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| The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria |
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Historical Notes
The Lighthouse was built around 280 BC under the reign of Ptolemy II. It is a fascinating structure, but I have strong doubts about the conventional designs of what it looked like.
That aside, the Lighthouse was legendary in its time, a spectacular monument as well as a working structure. Descriptions in my three references vary as to size, but the Pyre is probably between 350 and 400 feet high.
Sadly, it seems that many of the Wonders were destroyed by earthquakes, and so it was the the Great Pharos too was toppled by an earthquake in the 14th century AD. Its foundation was cleared and a fort now stands today where the Pharos once stood.
I've been asked this before, so I thought I'd better answer it once again for all to read. "Pharos" is not mis-spelled. It is not the plural of Pharaoh (the God-Kings of Egypt). Pharos is the name of the island the lighthouse was built on, and the word "pharos" soon came to be the root word for a lighthouse which many of the cultures of the Mediterranean world adopted.
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Construction Notes
I started building the Lighthouse from the top down, by putting a bowl about 400 feet in the air (at the Bryce scale of 2 Bryce Units to 1 foot) and then sort of filling in what was below it. My design is highly speculative, but I detailed it by imagining how it actually might work. So while the details themselves are speculation, I think this is an excellent example of how you might go about detailing a design by thinking through how it was really used by the people who lived or worked in it.
The tower is one pyramid primitive cut with about 67 negative cubes.
The large ramp has cubes at each corner and stretched, slanted cubes for each side segment of the ramp. The texture on them is the library material "Cracked Clay Pot" scaled smaller on X and Z axis but larger on the Y axis so the texture "streaks downward quite severely.
The boat created for this scene, as well as one of the hieroglyphics panels, are in my Download Page and the actual files can be downloaded and opened up to explore.
The trees were created using my Extra Tree technique as shown in the MDU Techniques page. Each tree is just four lattices.
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