These were made famous by Antipater of Sidon a century BCE.
In the Ars setting, would they still exist in some Regionne? (presumably Faerie)
Technically in the 13th century two of them mostly exist.
Spoiler:
Summary
the ghost Enperor Nero might be looking for a colossus...
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Not the pyramids, because they clearly exist in the real world, although there may be regiones hidden within some of the more mystical tombs. The others certainly could exist, much in the same way that the Tower of Babel may exist in a regio as suggested in Hermetic Projects p32-33.
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The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, there's questions on how true the stories about the gardens were. That really leads itself to a faerie regio.
The Statue of Zeus and Temple of Artemis, one could say there destruction was done by those fae pretenders with the temerity to falsely call themselves Gods. It was where they ran, when the true God spread his influence. Collapsing the structures in the real world strengthened the regio.
I personally am not that religious, just channeling my character from the game.
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Areas that were used ritually for long periods of time become genuinely magical, so the Temple of Artemis might be in a magic regio even if Artemis is a faerie goddess.
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CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED!
(This is a reference to a book no one's heard of* that everyone should have read.)
*Make me happy and prove me wrong.
So, to answer the OP: The original pyramids are indeed in something like a regio.
Because Carthaginian pyramids? I don't remember hearing about those- the pyramids (at least the one known of in the middle ages) were in Egypt. Now had you been talking about Sumerian ziggurats you might have had a point, but in my experience players get really frustrated when you bring Sameria into the game, especially since the civilization fell before the world began by official AM timelines.
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Yeah, the whole 'Biblical timeline' for creation is annoying nonsense. The choice to make one favored religion the 'official truth' in the rules seems like a mistake. I just treat it as absolutely true only in strong Dominion (and Infernal, of course) auras & regios. Everywhere else the world works like the world actually works.
Oh, I remember this from childhood. Asterix & Obelix are in Rome and a senator starts his speech with "As Cato said, Carthago delenda est." The next panel is a politician saying "but I was going to use Carthago delenda est!"
Yes, definitely Asterix & Obelix. Nobody reads Cato (unless they're Ars Magica characters when they read his books to get the xp in Artes Liberales (rhetoric)).
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I think Carthage has pyramids in Ash, by Mary Gentle, so that's my guess.
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Ash! It seems there are at least 3 of us.
"Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse!" is (both in antiquity and from then on through all of western culture) a famous conclusion of speeches held by Marcus Porcius Cato Senior in the senate. These speeches were collected and many were and are known - but they did not form books by Cato Senior.
Your "biblical timeline" was roughly - and with lots of variations even inside each religion or sect - agreed among muslims, jews and christians. It is hard to find scholars in 13th century Europe or the Arab world disagreeing with it.
First, since I'll be going so far off topic, here's what I would do:
the Great Pyramid of Giza - I'd leave this where it is.
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon - I'd have this be gone.
the Statue of Zeus at Olympia - faerie regio
the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus - faerie regio
the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus - Still there
the Colossus of Rhodes - strangely still there - there are some non-Hermetic mages on Rhodes involved.
and the Lighthouse of Alexandria - still there but hidden. Mages again. Maybe the same ones.
Curious. In the small mining village I come from, a collection of his speeches is the sole topic of conversation.
Yay!
I very much keep in mind that something believed in medieval Europe might be true in Mythic Europe, but not necessarily.
As part of the setting, I like the way the Dominion suppresses magic in towns, and I like "God will smite you," to discourage the Order simply taking over or, say, turning Bremen into a giant turtle. Otherwise, I do my best to avoid the subject. Partially out of vague sensitivity, partially because establishing the true nature of God etc for a saga isn't something I want to do without a LOT of thought, and partially because I certainly don't want to follow in WW's footsteps in any way.
The dates are disputed, but I thought Nocturnus of Tremere and Olivia Viridis of Bonisagius established the existence of an ancient organization of mages in Sumer that might even be linked to our Order.
EDIT: I think Olivia Viridis is translating another set of tablets.
I love 1632 by Eric Flint.
And more on topic; the "Sumeria, older than the 'Biblical Timeline'" problem only exists if one assumes God can't create things backwards as well as forwards, a sentence that sounds like nonsense, but then again, how many books are written with an established backstory?
I'm also not huge on the "This one faith grouping is 100% right about how the world works" BUT accepting it as canon while also theoretically having things that exist before they were supposed to has a cool "What was there before the universe" factor. The frightful idea that God wiped the board clean before starting this creation, like The Flood but 100% effective. The sort of thing that some Faeries will tell you they remember seeing, because they're Just That Old, and it's hard to figure out if it's true or not.
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This sort of reminds me of one game where the group found the sole witness to a crime, who was a 5 yar old girl. They had trouble establishing the timeline of events because whenever the asked he when something happened it was "yesterday", even things they knew had occurred months ago.
The idea of millennia old magical and fairy creatures just answering everything "oh it was forever ago, like 2000 years" whether they are talking about Sumeria, the flood, or dinosaurs.
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I'd be curious exactly what part of the timeline is crazy...last I heard not one part had been refuted with anything resembling certainty.
How about the fact that at the time the bible ascribes to the creation of the universe there were at least 5 active civilizations of note.
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"I'd be curious exactly what part of the timeline is crazy...last I heard not one part had been refuted with anything resembling certainty."
Not one part refuted -- hell, all of it has been refuted. The bible is NOT a history text. Picking out just one is like trying to pick a particular snowflake out of all the blizzards that ever happened. But let's take an easy one -- the Noachian Deluge, the flood that killed every living thing & reduced the entire human population down to just eight people in (supposedly) 2348 or 2350 BC. This is right smack in the middle of the 6th Dynasty of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, and none of their writings mention their entire civilization being covered with murderous floodwater for more than 40 days.
There are others; like the Hittite empire barely gets a mention, despite being a vast & might empire -- which, unfortunately for them appearing in scripture, happened between the times the Old and New Testaments got written. The folks who built Gobleki Tepe apparently finished their work about 6000 years before the Abrahamic god bothered to get started with the whole 'creation' thing.
Like I said; in my games all the biblical stuff is only true in Divine & Infernal auras -- places where god is in charge. Everywhere else, history is actual history. If other pantheons were represented in the game, then their mythologies would be true inside auras where they hold sway.
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