Top 10 Most Greatest Lost Cities In the World 

Since ancient times, human colonies have transformed into large towns and cities. During the course of history, various empires built magnificent cities of their times. They became crucial centers of trade, administration, religion, economy, and culture. Like humans, cities born, they grow, and they eventually die. Those cities lost their importance with the passing centuries and eventually forgotten. These cities known as lost cities. A lost city is a city that became uninhabited and its location has been forgotten. Once thriving, hundreds of cities across the world now lie in ruins. Lost cities like Petra, Angkor and the infamous Machu Picchu offer a glimpse into the past. Their ruins are the only remain of their glorious existence back in the day.

Throughout time, the search for the lost cities fascinated explorers and

adventurers. These explorers ventured into distant corners of world to find such places. Some of the cities were found accidentally or intentionally discovered by some wanderer or historian. Some rediscovered by archaeological surveys. Most lost cities are found, and have been studied extensively by scientists. These cities into terminal decline and cities were abandoned. There are several factors that contribute to the decline a cities. There are many reasons like war, natural disasters, climate change and the loss of important trading partners that contributes in decline of city.

Scroll through to see all Top 10 Most Greatest Lost Cities In the World :-

10. Babylon :-

Babylonia was a state in ancient

Mesopotamia. The town of Babylon was located along the Euphrates River in present-day Iraq, about 50 miles south of Baghdad. It was founded around 2300 B.C. by the ancient Akkadian-speaking people of southern Mesopotamia. Babylonia was established as a small port town on the Euphrates River. It thrived into one of the largest cities of the ancient world under the rule of Hammurabi. Today ruins of the city of Babylon are located in present-day Iraq. During this period, Babylon became a city of beautiful and lavish buildings. The Babylonians built many statues and artworks.

The city’s wealth changed dramatically, when its sixth king, Hammurabi, ascended the throne. Hammurabi turned Babylon into a rich, powerful and influential city. Babylon became a major military power under Amorite king Hammurabi, who ruled from 1792 to 1750 B.C. Babylonia, however, was short-lived. The empire collapsed after Hammurabi’s death and reverted to a small kingdom for several centuries. In 539 B.C., the legendary

Persian king Cyrus the Great defeated Babylon. The fall of Babylon was complete when the empire came under Persian control.

9. Thebes :-

The city dates to the reign of Amenhotep III, one of Egypt's most powerful pharaohs, who ruled from 1391 to 1353 BC. It is one of the most significant Egyptian archaeological finds of the past century. Amenhotep, the ninth king of the 18th Dynasty, ruled during the second half of the New Kingdom period. He began the construction of various huge temples and public buildings.

The city continued to be used by pharaohs Ay and Tutankhamun. Akhenaten shifted the capital away from the city of Thebes, setting up a new capital on the site of what is now the city of Amarna. Shifting the capital may have been more of a political strategy on the part of the new pharaoh to break the stranglehold of Amun's priests on Egyptian culture and society.

8. Troy :-

Troy is a city that survived for over 4.000 years and is known as the centre of ancient civilizations. Troy is located in Hisarlik village near Canakkale city where the remains of this once-great city can be visited. The site of Troy was enlisted in the World Cultural Heritage List in 1998 and it is considered a site of “Outstanding Universal Value”. Troy appeared in Greek and Latin literature. The tale of Troy was first written down in the epic poem The Iliad, written by the Greek author Homer in about 750 BC.

The site of Troy was first established in the Early Bronze Age, from around 3000 BC. The original village of Troy was tiny, but it thrived and grew. During the Bronze age, Troy had great power because of its strategic location between Europe and Asia. About 1750–1180 BC, a larger citadel was enclosed behind impressive sloping walls, parts of which can still be seen at the site today, and there is evidence of a large settlement in the lower town.

For many years people assumed that it was the city illustrated only in the tales and never existed until it was first found in the 19th century. Finally, in 1870, a man named Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the remains of a large Bronze Age city buried beneath a huge mound in northwest Turkey. Among the ruins, he found a pile of gold treasures that he was confident was the gold of Priam, the King of Troy. In total, the city covers 75 acres and is large enough for 10,000 inhabitants. It’s big enough to be Troy.

The city was said to have controlled the Troad until the Trojan War led to its destruction at the hands of the Greeks. After the Trojan War, the city was abandoned from 1100 to 700 BC. Around 700 BC Greek immigrants began to inhabit the Troas region, Troy was resettled and called Ilion. 

7. Persepolis :-

Persepolis was the capital of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, located about 50 km northeast of Shīrāz in the Fars region of southwestern Iran. Founded by Darius I around 515BC, the city stood like a beautiful statue to the vast power of Persian kings. The site lies near the confluence of the Pulvār and Kor rivers. Persepolis was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1979. Persepolis's name comes from the Greek Perses-polis means Persian City. But the Persians recognized it as Parsa.

Construction started in 518 BCE under Darius I who wanted to shift the capital from Pasargadae. The complex of Persepolis is raised high on a walled platform, with five palaces of varying size, and grand entrances. The complex was formed of nine structures including The Apadana, Trachara, Council Hall, Treasury, Throne Hall, the palace of Xerxes I, Harem of Xerxes I, Gate of All Nations and Tomb of the King. Of these nine, the first three were built by Darius I and the rest were completed by his successors, Xerxes I and grandson Artaxerxes I. There were also residential buildings and a marketplace.

Persepolis was the seat of government of the Achaemenid Empire. Persepolis wasn’t one of the largest cities in Persia. It was only occupied seasonally. Persepolis was a summer royal residence. It was constructed primarily to be a showplace and centre for the receptions and festivals of the kings and their empire. The city's remote location kept it a secret from the outside world. It became the safest city in the Persian Empire for storing art, artefacts, archives, and keeping the royal treasury. Persepolis is among the world’s greatest archaeological sites. The city is renowned for its architecture, urban planning, construction technology, and art.

Persepolis was looted and destroyed by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE, who burned it and looted its vast treasures. Some months later his troops eradicated much of the city. Persepolis does not seem to have been restored from this

destruction and the city slowly declined in prestige, never again becoming a major seat of power. The ruins lay buried until the 17th century CE when they were recognized as the once-great royal city of Persepolis. The excavation did not begin until 1931 CE, with work proceeding since.

6. Pompeii :-

One of the most popular visitor attractions in Italy is the ruins of the ancient lost city of Pompeii. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in1997, Pompeii attracts over two million visitors every year. The history of Pompeii goes back much further than the first century. It was established sometime around the 7th to 6th century BC. Pompeii was a popular holiday place for Romans. The town had a population of about twenty thousand inhabitants, with a large amphitheatre, a canal system to supply water, several public baths, and many private homes and businesses.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius occurred on August 24th, 79AD. This report of the eruption was recorded by Pliny the Younger. The results of the eruption were devastating. Pompeii and the nearby town of Herculaneum were both completely covered up by up to 25 meters of hot volcanic ash in a matter of hours. Mount Vesuvius buried the whole town of twenty thousand people with burning lava and merciless violence. The volcano made the region uninhabitable for centuries. Buried for centuries, Pompeii remained undisturbed and invisible. In 1748 Pompeii was rediscovered, when a group of explorers looking for ancient artefacts reached Campania and excavations of the area started. Over the last 250 years, excavations have unearthed about two-thirds of the city. 

The coverings of volcanic ash conserved Pompeii, giving us the chance to feel a common day in Roman Empire. Pompeii was buried for such a long time and not subjected to the corrosion forces of air and water. The ashes had behaved as a marvellous preservative. Because of ash, magnificent temples, villas, one-room workshops, graves of lower-class citizens, and modest take-out restaurants are conserved for centuries. Even skeletons were frozen right where they’d fallen.

5. Teotihuacan :-

Teotihuacan is an ancient Mesoamerican city located 50 km northeast of modern-day Mexico City. Teotihuacan’s origins, history, and culture largely remain a mystery. The city is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. Teotihuacan was founded as early as 400 B.C. and became the most powerful and influential city in the region. Teotihuacan was one of the largest urban centres in the ancient world. Some historians have speculated that its founders were refugees moved north by the eruption of a volcano. Others have assumed that they were Totonacs, a tribe from the east. The current name, Teotihuacan, was given to it by the Aztecs centuries after it was abandoned in the 7th century when they found the city in the 1400s. Teotihuacan means the place where the gods were created.

The city reached its peak around 100 years later. At its height, Teotihuacan encompassed an urban core of about 20 square km. An impressive city of 125,000-200,000 inhabitants, Teotihuacan was the first large metropolis in the Americas. Teotihuacan is one of the most remarkable ancient sites in all of Central and North America. Its scale exceeds the cities built by the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations. Teotihuacan was the sixth-largest city in the world at the time. It comprises around 2,000 single-story apartment compounds, as well as various large, important structures, that include The Pyramid of the Moon, the Pyramid of the Sun, the Ciudadela, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, plazas, temples and palaces of nobles and priests. The citizens of the city held rituals and ceremonies at the pyramids. The main buildings of Teotihuacan are linked by the Avenue of the Dead. The Avenue of the Dead is a 40-meter wide, 2.4-km long road. The city was laid out geometrically and features a complex network of irrigation canals drawn from the nearby San Juan River. Different ethnic groups from all over Mesoamerica once inhabited the city.

For hundreds of years, Teotihuacan would have been placing wealth, power and culture in the Mesoamerican world. The city’s rulers held sway over a large part of the Valley of Mexico, and its impact was felt throughout central Mexico and as far south as Guatemala. The art and architecture styles of Teotihuacan are found widely throughout Mesoamerica. Teotihuacan was a wealthy trade metropolis in its prime. The city exported fine obsidian tools, including spear and dart heads. Teotihuacan had a monopoly on obsidian trade. Ceramics, such as pottery and other luxury goods, were also exported. Trade of other goods like cocoa, cotton and exotic feathers and shells was happed in city

Teotihuacan was inhabited until around 700 A.D. No one knows why the citizens vacated the city. Around 600 CE, the major buildings of Teotihuacan were deliberately destroyed by fire, and artworks and religious sculptures were destroyed. Some say this happened because of an uprising from the poor against the ruling elite. Other theories say that the invaders sacked and burned it, this happened because of civil war swept through Teotihuacán, clashes with other local city-states, the fire was caused by a visiting army and a large-scale migration occurred. In A.D. 750, nearly 700 years after it was established, the city of Teotihuacán was abandoned. All inhabitants of the city abandoned their homes to join neighbouring cultures or return to their ancestral homes. However, even with the decline, the city was never truly lost. Centuries later, when the Aztecs came to view Teotihuacan. They would even hold rituals in its centre. The Aztecs made regular pilgrimages to the site in later periods.

4. Angkor :-

Mahendraparvata was one of the first capitals in the Khmer Empire, a Hindu-Buddhist regime of Southeast Asia that lasted from the 9th to 15th centuries AD. The city was located on the Phnom Kulen plateau, about 48 kilometres north of Siem Reap. Mahendraparvata is sometimes called the lost city of Cambodia. Today Cambodia is famous for these buildings. The largest, Angkor Wat, constructed around 1150, remains the biggest religious complex on Earth, covering an area four times larger than Vatican City. It draws two million tourists a year and takes pride in the place on Cambodia's flag.

The city was hidden for centuries deep in the Cambodian jungle. In April 1858 a young French explorer, Henri Mouhot, sailed from London to south-east Asia. For the next three years, he travelled widely, discovering exotic jungles. His journal was published in 1863, two years after he died of fever in Laos. In the journal, Mouhot introduced the world to the lost medieval city of Angkor in Cambodia and its vast temples consumed by the jungles. It took over a century to rediscover an ancient city of the Khmer Empire. The lost city of Angkor gradually began to reappear, street by street. But even then significant blanks remained.

At its peak, in the late 12th Century, Angkor was a bustling metropolis covering 1,000 sq km. The city was famous for its temples, complicated engineering, large-scale hydraulic engineering and complex network of large canals and reservoirs. The utilization of this water gave food security and made the ruling empire enormously rich. For the next three centuries, they accumulated their wealth into the greatest concentration of temples on Earth.

The end of the medieval period saw dramatic changes in climate across south-east Asia. At the same time that Angkor's temple-building programme peaked, its vital hydraulic network was falling into disrepair. The destructive flood damaged the city's crucial water network. Angkor saw a spiral of decline from which it never recovered. In the 15th Century, the Khmer kings abandoned their city and shifted to the coast. They built a new city, Phnom Penh, the present-day capital of Cambodia. Life in Angkor slowly ebbed away.

3. Petra :-

Petra is located in present-day Jordan, about 150 miles south of Amman, the capital of Jordan. The ancient city was built in the 12th century during the Byzantine period. Petra was carved into the dusty mountains. It is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Petra was one of the first metropolitan cities ever constructed. The name Petra is derived from the Greek word ‘Petros’ meaning rock and since 1985, the ancient city of Petra. Petra has also been cited as the “Rose City” because of the colour of the stones utilized in its buildings. It was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.

Petra was rediscovered in modern times by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812. He interpreted the ruins of the once-great city in chronicles of his travels. With the western world now aware of petra's presence, petra soon lured the interest of architects and scholars, among others. Starting in 1929, British archaeologists Agnes Conway and George Horsfield, as well as scholars Tawfiq Canaan and Ditlef Nielsen, launched a formal project to excavate and survey Petra.

Petra is set in over 2,500 acres. The engineering of Petra is extraordinary. The doorways, archways, and buildings are extremely tall. Today, more than 500 buildings withstand in the ancient city of Petra. The buildings of Petra are built of stone that has been carved by hand out of the sandstone cliffs using chisels. Inside the rocks, the city sprawls out across tunnels and whole rooms materialize inside of the sandstone, their walls marbled with the red and orange colours of the natural rock. Petra had a system of conduits, dams and cisterns to harvest, store and distribute rainwater for year-round use.

After a series of severe earthquakes around 1BC and 8AD, Petra was invaded, half the city was eradicated and most of these ancient treasures were stolen from the site. The Greek Empire attacked the city in 312 B.C. In 400 A.D., when an earthquake destroyed many of its buildings. After the eighth century, when Petra was largely abandoned as a trading centre, its stone structures were used for shelter by nomadic shepherds for several centuries. Over 200 years have passed since the rediscovery of the Lost City, but still, archaeologists are discovering the sheer magnitude of the site.

2. Machu Picchu :-

Machu Picchu is an old Inca site located in the mountains of Peru. It is about 80 kilometres northwest of Cusco at the 2,430-meter level of Machu Picchu Mountain. The site is often dubbed the Lost City of the Incas. Machu Picchu is the most preserved remains of the once-mighty Inca Empire. Machu Picchu was built around 1450 as a home for the emperor Pachacuti, of the Incas. Today, Machu Picchu attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists from around the world. In 1983 it became a  UNESCO World Heritage site. Machu Picchu is assumed to have been a royal estate or sacred religious site for Inca leaders.

The Spanish conquistadors started conquering the Inca in the 16 century. But they did not encounter the historic site of Machu Picchu. The site eluded the plundering and destruction of the Spanish conquistadores. The lost city of the Incas remained untouched for many years. The American historian and explorer Hiram Bingham discovered the site in 1911. Its presence was known only to people living in the region.

The site totals a huge 116 miles when including the forest and wilderness park. The site spreads over an impressive 5-mile distance. It features more than 3,000 stone steps that link its many different levels. The site is located on top of a high hill with steep slopes dropping to the valleys below. The mountains are often covered in fog and clouds. Altogether, about 200 buildings can be found at Machu Picchu. Structures are built of stone. These stones and rocks were fitted together without the use of mortar. The rocks fit together so tightly, a knife blade cannot be inserted between them.

The ruins of Machu Picchu are divided into two sections. There’s an urban section and an agricultural section, an upper old town where the temples are located and a lower new town where warehouses can be found. In the agricultural area, Inca cultivated their crops. In the urban

section, there are the Temple of the Sun and other buildings where people lived. Also, there is the Temple of the Three Windows, which is a large hall that stands near the Main Plaza and has three large windows on one wall. It was abandoned an estimated 100 years after its construction because of a smallpox epidemic.

1. Tikal :-

Tikal is a complex of Mayan ruins located in the middle of the rainforests in northern Guatemala. The Mayan people lived there between the 6th century BC and the 10th century AD. Between 200 and 900AD, the city began to thrive culturally and politically, surpassing the city of El Mirador in terms of power and influence within the Mayan empire. But it suddenly collapsed, along with much of the rest of the Classic Period Maya civilisation, shortly thereafter. Tical was one of the largest ancient cities in the Americas, with a population of perhaps over 100,000 inhabitants. In 1979, Tikal has named a UNESCO World Heritage site.

In the ninth century A.D., after hundreds of years of prosperity and expansion. For unknown reasons, like other Maya cities and complexes, the Maya abandoned the great city of Tikal. The reasons for the Mayan empire’s breakdown may seem to be a mystery. There are lots of different theories about why the city was abandoned. The region fell victim to a series of droughts and outbreaks of epidemic diseases. The combination of drought and climate change led to creating conflict, resource overexploitation of the surrounding landscape and ecological collapse. While some historians believe overpopulation and the resulting deforestation led to crop failure, people chose to abandon the city. Decades of continual warfare and shortage of food is also one of the reasons. Soon, the city was largely vacant, small groups continued to live at the site for almost a century, but the area was completely abandoned in the 10th century.

The architecture of the ancient city is constructed mainly from limestone. There may have been 48 square miles covered with structures. Historians believe that the more than 3,000 structures on the site and the discovered remains of the city are spread over 6 square miles. There are several different structures including great pyramids, temples, plazas, palaces, administrative buildings and palaces. The structures that are still in evidence include The Great Plaza, or the main square of the city, The Central Acropolis, The Mundo Perdido, The Temple of Ah Cacao or Temple of the Great Jaguar, Temple I. The main structures are in the centre of the city and cover 1 square mile. The main structures of the site are five pyramidal temples and three large complexes. The complexes are composed of many buildings. Smaller structures that probably served as houses are located at the periphery of the site. Tikal’s residents built reservoirs to collect and store water.