February 20, 2007	Tuesday	Safar 2, 1428

ZURICH: What are the greatest architectural achievements in history? Rome’s Colosseum? The Great Wall of China? The Pyramids of Giza?

That’s what millions of people are asking themselves as they vote in the largest global poll ever conducted, an attempt to recast ancient history by ranking the top architectural marvels as the “new” seven wonders of the world.

Besides the vast scale of the poll -- itself a wonder -- the new list may reveal what the wired voters in today’s global village view differently from the ancient Greeks, who laid out the original seven wonders more than two thousand years ago.

About 200,000 people are voting online or firing off mobile phone text messages every day, organisers estimate -- and the final total of ballots cast before the result is announced on July 7 could top 100 million.

“This is the first ever global vote. It’s never been done before. Culture is one of the few things that would be relevant to a global vote,” said Tia Viering, spokeswoman for the Zurich-based New 7 Wonders campaign.

“It is going up quickly and we expect it to go up even more quickly. The faster it goes, the more people find out about it,” Viering said.

She said Europe was lagging in the voting, but there was lots of interest in the United States, China, India and Latin America.

The first list of the most impressive monuments of the ancient world was compiled by the Greeks and included sites around the Mediterranean such as the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

The only wonder to have survived to the present day is the Pyramids of Giza, and that inspired Swiss-Canadian adventurer Bernard Weber, who decided the start of a new millennium was the right moment to find a consensus “on the last 2,000 years of human achievement”.

The number of votes probably makes it the largest poll ever undertaken on a global basis, said pollster John Zogby, but that did not make it a scientific exercise.

“At the very least the pollster has to create some kind of sample. However that doesn’t reduce the fact that this is an interesting and intriguing project,” said Zogby, who runs polling organisation Zogby International.

There is no mechanism to prevent people voting more than once, provided they have the desire to do so by setting up more than one Internet or mobile phone profile.—Reuters