

However, some locals would have known of its existence: over the centuries there have been many rumours about a lost city. It seems that the city has been gradually abandoned for many years, being abandoned to the jungle. Like other New World ruins, this site is thought to have been suddenly abandoned mysteriously, but research has shown that the land could not have accommodated a large number of people who were known to live there anyway. Due to the exceptional conservation status of the city, today we know many things about the grandeur of Tikal in the years of its peak.

The site was inhabited between the years 200-900. The Mayan city of Tikal was once the capital of a Mayan kingdom and one of the largest cities in the New World. The water supply system suggests that the inhabitants of the fortress had access to both cold water and hot water, with the warm water being provided by the volcano that caused them to perish. The discovery of the Akrotiri Fortress in 1967 revealed very well-presented frescoes, three-storey houses and a well-organized settlement. Today it is believed that the eruption of the volcano Thera, on the same island, in 1600 BC would have led to the collapse of the Minoan empire. One of Greece’s most famous archaeological sites, the Middle Bronze Age city of Akrotiri, reopened to the public today (April 11, 2012) after being closed for 7 years.Īlthough Knossos is a lost city, there is another, as interesting: Akrotiri, on the island of Santorini, was an outpost of the Cretans. With the rediscovery of the great palace of Knossos, the glory of Minoan civilization reborn. The whole civilization disappears from the knowledge of the people until the beginning of the 20th century. Written sources are very few, so we do not know what the name they had adopted for themselves. Minoan civilization in Crete owes its name to the legendary King Minos, who built the famous labyrinth. There is no reason why the site was abandoned, but the theory accepted by most specialists is that the first of the major droughts that affected the American continent in the centuries before the arrival of the Europeans destroyed agriculture throughout the region and the populations had to move. Looking for lost cattle, Richar Wetherill, Charles Mason, and an American from the Ute tribe found the old buildings protected by a rock wall. The site was inhabited only for a short period of time and was abandoned until 1300, remaining hidden until it was rediscovered in 1888. Huey/Alamy)(Bing United States)Īccording to dendrochronological analyzes, most of the buildings in this site were built around 1200. Bing Image Archive: Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado (© George H.H. The rock palace was built in this golden age of the Anasazi tribe. Communities pueblo exist today, but one of the most fruitful epochs in the history of this community is that of the ancient Anasazi society from the years 900-1200. The Pueblo Civilization, from the southwestern United States of America, take their name from the villages (pueblos in Spanish) that they build. Perhaps the city has gotten under the water as a result of rising water levels and earthquakes. Other sites were partially destroyed by further construction, but Pavlopetri remained uncontaminated. The fact that the city came under the waters provided archaeologists with unique information about their lives at that time. Pavlopetri was a pre-classical Greek town, founded in the Stone Age. But there are other cities that have had the fate of Atlantis, as the Greek philosopher presents us, namely cities swallowed by the waters. But we have no concrete evidence to support the idea that Atlantis Civilizations really existed outside Plato’s allegory. Pavlopetri, GreeceĪny discussion of “lost cities” will undoubtedly be mentioned in Atlantis. And maybe there are still other lost cities that we have not yet discovered. But they are not alone examples are countless. These 10 cities are some of the most famous lost cities.

But the cities have always fallen, abandoned for various reasons, and have remained unknown to history for centuries or even thousands of years. Today it seems absurd that something as big as a city can be lost. This trend was fed by the archaeological finds of important cities whose existence was not even known. Civilizations | People tend to imagine the past as grandiose, more spectacular than the present, and to think that the ancients had knowledge that we can not reach.
