Ranked third in the list of wonders of the Ancient World the Temple of Artemis at Epheseus was rebuilt three times, each grander than the last. It was originally built in around 800 BC and is thought to have been built by the Amazons with their Bronze Age tools. In the seventh Century BC the conquering King Croesus of Lydia is said to have seen it destroyed by his army in the fighting but archaeological digs have found that it was most likely destroyed by a large flood at the time. Either way King Croesus, now conquerer of Epheseus, paid for the temple's reconstruction and it was larger and grander than ever before. It was much loved and lasted until a man from Epheseus named Herostratus set fire to the wood in the roof of the temple and burned it to the ground, desperate to record his name in History. The people were furious and had him killed and even made his name punishable by death but the temple lay in ashes. One legend says that the temple burned the night Alexander the Great was born and that Artemis was so busy ensuring his safe birth that she did not watch over her own temple.
The next version of the temple was the largest and grandest, built over a supposed 120 years though Historians doubt it took half the time and is recorded as under construction when Alexander visited in 333 BC. Roman Historian Pliny the elder said that it was a magnificent building which contained sculptures in rememberance of the Amazonians who supposedly built the original temple on the site. Each time the temple wax rebuilt it was done so on the same marshy land despite being apparently destroyed once by a flood but this is apparently because the wet land made it more protected against the earthquakes that were frequent in the region and as we know many of the other great wonders in the Ancient Greek area of the world were indeed destroyed by earthquakes. This final grand version of the Temple was magnificent and earned its place on the list of Ancient World wonders but as Christianity grew and spread through people such as Saint Paul the worship of Artemis declined and when the temple was sacked by Goths in 268 AD it is unknown whether enough people still valued the Pagan Gods to bother rebuilding it.
Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great had the temple (or remains of the temple) closed and Constantine used the remaining stones and columns in construction of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul). The Temple was magnificent but eventually it declined one final time along with its worship and we know it now only in reconstructions and historical records. The picture at the top shows a reconstruction of how we think the final temple would have looked. The ruins of the Temple stand today in Turkey near the town of Selçuk.
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