Temple of Artemis at Ephesus belongs to the years before the Common Era — dated here to c. 550 BCE at Ephesus, Anatolia. The date is a scholarly centre of gravity, not a foundation-stone timestamp.
Antipater of Sidon said the temple outshone Olympus: a forest of more than a hundred marble columns on a vast stylobate.
How it was made
Croesus of Lydia helped fund an Archaic rebuild; after Herostratus burned it in 356 BCE, a Hellenistic temple rose on the same marshy ground.
Why it still counts as a wonder
It sits on the canonical Greek list of seven wonders of the ancient world — a tourist poster already in Hellenistic poetry.
A single later column stands in the Selçuk fields. The wonder is measured now in foundations and in Pliny’s column count.
On dating
BCE in this series means years before the traditional birth of Christ, counted backward. A monument listed as c. 550 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 3 of 100 in The Trend Ledger’s illustrated desk on world wonders raised before the Common Era.