Wonder Cities That Are No More (14 Pics)

Thebes (Egypt, c.3200BCE-1st Century BCE) What can we say about the extraordinary heart of ancient Egypt? Glittering centre of trade...

Thebes (Egypt, c.3200BCE-1st Century BCE) What can we say about the extraordinary heart of ancient Egypt? Glittering centre of trade, piled high with extraordinary architecture (including the incredible Temples of Karnak and Luxor), home to Egyptian faith and culture, it managed to survive the many tumults and ups and downs of ancient millenia. However after the Greeks conquered Egypt under Alexander the Great, Thebes became the centre of resistance, and after multiple uprisings was basically destroyed. By the time the Romans replaced the Greeks in the 1st Century AD, they were quartering troops in the ruined temples and reported that, while it was one of the biggest cities on earth two thousand years earlier, it was now a village amidst rubble.

Babylon (Mesopotamia, c.2000BCE-c.275BCE) Placed at the heart of the Fertile Crescent, Babylon managed to survive the waxing and waning of many empires, including the Persians and the fierce Assyrians, and occasionally managed to become the heart of a small empire. A centre of literature and trade, source of the incredible Code of Hammurabi, it had many ziggurats, or stepped towers, and the Ishtar Gate (now preserved in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin). Unfortunately, being made primarily of brick, the city didn’t age well. Worse, it was on the front lines of the wars between the successors of Alexander the Great, and when the Greeks decided on a new capital (called Seleucia), they filled it with people by moving everyone out of Babylon. By the time of the Muslim conquest a thousand years later, it was just a heap of bricks used for construction projects (including the building of ancient Baghdad).

Chersonesus (Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Genoese, c.2500BCE-1299AD) Founded by Greek colonists in Crimea, Chersonesus enjoyed a delicate existence on the fringes of what is now Ukraine, which in ancient times was home to successive waves of mounted tribesmen like the Sythians, Avars, Huns and many more. Amazingly, it had almost no military presence, which might have helped demonstrate that it wasn’t a threat to anyone. It was run along democratic lines, and was a centre of trade (though, as part of the Roman Empire, it was also used as a distant place to exile people). Unfortunately, while it weathered many generations of regional conflicts, it couldn’t survive the Mongols, who sacked and burned it to the ground.

Sirmium (Roman (modern Serbia), 1st-5th centuries) Located in a strategic spot on a tributary of the Danube, Sirmium began as a Roman Legion camp, then grew, over the centuries, into one of the biggest, richest cities on earth. Ten Roman emperors came from there (it even had an imperial palace), and its products were renowned across the empire. Studies of remains found on the site indicate it was astonishingly multicultural, with large numbers of people from across the empire and beyond. It was also home to an imperial mint. It was still a hell of a place with Atilla the Hun swept through and burned it to the ground. The East Roman Empire rebuilt it, but a fresh wave of mounted tribesmen, the Avars, burned it to the ground again, and this time it stayed down.

Fustat (Egypt, 641-1168) When the Muslims conquered Egypt in the 7th Century, they were only a tiny minority of the population, so rather than live in the heavily Christian city of Alexandria, they built a new city to be their capital. Over the years it became an incredibly wealthy trading city, with palaces, mansions, and markets where you could buy and sell goods from Europe, Africa, India, China, you name it. Then the ruler of the Crusader states in the nearby Holy Land decided to try conquering Egypt, and when his army approached Fustat he issued an ultimatum: surrender the city or he would burn it all -- and kill every man, woman and child. The Egyptian ruler chose a third option, evacuating everyone and burning the city himself. Ironically the crusaders were defeated anyway. A suburb of Fustat grew in its place, and the ruins of Fustat became Cairo’s garbage dump. It's now the site of slums so dangerous that little archeology takes place.

Angkor (Cambodia, 9th-15th centuries) Capital city of the Khmer Empire that once dominated Southeast Asia, Angkor was an amazing place. It’s most famous for the temple complex of Angkor Wat, which is within the city. Lost to the jungle until “rediscovered” by the French in the 19th Century, they were blown away by the scale and grandeur of Angkor Wat, and pre-covid it received at least a million tourists per year. However more recent studies have revealed just how immense the city of Angkor was, employing lakes, canals and agriculture on a vast scale -- indeed in terms of area it was by far the biggest city in the history of the world prior to the industrial revolution. Its greatness declined with the Khmer Empire, and ended up sacked and destroyed by invaders from what is now Thailand.

Turquoise Mountain (Afghanistan, 9th-13th centuries) More commonly known as Firozkoh, this was the capital of the Ghurid dynasty, which, for a time, dominated Central Asia. Little is known about the empire or the city, though it’s believed it had a thriving Jewish community. Being located along the Silk Road, it may well have been a thriving centre of trade and diplomacy. Its exact size and population are unknown, though. It was destroyed by the Mongols as they swept through the region, and whatever remained was pillaged by looters in the still-raging Afghan Civil War.

Cahokia (Mississippi Valley (USA), 7th century?-14th Century?) There’s still so much we don’t know about the Mississippian Culture, an aboriginal people who thrived and peaked centuries before Christopher Columbus was born. We know they had pottery, and built cities on man-made earthen mounds. Cahokia, located in what is now Illinois, may have had more people than contemporaneous London. Only recently is serious scholarship taking place regarding this and other lost cities in pre-Columbian America. Previously, Americans popularly believed that such huge settlements couldn’t possibly have been made by natives; theories included Lost Tribes of Israel, ancient Romans and refugees from Atlantis.

Dadu & Shangdu (Mongol Empire, 13th & 14th centuries) When Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, conquered China in the 1200s he began a building project to transform his capital city of Shangdu (in modern Inner Mongolia, China) from a nomadic encampment to the massive, glittering capital of an empire with global aspirations. Later, Shangdu (called Xanadu by many writers and Aussie-born songstresses) became the summer capital of the empire, while a new city called Dadu was built further south to become the winter capital. But when, after years of war, the Mongols fled China back to their old nomadic ways, the victorious Chinese burned the magnificent cities to the ground. Among the palaces and temples were houses of worship of foreign religions, including Islam and Christianity. Later, the Ming Dynasty built a new capital city on the ruins of Dadu, the heart of which still stands today as the Forbidden City of Beijing.

Great Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe, 11th-15th centuries) Another city that racists refused to believe for many years was built by actual non-white indigenous people, Great Zimbabwe was a capital of a great realm of the Shona people. With its trade centered on gold, ivory and other items, the city was connected to a vast trade network that extended as far as China and beyond. In particular, the Shona were incredibly talented stonemasons, building huge walls and other structures out of stone -- but without mortar. Over time, the kingdom became divided, the city was eclipsed and eventually it was abandoned.

Tikal (Mayan, 1st Century AD-c.9th Century AD) The Mayan civilization was a complicated one. Not really a unified empire, for most of its history it was a collection of city-states, some big, some small, some peaceful, some aggressive. Tikal was among the biggest of those cities, and at its peak was just massive, with a population that might have been as high as 120,000, making it as populous as Cordoba, Spain or Alexandria, Egypt. Eventually Tikal declined and was abandoned, no one really knows why, with its pyramids and plazas getting swallowed up by the jungle until the late 19th Century.

Tenochtitlan (Aztec Mexico, c.1325-1521) Capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan was by far the biggest city in the pre-Columbian Americas. Built on an island on a huge shallow lake (it shared the island with a twin city called Tlatelolco), it had incredible markets, advanced architecture including aqueducts and massive pyramids, and was quite defensible because it could only be approached by land via causeways. In terms of size it probably equalled the biggest on earth, like Paris and Venice. The arrival of the Spanish brought an end to the glittering metropolis. They besieged the city, starving it into submission, while nightmare plagues introduced to the “New World” amounted to an extinction-level event. The Spanish systematically dismantled the city and built a new one more to their liking, which still stands today as Mexico City.

Port Royal (Jamaica, 1494-1692) After the English conquered Jamaica from the Spanish in the 1600s, they faced a problem: the Spanish were still powerful and nearby, so the governor invited pirates to hang out in Port Royal, the unofficial capital of Jamaica, to bolster its defences. Those pirates were also given permission to raid the Spanish, and as a result the city became a rough and dangerous place -- you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. But on June 7, 1692, the party town was hit by a severe earthquake, the land underneath liquified, and most of the place just sank into the sea. Centuries later, archeologists examining the site found a pocket watch that allowed them to fix a time for the earthquake: 11:43 am.

Varosha (Cyprus, abandoned 1974) What a glorious resort city it was. Perfect beaches, friendly locals, and easily reached by air from Europe. As the popularity of the place grew, swanky hotels and apartment buildings started sprouting up, and it wasn’t at all unusual to encounter A-list celebrities prowling the beaches and boppin’ at the nightclubs (Liz Taylor and Richard Burton loved the place). But then in 1974 the Turks invaded the ethnically-mixed island of Cyprus, and Varosha was on the front line. Fearing a genocidal bloodbath, the locals fled in terror, and overnight the bustling holiday paradise became an abandoned ghost town. In recent years the Turks have started talking about fixing up the place and moving in settlers, but nothing has come of those plans (yet).