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In 653, an Arab force led by Muslim general Muawiyah I captured Rhodes, and, according to the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, the statue was melted down and sold to a Jewish merchant in Edessa who loaded the bronze onto 900 camels. We also see large rock massifs, by the weight of which the artist stabilized by erecting it. The Naturalis Historia is one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire to the present day and claims to cover the entire field of ancient knowledge. Pliny wrote the encyclopedia Naturalis Historia, which has become an editorial model for encyclopedias. Pliny the Elder was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, commander of the navy and army of the early Roman Empire, and friend of Emperor Vespasian. Strabo is best known for his work Geographica, which presented a descriptive history of people and places from different parts of the world known during his lifetime. Strabo was a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian who lived in Asia Minor during the period of transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. The remains were briefly described by Strabo, in his work Geography.
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Ptolemy III offered to pay for the reconstruction of the statue, but the oracle of Delphi made the Rhodians fear that they had offended Helios and they refused to rebuild it. The statue broke at the knees and fell to the ground. Archaeologist Ursula Vedder has proposed that the sculpture was cast in large sections using traditional Greek methods and that Philo's account is "not compatible with the archaeologically proven situation in ancient Greece".Īrtist's conception of the knowledge book of the Grolier company of 1911. Modern engineers have put forward a plausible hypothesis for the construction of the statue, based on the technology of the time, and the accounts of Philo and Pliny, who saw and described the ruins. Much of the iron and bronze was reforged from the various weapons left behind by Demetrius' army, and the abandoned second siege tower may have been used for scaffolding around the lower levels during construction. In 304 BC, an auxiliary force of ships sent by Ptolemy arrived, and Demetrius and his army left the siege, leaving most of their siege equipment behind.
