Ten Lost Cities That Turned Out to Be Real

For centuries, Troy lived mainly in poetry. Homer's Iliad made it the most famous besieged city in literature, but by the 1800s, many readers treated it as half myth. The hard question was not whether a Troy had existed somewhere, but whether anything real lay behind the story and where it was.

The answer was a mound called Hisarlik, near the mouth of the Dardanelles in northwest Turkey. Frank Calvert, a British expatriate whose family owned part of the mound, was convinced it held Troy and dug test trenches, but he lacked money to go further. The wealthy German businessman Heinrich Schliemann began excavating in 1870. He found a city, and then another, and another: the mound holds layer upon layer of settlement covering some 4,000 years. Schliemann's methods were crude, and his workers destroyed a good deal of evidence. The gold hoard he called Priam's Treasure turned out to be roughly a thousand years too old for Homer's war.

Later archaeologists, including Carl Blegen in the 1930s, pointed to the layers known as Troy VI and VIIa as the likeliest candidates for the city of the legend. UNESCO listed the site in 1998.

On July 24, 1911, the Yale lecturer Hiram Bingham III climbed a steep ridge above Peru's Urubamba River and reached a cluster of Inca stone buildings and terraces draped in vegetation. His photographs, and an entire 1913 issue of National Geographic, turned Machu Picchu into the world's most famous lost city.

It was not lost to everyone. Bingham paid a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, to guide him, and the final stretch was led by a boy from one of the families living and farming among the ruins. A local farmer, Agustín Lizárraga, had written his name and the year 1902 on a wall there. The name Machu Picchu even appeared on a map from 1874. What Bingham did was introduce the site to the outside world, then excavate it and ship thousands of artifacts to Yale. Those collections were returned to Cusco in 2012 after years of pressure from Peru.

Bingham thought he had found Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Inca. He was wrong. Machu Picchu is now understood as a royal estate built in the fifteenth century, abandoned after the Spanish conquest and apparently never found by the Spanish. UNESCO listed it in 1983.

Imagine finding not just a lost city but a lost civilization. Mohenjo-daro, on the right bank of the Indus River in what is now Pakistan, was one of the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, built around 2500 BCE. Its streets met at right angles. Houses connected to covered drains. A large brick-lined pool now called the Great Bath may have been used for ritual washing.

Then it disappeared from history. By around 1700 BCE, the city had been abandoned, and its real name was forgotten. The name used today, usually translated from Sindhi as mound of the dead, came much later. People knew the mound was there, partly because a much later Buddhist stupa stood on top of it. What nobody suspected was how old the ruins beneath it were.

In 1919 and 1920, R. D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India visited the stupa and found signs of far greater antiquity. Large excavations followed in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with Harappa, about 400 miles (640 km) away, Mohenjo-daro revealed a sophisticated urban culture that had flourished alongside ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Its writing system has still not been deciphered. In 1980 it became the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in South Asia.

Pompeii was never a legend. Roman writers recorded its destruction, and educated Europeans knew roughly what had happened. What they did not know was exactly where it lay. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it buried the town under some 13 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) of ash and pumice, and over the centuries the landscape closed over it.

The traditional date of the disaster is August 24, but an inscription found in 2018 suggests the eruption may have come in October. In 1592, an engineer named Domenico Fontana dug a water channel straight through the buried town, hitting painted walls and inscriptions, but the find led nowhere. Digging began in earnest in 1748, but the ruins were only confirmed as Pompeii in 1763, when an inscription naming the town turned up.

In 1863, the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli began pouring plaster into the hollows left in the ash by victims' bodies, producing the haunting casts that still define the site. About 1,150 bodies have been recovered. Roughly two thirds of the city has now been excavated, and new digs keep turning up frescoes, streets and houses.

Petra is a city half built and half carved out of rose-colored cliffs in southern Jordan. It was the capital of the Nabataeans, Arab traders who grew rich on caravan routes carrying incense and spices, and it remained prosperous for a time after Rome annexed the kingdom in 106 CE. Visitors still enter the way caravans did, through the Siq, a narrow winding gorge that opens onto the towering facade known as the Treasury.

Shifting trade routes and a destructive earthquake in 363 CE sent the city into decline. Crusaders held the area in the 1100s, but after they left, Petra's location dropped out of European knowledge for more than six centuries.

Local people never forgot it. Bedouin families, including the Bdul, lived in its caves into the 1980s, when Jordan resettled them in a nearby village. In 1812, the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, fluent in Arabic and traveling in local dress, heard of ancient ruins near a shrine to the prophet Aaron. He persuaded a guide to take him there by saying he wished to sacrifice a goat at the tomb, and after a brief look around, he concluded he had reached Petra. UNESCO listed the site in 1985.

Just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis stands Monks Mound, a terraced earthen platform about 100 feet (30 meters) tall, the largest prehistoric earthwork in the Americas north of Mexico. It was the centerpiece of Cahokia, a Mississippian city that at its peak, around 1050 to 1150, may have held 10,000 to 20,000 people. About 120 mounds once rose across the site, along with plazas and great circles of wooden posts that archaeologists nicknamed Woodhenge.

Cahokia was never physically hidden. The mounds were plain to see. What went missing was credit. In the 1800s, many white Americans embraced the so-called Mound Builder myth, claiming a vanished race, perhaps lost Israelites or even Atlanteans, must have raised the earthworks because they refused to believe Native Americans had. Smithsonian research, especially a major 1894 report by Cyrus Thomas, helped dismantle that idea.

Meanwhile, much of the archaeological record was bulldozed. The neighboring mound group that gave St. Louis the nickname Mound City was largely leveled for fill, and highway construction in the 1950s damaged parts of Cahokia itself. Today the site is protected as a state historic site and, since 1982, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Descendant nations, including the Osage, work with archaeologists there.

High in the cloud forest of northern Colombia, a series of stone terraces and circular platforms climbs a mountain ridge. Outsiders call it Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City. It was likely the seat of the Tairona civilization and is thought to date to around 800 CE, roughly six centuries before Machu Picchu. It was probably abandoned in the 1500s, around the time the Spanish arrived.

Its modern story begins badly. In 1972, local treasure looters stumbled onto its stone steps, reportedly while hunting, and began stripping graves of gold and pottery. Colombian archaeologists reached the site in 1976 and spent years restoring it.

The descendants of the Tairona, including the Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankuamo peoples, say the city was never lost to them. They call it Teyuna, and some leaders have said they kept its location quiet precisely to protect it from looters. Today it is reached only by a hike of about 27 miles through rough terrain, finishing with a climb of more than 1,200 stone steps.

Sometimes a lost city turns up on page 16 of a web search. That is roughly how the archaeologist Luke Auld-Thomas described the start of his discovery. Wondering whether anyone had already flown a laser survey over a part of Campeche in southern Mexico, he found one: a 2013 lidar project made to measure carbon in the forest, not to look for ruins.

Lidar fires laser pulses from an aircraft and can strip away the tree canopy digitally to reveal the ground beneath. When Auld-Thomas and his colleagues processed the data, a dense Maya city emerged, with temple pyramids, enclosed plazas linked by a causeway, a ball court and a reservoir. Across the roughly 50 square miles (129 square kilometers) surveyed, they counted 6,674 structures. Their findings appeared in the journal Antiquity in October 2024. They named the city Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon.

The ruins sit beside the region's only highway, and people in a nearby town have farmed among the mounds for years, so the land itself was hardly unvisited. What no one had grasped was the scale of what lay under the trees. At the time of the announcement, the researchers stressed that archaeologists still needed to examine the city on the ground.