and seven hundred tons of bronze, depending on which modern reconstruction is used. Iron and stone added at least as much again. The Colossus would have been visible from the open sea, possibly from approximately sixty kilometers away, depending on weather and atmospheric conditions.

It was the tallest free-standing bronze statue of the ancient world. The Statue of Liberty, completed in 1886, is approximately the same height from feet to head; the modern statue’s torch reaches higher only because of its raised arm and pedestal. The two statues are sometimes compared as a deliberate echo — though the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi denied direct imitation.

What broke

The 226 BC earthquake that destroyed the Colossus also destroyed substantial parts of Rhodes city, including the city walls, the dockyards, and the great Temple of Helios where the statue stood. The earthquake’s epicenter was probably under the sea southwest of the island. The seismological reconstruction, based on the recorded damage pattern, puts it at approximately magnitude 7.

The statue, by Strabo’s account, broke at the knees — the structural weak point in any large standing figure. The upper body toppled forward and shattered on the pavement. The lower limbs and feet remained standing on the pedestal for some time afterward, possibly several decades, before being toppled in subsequent earthquakes or quietly disassembled. The pedestal itself was still identifiable in Strabo’s time, although the temple complex around it had been largely rebuilt.

Ptolemy III of Egypt — the same dynasty that had built the Lighthouse of Alexandria a generation earlier — offered to fund the reconstruction in 224 or 223 BC. The Rhodians declined. The reason given in the surviving accounts is religious: the oracle of Delphi had advised against re-erection. The reason that is more likely true, in the judgment of modern historians, is that the Rhodian government had immediate problems more pressing than statuary reconstruction — the earthquake had damaged the city’s economic infrastructure, and the proceeds of any reconstruction fund were probably better spent on harbours and walls.

The fallen statue became, accidentally, a tourist attraction. For eight centuries, Mediterranean travelers detoured to Rhodes specifically to see the ruins. The bronze plates were not stolen during this period — partly because the Rhodian state controlled the site, partly because the pieces were too large to move easily, partly because the cultural prohibition against scrapping a Wonder of the World held.

The 654 AD sale

The end came when the Rashidun Caliphate, expanding from Arabia through the Levant in the mid-seventh century AD, captured Rhodes in 653 AD under the general Muawiya I (later the first Umayyad caliph). The Arab administration had no particular interest in preserving Greek antiquities. The bronze was inventoried and sold.

The buyer, according to the standard account in the Muruj al-Dhahab of the tenth-century Baghdadi historian al-Mas’udi, was a Jewish merchant from Edessa (modern Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey). The transport, al-Mas’udi reports, required nine hundred camels.

The nine-hundred-camel detail is almost certainly apocryphal. It is the kind of round-number embellishment that medieval Arab historical writing routinely added to dramatic events. The actual number was probably substantially smaller — bronze, even at the high quantities involved, would have required perhaps a few hundred animal-loads, not nine hundred. The detail has nevertheless been repeated in every popular account of the Colossus since.

What happened to the bronze after Edessa is not recorded. It was probably melted down for currency and tool-making within a generation. Some of it may have ended up in the early Abbasid mints in Iraq during the eighth century. None of it has been identified in any surviving object. The metal of the largest free-standing bronze statue of the ancient world is now indistinguishable from any other recycled Mediterranean bronze of the early medieval period.

The pedestal stood empty until at least the twelfth century. By the time the Knights Hospitaller occupied Rhodes in 1309 and began building the surviving medieval castle there, the pedestal was gone — incorporated, possibly, into the new harbour-front fortifications. Modern Greek archaeologists have searched the Mandraki harbour area periodically for fragments of either the statue or its pedestal. They have found nothing identifiable.

A small concrete plaque was installed on the harbour breakwater in 1988 noting that the Colossus had stood somewhere in the vicinity. The plaque is in Greek and English. The location given is approximate. No one is certain exactly where Chares of Lindos’s statue actually stood.