Lost Cities Rediscovered
The Idea of the Lost City
The phrase 'lost city' has always been more romantic than accurate. Cities do not truly vanish. They are abandoned, overgrown, buried by sand or jungle, or absorbed into later settlements — but the communities who lived nearby usually knew they were there. When Hiram Bingham III arrived at Machu Picchu in July 1911, guided by a local farmer named Melchor Arteaga, he was not discovering an unknown place. He was making a connection between the world of academic geography and a site that Quechua-speaking farmers had never entirely stopped visiting. The 'rediscovery' of lost cities is almost always, on closer inspection, a rediscovery by outsiders of knowledge that local people never lost.
This caveat matters, but it does not diminish the significance of what the great rediscoveries achieved for archaeology and for public understanding of the ancient world. The identification, survey and excavation of sites like Petra, Pompeii, Machu Picchu and the cities of the Mesopotamian plain reshaped our understanding of ancient civilisations entirely. These were places whose scale, sophistication and beauty had been entirely absent from the historical narrative — until someone looked.
Petra: The Rose-Red City
Petra, the Nabataean capital carved from rose-red sandstone in the mountains of what is now southern Jordan, was never a secret to the Bedouin communities who lived among its rock-cut facades. But it was unknown to European scholarship until Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, a Swiss explorer travelling in Arab disguise, persuaded a local guide to take him to a site he had heard described. On 22 August 1812 he entered Petra through the Siq, the narrow gorge that opens dramatically onto the Khazneh — the great temple facade carved into the cliff face — and became the first European to record it in modern times.
The Nabataeans built Petra as their capital from roughly the 4th century BC and maintained it through the Roman annexation of their kingdom in 106 AD. At its height around the 1st century BC to 1st century AD, the city may have housed tens of thousands of people, its wealth derived from control of overland trade routes carrying frankincense, spices and silk. The rock-cut architecture is spectacular, but Petra was also a built city of freestanding temples, colonnaded streets, a theatre seating several thousand, and sophisticated hydraulic systems that managed seasonal flash floods. UNESCO designated the site a World Heritage Site in 1985.
Machu Picchu: The Inca Citadel
Machu Picchu occupies a saddle in the Andes at around 2,430 metres altitude, between two sharp peaks above a bend in the Urubamba River in Peru. It was built by the Inca state, probably under the emperor Pachacuti, in the mid-15th century, and was apparently abandoned within roughly a century — possibly in connection with the Spanish conquest that began in 1532. The site was never entirely unknown to locals, but it was absent from the Spanish colonial record, which is why it survived without being dismantled for building material.
Bingham's 1911 expedition, sponsored by Yale University and the National Geographic Society, brought Machu Picchu to international attention and initiated the first systematic clearance and documentation of the site. What he found was remarkable: fine Inca ashlar stonework fitted without mortar, agricultural terraces cascading down the steep hillsides, a compact urban centre with temples, palaces, residential compounds and plazas. The Intihuatana stone — a carved ritual pillar apparently aligned to solar events — and the Temple of the Sun, whose trapezoidal windows frame astronomical alignments, demonstrate the site's ceremonial importance.
Machu Picchu became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 and receives well over a million visitors a year, generating both economic benefit and intense pressure on the site's fragile stonework and surrounding ecosystem.
Angkor: Rediscovery Through the Jungle
The temples of Angkor in northwestern Cambodia were built by the Khmer Empire between roughly the 9th and 15th centuries AD. Angkor Wat, begun under Suryavarman II in the early 12th century, is the largest religious monument ever built. When the Khmer capital shifted southward around the early 15th century and the site was no longer maintained, the jungle encroached on the outer buildings — though the main temples, including Angkor Wat itself, were never entirely abandoned by Buddhist monks.
European contact came through Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the site was known to French missionaries from the early 17th century. But it was Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist, whose accounts published after his death in 1868 brought Angkor to wide European attention. The French colonial administration subsequently undertook the first systematic mapping and conservation work, establishing the École française d'Extrême-Orient's long involvement with the site. UNESCO designated the Angkor complex a World Heritage Site in 1992, immediately after the end of Cambodia's civil war.
Troy: From Myth to Archaeology
Troy — Ilios or Ilion to the Greeks — was long treated as a literary invention. The Iliad and Odyssey described it, but without physical evidence no one could say where a city of that name had stood, or whether it had existed at all. The German businessman and self-taught archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann became convinced, through his reading of classical texts, that a mound called Hisarlik near the Aegean coast of northwestern Turkey was the site of Homer's Troy. He began excavating there in 1871.
Schliemann's methods were crude even by the standards of his day — he drove a great trench through the mound, destroying stratigraphy he did not recognise as significant — but he was right about the location. Hisarlik is layered with at least nine successive settlements spanning from roughly 3000 BC to around 500 AD. The level he identified as Homeric Troy, which he associated with a burnt destruction layer and a cache of gold objects he dramatically named 'Priam's Treasure', is now known to be considerably earlier than the period the Trojan War legend supposedly describes. The level most plausibly connected to the Homeric tradition — Troy VIIa, a fortified city destroyed by fire around 1190–1180 BC — was identified by later excavations. The site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Turkish national park.
Ur and the Cities of Mesopotamia
The cities of ancient Mesopotamia — Ur, Uruk, Babylon, Nineveh — were not entirely forgotten. Their names appeared in the Bible and in classical sources, and local people had names for the great mounds that dotted the plains of modern Iraq. But the civilisations that built them had been absent from direct human knowledge for two thousand years.
The first serious excavations at Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire, were undertaken by Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s, revealing the palace of Sennacherib and the library of Ashurbanipal, whose cuneiform tablets preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh and thousands of other texts. At Ur, Leonard Woolley's excavations between 1922 and 1934 uncovered the Royal Cemetery, a collection of pit graves from around 2600–2400 BC containing extraordinary gold, silver and lapis lazuli objects as well as evidence of mass human sacrifice — courtiers and soldiers buried alongside their rulers. The city's great ziggurat, a stepped temple platform dedicated to the moon god Nanna, survives in substantial form.
Çatalhöyük and the Prehistoric Surprise
Not all rediscoveries involved civilisations already known from historical sources. Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, excavated first by James Mellaart from 1961, revealed a Neolithic settlement occupied from roughly 7500 to 5700 BC — one of the world's earliest urban communities and certainly one of the largest known from that period. The settlement had no streets: its mud-brick houses were packed tightly together, their roofs serving as pathways, with residents entering through holes in the ceiling. Wall paintings, plaster reliefs, animal skulls mounted in domestic shrines, and burials under the floors made it clear that this was a complex society with a rich symbolic life, millennia before writing, metallurgy or any of the features usually associated with civilisation.
Çatalhöyük received UNESCO World Heritage status in 2012 and continues to be excavated and studied, its findings continuously revised as new evidence emerges.
Open the map to find the locations of these and hundreds of other rediscovered cities and sites, from the Andean peaks to the Mesopotamian plain.