A lost city is an old settlement that has been lost, deserted, and forgotten for so many years. It is a city that is not habitable by anyone and is not known to the world.
Scientists have rediscovered and studied the locations of such cities, which were previously forgotten. These cities are also known as ghost towns or ruins.
Cities with small settlements may be referred to as “abandoned villages.” The search for such lost cities by European explorers and adventurers in Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia from the 15th century onwards eventually led to the development of archeology.
Natural disasters, wars, economic outbreaks, and social mishaps are the most common causes of lost cities.
Types of Lost Cities
- Those whose memory was preserved in myth, legend, or historical records but whose location was lost or at least no longer widely recognized.
- Those where all knowledge of the city’s existence was forgotten before it was rediscovered
Let me walk you through some of the lost cities that have been rediscovered as a result of the development of acheologies and the application of modern technology and scientific research.
1. Vilcabamba
According to Wikipedia, the Incan capital city of Vilcabamba was destroyed and depopulated during the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1572. The Spanish did not rebuild the city, and the location went unrecorded and was forgotten until it was rediscovered through a detailed examination of period letters and documents.
It is often called the Lost City of the Incas. Vilcabamba means “sacred plain” in Quechua. The location of the Incan Vilcabamba was forgotten during the 17th century by the few remaining inhabitants of the region. In 1710, an explorer, Juan Arias Diaz, found Choquequirao, 70 kilometers (43 mi) southwest of Vilcabamba, and identified it as the Incan capital.
These discoveries testify that the Vilcabamba site was inhabited since ancient times and was almost certainly used as a center of commercial exchange between the people of the lowland jungle and the inhabitants of the Andean highlands.
2. Troy city
It was located in north-western Anatolia, now referred to as Turkey. As described in the Greek Epic Cycle, it was known for being the focus of the Trojan War.
After being repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, the city was abandoned in the Byzantine era. There are so many settlements that are lost, with little or no clue about the abandonment.
Melden Island in the central Pacific was abandoned and left until it was first visited by the Europeans in 1825. However, the remains of the temple and other structures on the island indicate that a population of Polynesians had once used that place as a habitation for several generations in the past.
3. Macchu Picchu
It is a pre-Columbian Inca site on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley in Peru. Mostly referred to as the “lost city of the Incas,” it is the most familiar icon of the Inca world.
Machu Picchu was built around 1450, at the height of the Inca Empire. It was abandoned just over 100 years later, in 1572, as a belated result of the Spanish conquest.
It is believed that most of its habitats died as a result of the smallpox breakout, which travelers spread. Melcher Arteagar led Hiram Bingham and an explorer in 1911 to Micchu Picchu, where they discovered only a small number of people living in the immediate valley.
This discovery was predicted by an explorer named Augustine Lizarraga in 1902.
4. Helike City
An ancient Greek city that sank at night during the winter in 373 BCE. The city is located two kilometers away from the Corinthians Gulf in Achaea, North Peloponnesos.
The city was known to be a legend in 2001 until it was rediscovered in the Helike Delta. Dora Katsonopoulou, a Greek archaeologist, launched the Helike Project to locate the site of the lost city in 1988.
In 1994, there was a collaboration with the University of Patras that led to a magnetometer survey in the midplane of the Delta. This revealed an outline of buried buildings
In 1995, this target was excavated and a large Roman building with standing walls was brought to light
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4. Mohenjo-daro-Sindh
It is an ancient city in Pakistan, built around 2500 BCE in the 26th century, and the biggest town in the ancient Indus Valley civilization. This city is known to be one of the earliest big cities in the world. It is also referred to as “Mound of the Dead Men.”
Mohenjo-daro-Sindh was one of the earliest settlements in the world and existed at the same time as the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. In Pakistan, it is one of the national icons of the distant past.
5. Caral-Barranca
It is located in the Supe Valley of Peru, near the current town of Caral. The city is an archaeological site in Peru where the remains of the main city of the Caral Civilization are found.
It is said to be 5,000 years old, and it is considered the oldest city in America and one of the oldest in the world. No other site has been found with such a diversity of amazing buildings or different ceremonial and administrative functions in the Americas as Caral.
The City of Caral Supe was habitable between the 20th and 26th centuries BC. It has been described as the oldest City in Central America, and this classification has been challenged by ancient sites nearby, such as Bandurria, Peru.
6. Calakmul-Campeche
This city is located deep in the jungle of the greater Peten Basin Region in the Mexican State of Campeche.
Calakmul was one of the largest and most powerful ancient cities ever uncovered by the Maya lowlands. It is 35 kilometers from the Guatemalan border.
The Maya archaeological site of Calakmul was the seat of the Snake Kingdom. Literally, meaning City of the Two Adjacent Pyramids, it had 2 very tall pyramids and hundreds of small structures.
7. Mesa Verde-Colorado
This city was established by Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. The park occupies 52,485 acres near the four corner regions of the American Southwest.
Mesa Verde National Park is an American national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The park protects some of the best-preserved Ancestral Puebloan Ancestral sites in the United States.
It is best known for the Cliff Palace, which is considered to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America.
8. Heracleion-Alexandria
This city, sometimes called Thonis Heracleion, was an ancient Egyptian port city located near the Canopic Mountains near the Nile.
Heracleion was built on some adjoining islands in the Nile Delta. It was built around the central temple and was intersected by canals with several harbors. Its wharves, temples, and tower houses were linked by ferries, bridges, and pontoons.
The city of Heracleion in Egypt was discovered for years around an enormous area of Abu Qir Bay. Franck Goddio, a French archaeologist, encountered the site submerged almost 6.5 km off the coast of Alexandria. The underwater ruins here include 64 ships, 700 anchors, 16-foot-long standing statues, and the remains of Amun-Gereb’s magnificent temple.
9. Göbekli Tepe-Örencik
This city is the oldest known temple in the world and predates the pottery of the Neolithic era. Many circular & oval structures were discovered atop a hill. It was proven that these structures weren’t used for domestic purposes but rather for religious purposes.
During the Southern Anatolia Region, the settlement was inhabited from c. 9500 to at least 8000 BCE. It was built with large circular structures that contain massive stone pillars—the world’s oldest known Megaliths.
The city was discovered in 1963. Schmidt recognized its significance in 1994 and began excavations there the following year.
No definitive purpose has been determined for the megalithic enclosures; Schmidt had described them as the “world’s first temples” that were intentionally and ritually backfilled.
10. Lagunita – Yucatán
The city was visited in the 1970s by the Swiss archaeologist Eric Von Euw, who documented the facade and other monuments with drawings. Lagunitais an ancient Maya city on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.
It was identified in August 2014, along with Tamchen, by Ivan Sprajc, associate professor at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and his team after they reviewed aerial photographs of the area.
Finally, I am glad to bring this article to an end. I believe you’ve learned a lot from these places and would love to visit there in the future. These amazing lost cities discovered are interesting places to visit, I must say. Watch the video below for more amazing discoveries