Perhaps the world’s best known monument is Stonehenge, located in the English county of Wiltshire. It’s composed of earthworks surrounding a circular setting of large standing stones and is believed to have been built around 2500 BC but has been revised and remodeled over a period of more than 1400 years. Though theories and speculation abound, no one knows what the original purpose of the prehistoric monument was and it remains one of the earth’s greatest mysteries.
Machu Picchu is the most well-preserved city of the Inca empire, hidden in the Peruvian Andes high on a steep mountain with a flattened top, a location that helped it escape notice by Spanish conquistadors. It was forgotten for centuries by the outside world, and re-discovered by archeologist Hiram Bingham in 1911. The stones of this city fit together so tightly a knife blade can’t fit between them. Modern research suggests that Machu Picchu was built around 1450 CE as a retreat by and for the Inca ruler Pachacuti and that it was actually relatively small by Inca standards.
Great Zimbabwe Ruins
Few people know that the modern-day African country of Zimbabwe was actually named after stone ruins that lie all over the countryside. The ‘Great Zimbabwe Ruins’ are some of the oldest and largest structures located in Southern Africa and at its peak, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe are estimated to have housed as many as 18,000 inhabitants. The Great Zimbabwe ruins span 1,800 acres and were constructed starting in the 11th century without the use for mortar. No one knows for sure why the site was eventually abandoned.
Easter Island
Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui or Isla de Pascua, is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, most famous for its monumental statues which were created by the Rapanui people. The statues, called moai, were part of the ancestral worship of the island’s settlers and were carved between 1250 and 1500 CE. The heaviest moai erected weighs 86 tons, illustrating how great a feat it was for the Rapanui to have created and moved them. Nearly half of all remaining moai are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were moved to stone platforms around the island’s perimeter.
Coral Castle, Monument to Lost Love
How did one five-foot-tall, 100-pound man build an intricate rock garden using pieces of coral that weighed several tons each? Coral Castle, in Homestead, Florida, was Latvian immigrant Ed Leedskalnin’s monument to a lost love. He began building it in 1923 after being jilted by his fiance in Latvia just days before their wedding, and dedicated his life to completing it. Construction continued even after his death in 1951. Experts are puzzled as to how Leedskalnin, who had only a fourth-grade education, could have built Coral Castle by himself. One engineer claims that even Albert Einstein couldn’t figure it out.
Peru’s Chavín de Huantar Ruins
While not as famous as the ruins at Machu Picchu, the Chavín de Huantar Ruins of Peru are also a fascinating World Heritage Site containing ruins and artifacts originally constructed by the Chavín, a pre-Inca culture, around 900 BC. The site served as a gathering place for people in the area to assemble and worship. It’s unclear why the Chavín culture disappeared, though some believe that the Chavín de Huantar ruins offer clues as to why some civilizations vanish. Most theories about the Chavín center on difficult environmental conditions including earthquakes, while others involve power struggles with other civilizations in the same region.
“Off the shores of Alexandria, the city of Alexander the Great, lie what are believed to be the ruins of the royal quarters of Cleopatra. It is believed that earthquakes over 1,500 years ago were responsible for casting this into the sea, along with artifacts, statues and other parts of Cleopatra’s palace. The city of Alexandria even plans to offer underwater tours of this wonder.”
The Mysterious Stones of Baalbek
The largest Roman temple ever constructed stands in ruins not in Greece or Rome, but in Baalbek, Lebanon. The temple was destroyed under Byzantine Emperor Theodosius but 6 of its original 54 columns still stand. Despite their beauty, the ruins at Baalbek have rarely been visited during recent decades due to war, but luckily this majestic archeological site has escaped harm. No one knows what made this site so special to the Romans, prompting them to quarry, move and assemble so many stone blocks.
Lake Michigan Stonehenge
A group of researchers using sonar to look for shipwrecks at the bottom of Lake Michigan got quite a surprise when they found what appears to be an ancient Stonehenge-like structure 40 feet beneath the surface of the water. Some of the stones are arranged in a circle and one appears to show carvings of a mastodon. The formation could be as much as 10,000 years old, which is coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the area. Michigan already has petroglyph sites and standing stones.
Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse
On a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia stands one of the world’s most bizarre and mysterious monuments. But it wasn’t created during ancient times. Known as the ‘Georgia Guidestones’, this stone structure of five 16-feet-tall, 20-ton slabs of polished granite is inscribed in eight languages – including Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Hindi and Swahili - with instructions for dazed post-apocalyptic survivors attempting to rebuild civilization. It’s oriented to track the sun’s east-west migration year-round, and has holes that allow gazers to locate the North Star. The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned by an anonymous group, whose identity remains a mystery.
Three Buried Ancient Megalithic Stone Circles
In southern Turkey, just north of the border with Syria, are three megalithic stone circles several thousand years older than the “first” stone circle built at Stonehenge. Strangely, these ancient stone circles were built by a hunter-gatherer society. It had previously been believed that the workforce required to construct a megalithic stone circle couldn’t be organized until human society reached the village stage of development. The three stone circles at Göbekli Tepe were deliberately buried for reasons unknown. Some people believe that Göbekli Tepe and the surrounding region were the historical basis behind the biblical Garden of Eden.
Underwater Ruins in Japan
On the southern coast of Yonaguni, Japan, lie submerged ruins estimated to be around 8,000 years old. Though some people believed that it was carved by geographic phenomena, it’s now confirmed to be man-made as the intricate stairways, carvings and right angles suggest. It was discovered in 1995 by a sport diver who strayed too far off the Okinawa shore with a camera in hand.
PALENQUE (Mexico): one of Mayan's most exquisite cities
Palenque is an ancient Maya city near the Usumacinta River in the Mexican state of Chiapas. It contains some of the finest architecture, sculpture, roof comb and bas-relief carvings the Maya produced. The ancient Mayan city of Palenque, with its superb jungle setting and exquisite architecture and decoration, is one of the marvels of Mexico. First occupied around 100 BC, it flourished from about 600 to 700 AD, and what a glorious century that was. The city rose to prominence under Pakal, a club-footed king who reigned from 615 to 683 AD, represented by hieroglyphs of sun and shield, he is also referred to as Sun Shield or White Macaw. During Pakal's reign, many plazas and buildings, including the superlative Templo de las Inscripciones (his Mausoleum), were constructed in Palenque, characterized by very fine stucco bas-reliefs.
Pakal's son Chan-Bahlum II continued Palenque's political and economic expansion and the development of its art and architecture and presided over the construction of the Grupo de la Cruz temples, placing sizable narrative stone stelae within each. One can see the influence of Palenque's architecture in the Mayan city of Tikal. The rival Mayan city of Toniná's hostility was perhaps the major factor in Palenque's precipitous decline after Chan-Bahlum II's death in 702. Sources speak of a devastating Toniná attack on Palenque in 730. After the 10th century Palenque was largely abandoned. In an area that receives the heaviest rainfall in Mexico, the ruins lay undiscovered until the 18th century. Frans Blom, an early-to-mid-20th century investigator remarked: 'The first visit to Palenque is immensely impressive. When one has lived there for some time this ruined city becomes an obsession.'
MEMPHIS (Egypt): ancient capital of Egypt
Memphis was the ancient capital of the first nome of Lower Egypt, and of the Old Kingdom of Egypt from its foundation until around 2200 BC and later for shorter periods during the New Kingdom, and an administrative centre throughout ancient history. Its Ancient Egyptian name was Ineb Hedj ("The White Walls"). The name "Memphis" is the Greek deformation of the Egyptian name of Pepi I's (6th dynasty) pyramid, Men-nefer, which became Menfe in Coptic. According to Herodotus, the city was founded around 3100 BC by Menes, who united the two kingdoms of Egypt.
Estimates of population size differ widely. According to T. Chandlerm, Memphis had some 30,000 inhabitants and was by far the largest settlement worldwide from the time of its foundation until around 2250 BC and from 1557 to 1400 BC. Memphis reached a peak of prestige under the 6th Dynasty as a centre of the cult of Ptah. It declined briefly after the 18th Dynasty with the rise of Thebes and was revived under the Persian satraps before falling firmly into second place following the foundation of Alexandria. Under the Roman Empire, Alexandria remained the most important city and Memphis remained the second city of Egypt until the establishment of Fustat (or Fostat) in 641. It was then largely abandoned and became a source of stone for the surrounding settlements. It was still an imposing set of ruins in the 12th century but soon became little more than an expanse of low ruins and scattered stone. The remains of the temple of Ptah and of Apis have been uncovered at the site as well as a few statues, including two four-metre ones in alabaster of Ramesses II. The Saqqara necropolis is close to Memphis.
MACHU PICCHU (Peru): The Lost City of the Incas
Machu Picchu ("Old Peak") is a pre-Columbian Inca city located at 2,430 m (7,970 ft) altitude on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley in Peru, near Cusco. Machu Picchu is probably the most familiar symbol of the Inca Empire. It is often referred to as "The Lost City of the Incas". The site was designated as a World Heritage Site in 1983 when it was described as "an absolute masterpiece of architecture and a unique testimony to the Inca civilization".
Machu Picchu was constructed around 1450, at the height of the Inca empire, and was abandoned less than 100 years later, as the empire collapsed under Spanish conquest. Although the citadel is located only about 50 miles from Cusco, the Inca capital, it was never found and destroyed by the Spanish, as were many other Inca sites. Over the centuries, the surrounding jungle grew to enshroud the site, and few knew of its existence. In 1911, Yale historian and explorer Hiram Bingham brought the "lost" city to the world's attention. Bingham and others hypothesized that the citadel was the traditional birthplace of the Inca people or the spiritual center of the "virgins of the sun," while curators of a recent exhibit have speculated that Machu Picchu was a royal retreat.
EPHESUS (Turkey): one of the most important cities of early Christianity
Ephesus was an Ionian Greek city in ancient Anatolia, founded by colonists from Athens in the 10th century BC. The city was located in Ionia, where the Cayster River (Küçük Menderes) flows into the Aegean Sea, and was part of the Panionian League. Ephesus hosted one of the seven churches of Asia, addressed in the Book of Revelation (2:1–7). It is also the site of a large Gladiator graveyard.
Ephesus was an important center for early Christianity. Paul used it as a base. He became embroiled in a dispute with artisans, whose livelihood depended on the Temple of Artemis there (Acts 19:23–41), and wrote 1 Corinthians from Ephesus. Later Paul wrote to the Christian community at Ephesus.
ANGKOR (Cambodia): Contains the world's largest religious monument
Angkor served as the seat of the Khmer empire that flourished from approximately the 9th century to the 15th century A.D. More precisely, the Angkorian period may be defined as the period from 802 A.D., when the Khmer Hindu monarch Jayavarman II declared himself the "universal monarch" and "god-king" of Cambodia, until 1431 A.D., when Thai invaders sacked the Khmer capital, causing its population to migrate south to the area of Phnom Penh.
The ruins of Angkor are located amid forests and farmland to the north of the Great Lake (Tonle Sap) and south of the Kulen Hills, near modern day Siem Reap (13°24'N, 103°51'E), and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The temples of the Angkor area number over one thousand, ranging in scale from nondescript piles of brick rubble scattered through rice fields to the magnificentAngkor Wat, said to be the world's largest single religious monument. Many of the temples at Angkor have been restored, and together they comprise the most significant site of Khmer architecture. Visitor numbers approach one million annually.
In 2007 an international team of researchers using satellite photographs and other modern techniques concluded that Angkor had been the largest preindustrial city in the world with an urban sprawl of 1,150 square miles. The closest rival to Angkor, the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, was roughly 50 square miles in total size.
VIJAYANAGAR (India): capital of one of the largest Hindu empires
Vijayanagar, the capital of one of the largest Hindu empires ever, was founded by Sangama dynasty princes Harihara and Bukka in 1336. Its power peaked under Krishnadevaraya (1509-29), when it controlled nearly the whole of the peninsula south of the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers. Comparable to Delhi in the 14th century, the city, with an estimated population of half a million, covered 33 sq km and was surrounded by several concentric lines of fortification. Its wealth derived from the control of spice trade and the cotton industry. Its busy bazaars, described by travelers such as Portuguese Nunez and Paes, were centers of international commerce. The empire collapsed after the battle of Talikota in 1565 when the city was ransacked by the confederacy of Deccan sultans (Bidar, Bijapur, Golconda, Ahmednagar and Berar), thus opening up southern India for Muslim conquest.
The ruins are set in a strange and beautiful boulder strewn landscape with an almost magical quality. The undisputed highlight, the 16th century Vittala Temple, is a World Heritage Monument. Started by Krishnadevaraya, it was never finished or consecrated; its incredible sculptural work is the pinnacle of Vijayanagar art. The outer pillars are known as musical pillars as they reverberate when tapped. An ornate stone chariot in the temple courtyard containing an image of Garuda.
SANCHI (India): the best-preserved group of Buddhist monuments
A UNESCO world heritage site in central India near the Betwa River, Sanchi is on a flat-topped sandstone hill, 90m above the countryside, and stands the best-preserved group of Buddhist monuments in India. Most noteworthy is the Great Stupa, discovered in 1818. It was probably begun by the emperor Asoka in the mid-3rd century BCE and later enlarged. Solid throughout, it is enclosed by a massive stone railing pierced by four gateways on which are elaborate carvings depicting the life of the Buddha.
The stupa itself consists of a base bearing a hemispherical dome representing the dome of heaven enclosing the Earth; it is surmounted by a squared rail unit, the world mountain, from which rises a mast to symbolize the cosmic axis. The mast bears umbrellas that represent the various heavens. Other remains include several smaller stupas, an assembly hall (caitya), an Asokan pillar with inscription, and several monasteries (4th–11th cent. CE). Several relic baskets and more than 400 epigraphical records have also been discovered.
POMPEII (Italy): buried by the volcano
Along with Herculaneum, this Roman city near modern Naples was destroyed and completely buried during a catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning two days on 24 August year 79. The volcano collapsed higher roof-lines and buried Pompeii under many meters of ash and pumice, and it was lost for nearly 1700 years before its accidental rediscovery in 1748.
Since then, its excavation has provided an extraordinarily detailed insight into the life of a city at the height of the Roman Empire. Today, it is one of the most popular tourist attractions of Italy and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
PETRA: stone structures carved into rocks
Petra ("Rock") lies on the slope of Mount Hor (Jordan) in a basin among the mountains which form the eastern flank of Arabah (Wadi Araba), the large valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. It is famous for having many stone structures carved into the rock. The long-hidden site was revealed to the Western world by the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812. It was famously described as "a rose-red city half as old as time" in a Newdigate prize-winning sonnet by John William Burgon. Burgon had not actually visited Petra, which remained accessible only to Europeans accompanied by local guides with armed escorts until after World War I. The site was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985 when it was described as "one of the most precious cultural properties of man's cultural heritage."
Enclosed by towering rocks and watered by a perennial stream, Petra not only possessed the advantages of a fortress but controlled the main commercial routes which passed through it to Gaza in the west, to Bosra and Damascus in the north, to Aqaba and Leuce Come on the Red Sea, and across the desert to the Persian Gulf. Petra's decline came rapidly under Roman rule, in large part due to the revision of sea-based trade routes. In 363 an earthquake destroyed buildings and crippled the vital water management system. The ruins of Petra were an object of curiosity in the Middle Ages and were visited by the Sultan Baibars of Egypt towards the close of the 13th century. The first European to describe them was Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812.
PALMYRA (Syria): the Bride of the Desert
Palmyra was in the ancient times an important city of central Syria. It has long been a vital caravan city for travellers crossing the Syrian desert and was known as the Bride of the Desert. The earliest documented mention of the city by its pre-Semitic name Tadmor, Tadmur or Tudmur, is recorded in Babylonian tablets found in Mari. Though the ancient site fell into disuse after the 16th century, it is still known as Tadmor and there is a small newer settlement next to the ruins of the same name.
In the mid-first century, Palmyra, a wealthy and elegant city located along the caravan routes linking Persia with the Mediterranean ports of Roman Syria and Phoenicia, came under Roman control. During the following period of great prosperity, the Arab citizens of Palmyra adopted customs and modes of dress from both the Iranian Parthian world to the east and the Graeco-Roman west. Tadmor is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Second Book of Chronicles 8:4) as a desert city built by the King Solomon of Judea, the son of David. Palmyra was made part of the Roman province of Syria during the reign of Tiberius (14–37). It steadily grew in importance as a trade route linking Persia, India, China, and the Roman empire. In 634 the first Muslims arrived in Palmyra. The city was taken by the Muslim Arabs under Khalid ibn Walid in 636. In the 6th century, Fakhreddine al Maany castle was built on top of a mountain overlooking the oasis. The castle was surrounded by a moat, with access only available through a drawbridge. The city of Palmyra was kept intact. After year 800, people started abandoning the city.
