Colossus of Rhodes

The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of the Greek god Helios, erected on the Greek island of Rhodes by Chares of Lindos between 292 and 280 BC. It is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Before its destruction, the Colossus of Rhodes stood over 30 meters (107 ft) high, making it one of the tallest statues of the ancient world

The statue represented only 56 years until Rhodes by the earthquake in 226 BC, Rhodes, in which the damage to large parts of the city, including the port and commercial buildings was carried out was made, which were destroyed. The statue fell to his knees and fell to the floor. Ptolemy III offered to pay for reconstruction of the statue, but the oracle of Delphi Rhodes was the fear that they had offended Helios, and they refused to rebuild it.

The rest lying on the floor, as Strabo for over 800 years and even broken, they were so impressive that many traveled to see them. Pliny the Elder noted that few people could wrap their arms around the thumbs down, and that each of his fingers was larger than most statues.

In 654, a force in the Arab-Muslim Caliph Muawiyah I captured Rhodes, and as the chronicler Theophanes the Confessor, the remains of a Jewish merchant of Edessa were sold. "The buyer had the statue broken down, and transported the bronze scrap on the backs of 900 camels to his house. Theophanes is the only source of the story to which all other sources will be traced. The destruction of Arab stereotyping and the alleged sale to a Jew, perhaps originally a powerful metaphor for the dream of Nebuchadnezzar the destruction of a statue of the great and terrible, and was heard coming from a monk of the seventh century as a sign of the apocalypse to. The same story is registered Barhebraeus, written in Syriac in the 13th century in Edessa (see EA Wallis Budge, The Gregory Abu'l Faraj chronography of, I, p. 98, APA - Philosophia Press, Amsterdam, 1932) (After the looting of Rhodes Arabic) and a large number of men with strong ropes from around the Colossus Messing, who was in town and were bound torn out. And she weighed three thousand loads of Corinthian bronze, and sold them to a Jew Emesa "(the Syrian city of Homs).