Petra may have been settled as far back as 312 BC, through to the fourth century, when it fell under the rule of the Roman Empire. Previously, it was a hub for silk trading. When the Roman Empire took over, the city's population began to decline until it eventually became deserted and forgotten by most of the world.
Machu Picchu is a pre-Columbian Inca site situated on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley in Peru. Often referred to as the "Lost City of the Incas", it is perhaps the most familiar icon of the Inca World.
Petra is sometimes called the 'Lost City'. In spite of its being such an important city in antiquity, after the 14th century AD, Petra was completely lost to the western world.
The Lost City is a series of impressive towering sandstones in Litchfield National Park. The vast array of these rock formations gives the impression of ancient city ruins. Access to The Lost City is via a 4WD access road from Litchfield Park Road between Buley Rockhole and Tolmer Falls.
Some cities are so top-secret they can't even be found on a map. Others are padlocked, hidden in the forest, or buried deep underground. From Poland's 800-year-old Wieliczka Salt Mines to America's WWII mystery towns, SPYSCAPE explores some of the world's most intriguing secret cities.
Jericho, Palestine
A small city with a population of 20,000 people, Jericho, which is located in Palestine, is believed to be the oldest city in the world. Indeed, some of the earliest archeological evidence from the area dates back 11,000 years.
Bodie, California: This former Wild West boomtown had a population of 10,000 people in the late 1870s, but Bodie's popularity shrank over the years and it was eventually abandoned. Pyramiden, Norway: Once a successful coal mining settlement, Pyramiden has been out of use since 1998.
Çatalhöyük. Modern-day south-central Turkey was once home to one of the world's oldest cities: Çatalhöyük. It was part of an extensive civilization that flourished between 9,000 and 7,000 years ago and then suddenly disappeared.
Ushuaia (/uːˈʃwaɪ.ə/ oo-SHWY-ə, Spanish: [uˈswaja]), is the capital of Tierra del Fuego, Antártida e Islas del Atlántico Sur Province, Argentina. With a population of nearly 80,000 and a location below the 54th parallel south latitude, Ushuaia claims the title of world's southernmost city.
The city of Mahendraparvata was never lost — just hidden. For centuries, the ancient city has been buried under a dense canopy in the Cambodian jungle. It was one of the first capitals of the Khmer Empire, which controlled large swaths of Southeast Asia from the ninth to 15th centuries.
In 1948, Senator Hiram Bingham published the best-selling Lost City of the Incas, chronicling his accidental discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911.
Today, many have been found, and that's worth celebrating, but there are still many cities out there that may forever remain hidden in the eyes of the world. Some have been lost for so long that doubt has begun to set in. Perhaps these cities were legends and not real. No one knows.
The Lost City of Heracleion, Egypt
Now nearly three miles off the coast of Egypt, the city was rediscovered by a French archeologist in 2000. Its submerged ruins include eerie 16-foot high statues, tiny sarcophagi holding animal sacrifices, and a huge temple. More at Atlas Obscura.
Developed initially as a residence for people working in the undersea coal mines in 1887, Hashima Island quickly expanded into an island of concrete high-rise buildings housing over 5,000 people.
Ghost Town Village (formerly "Ghost Town in the Sky at Ghost Mountain Park") is an abandoned Wild West-themed amusement park in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, United States whose status is currently, as of March 2023, the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.
Ghost Cities are vacant neighborhoods and sometimes whole cities that were built but were never inhabited. Their existence is a physical manifestation of Chinese overdevelopment in real estate and the dependence on housing as an investment strategy.
Göbekli Tepe is the oldest significant site for humans to ever have been discovered, beaten in age only by a stone wall in Greece. Its age is only made more impressive by the sheer complexity of the site. Excavations have been ongoing for the last 24 years and experts say they could continue for decades more.
North of Western Australia is the Pilbara, a sizable, arid area with a sparse population. The Pilbara area of Western Australia is home to the fossilized remains of the planet's earliest life forms. Because of the discoveries made in the area, it has been declared the oldest place on Earth.
At 12,000 years old, Gobekli Tepe predated humanity's oldest known civilizations. Its megalithic temples were cut from rock millennia before the 4,500-year-old pyramids in Egypt, 5,000-year-old Stonehenge in England, or 7,000-year-old Nabta Playa, the oldest known astronomical site.
The Lost City of Atlantis, first mentioned by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato more than 2,300 years ago, is known as one of the oldest and greatest mysteries of the world. According to Plato, the utopian island kingdom existed some 9,000 years before his time and mysteriously disappeared one day.
Mesopotamia and Egypt evolved over time, conquerors and conquered, merging with other cultures. But the Indus Valley civilisation, the largest of the three, collapsed and vanished. No one knows why.
Reports of the discovery of the ruins of Atlantis have surfaced countless times since Mavor's attempt, but no conclusive evidence of its existence has ever emerged.