Oh, well, really good mapmakers play the whole game through turn by turn and use worldbuilder to found the wonders on the correct turns, found/destroy barbarian and AI cities, force AI to meet (or not meet) each other and the player on particular turns, etc. You can even prevent the AI from building wonders by using regular autosaves and going back a few turns before they built a wonder and taking away the techs that allow the wonder to be built. All that is time consuming, but it can be done...
Wow! That is a lot of dedication however and I'm not sure if we can do that considering we do have a time limit on this game

Can we focus espionage on Ramesses and steal Iron Working from him?
Distance penalty may make things a lot more difficult.