The Erechtheion belongs to the years before the Common Era — dated here to c. 421 BCE at Athens Acropolis. The date is a scholarly centre of gravity, not a foundation-stone timestamp.
An asymmetrical temple for Athena Polias, Poseidon, and ancestral kings, with a porch of Caryatids instead of columns.
How it was made
Ionic detail on a split-level rock. The building accepts the Acropolis’s sacred mess instead of flattening it.
Why it still counts as a wonder
It never needed a Greek list to be a wonder: the labour, the alignment, or the survival is enough.
One Caryatid is in London; five stand as copies on site. The wonder is architecture that refuses a simple rectangle.
On dating
BCE in this series means years before the traditional birth of Christ, counted backward. A monument listed as c. 421 BCE may have been founded earlier, rebuilt later, or famous only in one phase. Where ancient writers disagree — as they do for Babylon’s gardens — we say so.
This is story 53 of 100 in The Trend Ledger’s illustrated desk on world wonders raised before the Common Era.