Buried by time, these lost cities were consigned to the realm of legend — until their locations were finally rediscovered.
Cities are large. Even in the ancient world, they served as homes to thousands of people. They are quite unlike a screw or car keys, which are often easy to lose. Yet, the world contains many lost cities — lost to time, lost to history, or simply abandoned and forgotten about only to be discovered centuries later by explorers or archaeologists who happen across them.
Today, many of these formerly lost cities are invaluable archaeological sites and UNESCO World Heritage Sites, where researchers can carry out investigations into ancient society and visitors can marvel at the architectural magnificence of long gone societies.
Some have even inspired the arts — The Strokes, for example, have a song title “Machu Picchu,” and Olivia Newton John starred in the 1980 film Xanadu — but for most people, these ancient cities represent the living history of some of our earliest ancestors.
Check out nine of the world’s most famous lost cities below.
Machu Picchu: The Wonder Of The Peruvian Andes
Diego Grandi/Alamy Stock PhotoMachu Picchu, the 15th-century city nestled in the Peruvian Andes.
Machu Picchu sits at an elevation of 7,710 feet in the Peruvian Andes and stretches across around 80,000 acres.
Although the history of the city was once lost to time, most experts now believe the mountaintop city was built around the 1420s on the orders of Incan Emperor Pachacuti. It comprised approximately 200 structures including palaces, temples aligned with the Sun’s movements, residential areas, a royal tomb, and thousands of stone steps. Surrounded by stepped agricultural terraces irrigated through a complex aqueduct system, the Incas remarkably built it all without wheels or iron and steel tools.
Researchers believe Pachacuti had Machu Picchu built as a royal retreat where he and his court would relax, hunt, and feast, though some theorize it functioned as a sacred pilgrimage site for ancestor worship.
After about 100 years of occupation, the city was abandoned in the 16th century during the Spanish conquest. It’s unclear why, exactly, though. It’s possible the inhabitants had been fleeing in fear of invaders or that they were perhaps wiped out by European diseases like smallpox. Either way, the Spanish conquistadors never actually found the city, as it was hidden between two Andean peaks.
Wikimedia CommonsExplorer Hiram Bingham with a local guide en route to Machu Picchu.
In fact, Machu Picchu remained largely unknown to the wider world until American explorer Hiram Bingham published a piece about it in National Geographic in 1913 after a local farmer named Melchor Arteaga guided him to the ruins for 50 cents. Of course, Bingham’s “rediscovery” is somewhat disputed, given that locals clearly knew about the site long before his arrival.
Still, Bingham deserves some credit for his article and accompanying photographs putting Machu Picchu on the international stage.
Machu Picchu was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, and remains the pinnacle of Incan architecture. Even today, more than 100 years after Bingham’s announcement, the ruins continue to fascinate researchers exploring their history, as new information sheds even greater light on the lost history of this great city.
