Lost city

From Free net encyclopedia

For other uses of the term Lost city, see Lost city (disambiguation).

In the popular imagination lost cities are real, prosperous, well-populated areas of human habitation that have fallen into terminal decline and been lost to history. Most lost cities are of ancient origins, and have been studied extensively by archaeologists. Abandoned urban sites of relatively recent origin are generally referred to as ghost towns.

Lost cities generally fall into three broad categories: those whose disappearance has been so complete that no knowledge of the city existed until the time of its rediscovery, those whose location has been lost but whose memory has been retained in the context of myths and legends, and those whose existence and location have always been known, but which are no longer inhabited.

The search for such lost cities by European adventurers in the Americas, Africa and in Southeast Asia from the 15th century onwards eventually led to the development of the science of archaeology.

There was an Arabian city named Ubar, which became abandoned with changes in trade routes, and its location was forgotten for some centuries: it was rediscovered in 1992 by satellite photography revealing the traces of the ancient tracks.

Other cities are lost with little or no clues to guide historians, such as the Colony of Roanoke. In August 1590, John White returned to the former English colony, which had housed 91 men (including White), 17 women (two of them pregnant) and 11 children when he left, to find it completely empty.

Malden Island, in the central Pacific, was deserted when first visited by Europeans in 1825, but ruined temples and the remains of other structures found on the island indicate that a small population of Polynesians had lived there for perhaps several generations some centuries earlier. Prolonged drought seems the most likely explanation for their demise. The ruins of another city, called Nan Madol, have been found on the Micronesian island of Ponape. In more recent times Port Royal, Jamaica sank into the Caribbean Sea after an earthquake.

Cities have been destroyed by natural disasters and rebuilt, again and again, but the destruction has occasionally been so complete that they were not rebuilt: the classic examples are the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried with many of their inhabitants in a catastrophic flow of volcanic ash from an eruption of Vesuvius. A lesser known example would be Akrotiri, on the island of Thera, where in 1967, under a blanket of ash, the remains of a Minoan city were discovered. The volcanic explosion on Thera was immense, and had disastrous effects on the Minoan civilisation. It has been suggested that Plato may have heard legends about this, and used them as the germ of his story of Atlantis.

Less dramatic examples of the destruction of cities by natural forces are those where the coastline has eroded away. Cities which have sunk into the sea include the one-time centre of the English wool-trade, at Dunwich, England, and the city of Rungholt in Germany which sunk into the North Sea in a great stormtide in 1362.

Cities are also often destroyed by wars. This is the case, for instance, with Troy and Carthage, though both of these were subsequently rebuilt. Various abandoned capitals in the Middle East are an interesting case: the Achaemenid capital at Persepolis was accidentally burnt by Alexander the Great, while after Babylon was abandoned, Ctesiphon became the capital of the new Parthian Empire, and was in turn passed over in favor of Baghdad (and later Samarra) for the site of the Abbasid capital—though all these cities are fairly close together.

Some of the cities which are considered lost are (or may be) places of legend such as the Arthurian Camelot, Russian Kitezh, Lyonesse or Atlantis, whilst some, such as Troy and Bjarmaland, having once been considered to be legendary, may actually have genuinely existed in the real world.

Alexandria in Egypt is an example of a large wealthy, world-renowned city that fell into almost complete insignificance, but which was never considered "lost".

1 Africa
2 Far East Asia
3 South and Southeast Asia
4 Central Asia
5 Western Asia
6 South America
- 6.1 Inca cities
- 6.2 Other
7 North America
8 Europe
9 Fictional Lost Cities
10 See also

Lost city

From Free net encyclopedia

Contents

Africa

Far East Asia

South and Southeast Asia

Central Asia

Western Asia

South America

Inca cities

Other

North America

Maya cities

Olmec cities

Lost cities in the United States

Lost cities in Canada

Others

Europe

Fictional Lost Cities

See also

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