Lost Cities

History Fix Podcast
Sep 27
43 min read

Episodes 131 & 132: How Ancient Metropolises Have Been Forgotten to Some and Rediscovered

"The Monastery" facade in Petra, Jordan photographed by Diego Delso in 2011

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Part 1: You guys know how I’m always going on about how we still basically live in ancient Athens? Well I’m back at it this week. No, Athens isn’t considered a lost city, I’ll get to the point soon. After last week’s Shakespeare episode I’ve been trying to think up other literary greats that were even halfway on his level and the first guy I thought of was Homer. Homer, like Shakespeare much later, was a bard, the original bard. He was a poet from ancient Greece who lived around the 700s BC most well known for writing the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey. And it’s the Iliad I’m interested in today. Because in this poem, Homer describes an ancient city, even ancient for Homer’s time, called Troy. The Iliad is like the prequel to the Odyssey and it’s all about the end of the Trojan War and the fall of this city called Troy. The Odyssey picks up after that with the main character Odysseus’ journey home after that war. But anyway, the Iliad and the Odyssey are, we think, works of fiction. Right, Homer was not a historian, he was a poet. So although most learned people were familiar with the story of Troy and the Trojan War, few believed it to be a real place until its crumbling almost 5,000 year old remains were discovered just beneath the soil in north-west Turkey. Let’s fix that.

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Did you notice the change there? I usually say lesser known true stories but recently I realized that the word surprising works better there, surprising true stories. Because while, yes, a lot of what I cover is lesser known, some of it isn’t. Some of it is super well known, it's just known wrong. So it’s not all lesser known, but it is all surprising. We are talking about lost cities today, cities that disappeared from our collective knowledge and then were rediscovered some time later. Rediscovered sometimes in air quotes as you will see because white people like to act like they discovered a lot of things that were never actually lost. We’re fixing that today too. And next week. I have four lost cities for you this week and four more lost cities for you next week, kind of like how I did the shipwrecks episodes so I hope you guys liked that cause here we go again but with cities this time. And, like with shipwrecks, we are somewhat going in a rough chronological order which brings us to the ancient city of Troy first. Troy is mega old.

One crazy thing about Troy is that people were super familiar with it because of the writings of Homer but they didn’t actually realize it was a real place, as I mentioned in the opener. Turns out it was. Something else you should know about Troy, it wasn’t in ancient Greece. I feel like people assume it was a Greek city because Homer was Greek and the Greeks were talking bout it all the time. It wasn’t. It was actually in ancient Anatolia which is basically Turkey today. The reason Homer talks about it is because, in the Iliad, the Greeks are fighting against the Anatolians who lived in the city of Troy. And the reason for the Trojan War, Homer explains is because this prince of Troy whom Homer calls Paris had kidnapped Helen, the wife of the wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus over in Greece, Sparta was part of Greece. And so Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon wage war to get Helen back. It’s all so confusing because she’s called Helen of Troy but she wasn’t from Troy she was from Greece. But she’s associated with the Trojan War and so that’s why Troy gets tacked onto her name. Now here’s the thing though, here’s where it gets really confusing. These were not real people. These are fictional characters. It becomes very confusing what in the Iliad is true and what is just mythology. Paris, Helen, Menelaus, Agamemnon - these were just fictional characters from myths, not real people. The Trojan War - a 10 year war between Greece and Troy, probably didn’t happen, not on that scale at least, historians agree. But Troy itself, the city itself, this super important city according to Homer - turned out to be very real.

So let’s talk about how it came to be rediscovered when everyone thought it was a fake place to begin with. This is like actually finding Atlantis you guys, a place that most agree never existed, episode 14. It is so crazy to look for a fictional city and actually find it. What we had gleaned is that, since ancient times, people had been journeying to an area in northwest Turkey called the Troad. This was like a pilgrimage that people would take to where they believed Troy once was to stand on the ground where heroes once walked. They called this place Ilion in Homer’s day, and it was just a small Greek town in the general area of where they believed the city of Troy once flourished. But of course to most it was all a myth right? This is like visiting Mount Olympus to be closer to Zeus or whatever. In the 17 and 1800s, people started getting really into Homer’s poems. Homer was trending and so, therefore, was Troy. This is also around the same time period we start to see people getting really involved in archaeology and the ancient world, right ancient Egypt is popping in the 1800s for sure. So some folks, who believed it was real, started to look for Troy. In the Iliad, sometimes Homer calls the city Troy and sometimes he calls it Ilion. He uses these terms interchangeably which is confusing but what we thought at the time was that Troy was a fictional place from a poem set well before Homer’s day and Ilion was the real place, this small Greek town, where people went to pilgrimage to this sort of symbolic Troy during Homer’s day to pay their respects to the heroes or whatever. And then, according to ancient records coming from the Hittite people who lived in that same region, their version of Troy was called Wilusa (wee-loo-sa). So Wilusa, Ilion, Troy, all the same, maybe real, maybe mythical city. People start to go looking for it. They mostly focus on large hills in this area, assuming that the city would have been built on a hill and now probably buried under said hill.

In 1801, a traveller named Edward Clarke visited one of these hills called Hissarlik (Hi-sar-lick) and, while he was there he found coins and inscriptions. He identified the place as Ilion, the small town where people used to pilgrimage to in Homer’s day. But what he, and the world, didn’t realize then is that Ilion and Troy were in fact the same place. They were always the same place. The people of Homer’s day taking those pilgrimages had gotten it right. They knew what they were doing after all. Another 70 years would go by though before we would realize the actual significance of Clarke’s find. Another man named Frank Calvert lived near this mound, this hill called Hissarlik (hi-sar-lik). He was an amateur archaeologist himself and was intrigued by the hill. So when a German businessman turned archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann visited the area in 1868, Calvert told him exactly where to look. He’s like “I mean if you’re looking for Troy you might want to try digging around that hill.” Pretty soon, in 1871, Schliemann finds an ancient city buried under the hill. He sees the artifacts from Homer’s day that Clarke had found back in 1801, remnants of what he called Ilion, that pilgrimage site. But then, beneath that, he finds artifacts that go back much much farther than that. He finds silver and gold vessels. He finds jewelry which he claims to be “the jewels of Helen.” And he announces to the world that he has found the ancient lost and questionably real city of Troy. The size and scale of the city, how ancient it is, the surrounding landscape, the location - all of it is checked out. All of it pointed to it being Homer’s Troy.

So excavations begin and they actually continue to this day. This is a really old city we’re talking about this thing was founded in like 3000 BC and it was in use to some extent for 4000 years. Now the later part of that was actually the Homer era pilgrims voyaging there right to pay respect at these ruins, but that’s still considered use. So they’ve separated the ruins of the city into these these layers and each layer sort of represents a different time period. So as we go down through the layers, we kind of get an idea of what Troy was like at different points in time and also what happened there, these significant shifts and events. If we go all the way down to the bottom, layer 1, Troy was just a small village on a hill. This would have been around 3,000 BC, the bronze age. Then on top of that we have layer 2 from 2,400ish BC. At this point a strong wall had been added around that village on the hill. At this point, Troy is still quite small but we see evidence that it was very prosperous. And that’s mostly because of its location. Back in those days, Troy was much closer to the water and near the Dardanelles strait. So it could trade by sea and by land and it was also right next to this sort of bottleneck that people had to pass through. That meant people were brought to Troy where they then paid for Trojan goods and services, ships waiting for the winds to turn so they could pass through the straight, that sort of thing. And so Troy, once just a village on a hill grew in size and prosperity over time.

Eventually in higher levels, we see the city expand outside of that fortress wall and start to sprawl down and away from the hill. The British Museum says quote “Trojan wealth was also built on the rich agricultural land in the surrounding area. In the Iliad, the Trojan prince Hector is 'tamer of horses' and horse-breeding may well have played a part in Troy's prosperity. Horse bones have been found there in quantity, as well as bones showing the rearing and domestication of other animals. Sheep farming must have been particularly important, as there is evidence for extensive textile production at Troy and these textiles may well have been exported. It is only over the past few decades that modern archaeology, including the study of ancient plant and animal remains, has transformed our understanding of all these aspects of life at ancient Troy,” end quote.

As for the Trojan War from Homer’s Iliad, there’s still not much proof that it happened, at least not on the scale he described, this 10 year long war. There are some tantalizing tidbits worth mentioning though. The Hittites, the people from that region who called Troy Wilusa (wee-loo-sa), in their ancient texts carved onto tablets they talk about fighting the Greeks for control of Wilusa. They also mention a leader named Alexandros which is an alternate name Homer uses for his character Paris in the Iliad. Daisy Dunn says in an article for BBC quote “Evidence of fire, and the discovery of a small number of arrowheads in the archaeological layer of Hisarlik (hi-sar-lick) that corresponds in date to the period of Homer’s Trojan War, may even hint at warfare,” end quote. So was this conflict between the Hittites and the Greeks over Wilusa (wee-loo-sa), the Hittite name for Troy, was this the Trojan War? Well if it was, it happened on a much smaller scale than what Homer described which a lot of people found disappointing. Aw man the war wasn’t as bad as he said was? Bummer. I wish way more people had died. Obviously joking.

We do know, according to the layers, according to the archaeological record, that Troy fell, probably not because of a great war like in the poem but it did fall into ruin in the late bronze age around 1180 BC. We don’t exactly know why it fell though. The British Museum says quote “Troy fell into ruin at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1180 BC, as did all the centres of power of the Mediterranean world, for reasons that are not completely understood. The site was never completely abandoned, and its ruins must have remained visible for some centuries, probably up to the time of Homer, if the poet lived in the late 8th or early 7th centuries BC as thought. It was not long after this that Troy, known as 'Ilion', became a place of pilgrimage because of its heroic associations,” end quote. And now I really want to know why all of the centers of power of the Mediterranean world fell into ruin at the end of the Bronze age… like, what? May have to revisit.

Let’s move on to our next lost city, one much less familiar, Mohenjo-Daro. What the heck was Mohenjo-Daro? Samantha Shea writes for BBC quote “In the dusty plains of present-day Sindh in southern Pakistan lie the remains of one of the world's most impressive ancient cities that most people have never heard of,” end quote. Cause while we knew, or thought we knew at least, a whole heck of a lot about Troy, we didn’t know anything about Mohenjo-Daro when it was discovered in 1911. Nothing. Who were these people living in this city of up to 40,000? They didn’t appear to have a leader, no king or queen. They didn’t seem to have any major temples. Their central building wasn’t a temple it was a bath, essentially a swimming pool. John Roach writes for National Geographic quote “A watertight pool called the Great Bath, perched on top of a mound of dirt and held in place with walls of baked brick, is the closest structure Mohenjo Daro has to a temple. Possehl, a National Geographic Explorer, says it suggests an ideology based on cleanliness. Wells were found throughout the city, and nearly every house contained a bathing area and drainage system,” end quote. So who were these mysterious germiphobes inhabiting this rather large city we knew nothing about so long ago? We’re talking built around 2,500 BC and fell to ruin by 1700 BC.

So just to clarify the setting here, the people who inhabited Mohenjo Daro were known as the Indus people because they lived in the Indus river valley and flourished because of the fertile soil there. They were also called the Harrappan civilization. They were living at the same time as ancient Egyptians and ancient Mesopotamians who we know a whole lot about but for some reason, after Mohenjo Daro fell to ruin in 1700ish BC, we just kind of forgot all about it. Forgot it existed. In 1911, archaeologists had caught wind, probably from local people, about some ancient brickwork discovered in this area of southern Pakistan. And that of course piqued their interest. But they got shut down initially. The Archaeological Survey of India, this government organization, determined immediately that the bricks had no significant historical value. They were like “yeah they’re just dumb bricks why do you guys care?” And this postponed excavations until the 1920s. Once they did finally start excavating, they were completely blown away by the complexity of this ancient city. According to Shea, not me, Samantha Shea who wrote the BBC article I read, quote “The remains they uncovered revealed a level of urbanisation not previously seen in history, with Unesco lauding Mohenjo-daro as the "best preserved" ruin of the Indus Valley,” end quote. Ha, take that Archaeological Survey of India, just some dumb bricks, please. Bricks are rarely dumb when you find them randomly in the middle of the desert, okay. No one is lugging bricks out into the desert for nothing. That’s not, that’s never just for fun. There’s a reason.

Shea and Roach both talk extensively about this sanitation system in Mohenjo-Daro, remember their, what would normally be a temple, their main temple was a big bath tub. These guys were all about cleanliness. And it shows in the infrastructure of their city. They had a city-wide sewer system for disposing of waste on the level of sophistication of a modern city. Most private residences had indoor toilets that drained into the sewers. We see this in Egypt and Mesopotamia around this time too but there private toilets were a luxury enjoyed by only the very rich. In Mohenjo-Daro everybody's got a toilet, a sanitary one. They’ve also uncovered over 700 wells, lots and lots of baths. These people were bathing regularly. It was clearly a very big deal. They also built these super impressive flood defense platforms and drainage systems to protect themselves from annual floods of the Indus River. Just like an ancient city of mysterious plumbers here, I don’t know what’s going on. They were also very into trade apparently because we have found artifacts amongst the ruins, these very specific artifacts, little figurines, intricately carved pottery and jewelry. They had their own style of goods, their own look, and we find these all over, traded all over from Central Asia to the Middle East. We didn’t know these things came from Mohenjo-Daro because we didn’t know Mohenjo-Daro existed. But now that we do and we’ve found a lot of this stuff there, now we know, okay they were trading extensively. Just bathing and trading.

What really sets Mohenjo-Daro apart from the big cities of ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia that we didn’t forget about, is that it doesn’t have any major temples, as I mentioned or like mansions, no elaborate residences. There’s no sign that there was any central leader or elite group, like no nobles, no aristocracy. Everyone was just sort of middle class-ish. And this leads us to believe that it was probably ruled by more of like a group of elected officials, like a lot more democratic. It’s very weirdly modern in a lot of ways. Like, the people at Mohenjo Daro figured out things 5,000 years ago that took the rest of us way longer to figure out. Like, we didn’t realize that kings are bad and sanitary sewers are good until like 200 years ago. They were way ahead of the game. And it may be part of the reason they got forgotten about. You know, they didn’t have this all powerful leader, this king, pharaoh, emperor whatever who wanted to be remembered forever and built monuments and temples and statues everywhere to ensure it. And maybe that’s part of the reason it became lost. Another part of the reason may be their written language called Indus Valley Script. It’s a pictographic language kind of like hieroglyphics but, unlike hieroglyphics which we were able to crack using the Rosetta stone, Indus Valley Script has never been decoded. We don’t know what it means. And that to me is just so tantalizing. Like, can you imagine if we’re ever able to crack it with some sort of future Rosetta Stone discovery and then we can read what these people wrote. Amazing.

Starting around 1900 BC, Mohenjo Daro began a 200 year descent into ruin. We know it started in 1900 because we start to see some neighborhoods in the city fall into disrepair. Houses aren’t being repaired anymore by 1900 which suggests that people are no longer living there. We see fewer personal items appearing starting at that time as well. It seems as though people were leaving the city starting in 1900 and by 1700 BC it had been more or less deserted. We aren’t totally sure why but it was probably due to climate factors. It’s possible that the Indus River changed its course around that time which would have affected agriculture. The Indus River was everything. It was the only reason they were able to live there. Without it, they were just in the desert. So if something happened there, it’s possible they were forced to pick up and move elsewhere. But we really don’t know. We don’t know much about Mohenjo-Daro at all but the level of sophistication we have found there is truly unexpected and fascinating.

So we’ve been to Turkey, we’ve been to Pakistan, let’s go to the other side of the world now, to Guatemala to the ancient lost city of the Maya, El Mirador. We’re trading deserts for jungles now. If you want to know more about the Maya, I have a whole episode about them, episode 39. The Maya are often seen as this really mysterious group of people that sort of vanished even, for the most part before Spanish explorers arrived and left us with all these questions about them. It’s led to a lot of mysticism and fringe theories, like with the Mayan calendar debacle, right the world ending in 2012. All of that just came from a complete lack of understanding about the Maya and that’s not because they’ve vanished or somehow disappeared. They are still here. Almost half of Guatemala’s population is at least part Maya. There’s a lack of understanding because no one ever cared enough to try to understand not because the information wasn’t available. But anyway, check out episode 39 if you missed it. Let’s talk about El Mirador.

The first thing you should know is that El Mirador was the capital city of the Maya civilization during its heyday. Also, it’s very very old for this part of the world, for the Americas. El Mirador was founded around 1,000 BC. When you think about other major Maya cities we know about, Chichen Itza founded around 600 AD, Tikal around 200 AD, even older Palenque founded around 200 BC, to them, to these other major Maya cities, El Mirador was already ancient. It predates most of them by over 1,000 years. So if the Maya were aware of El Mirador after it fell to ruin around 150 BC, it was already ancient history to them. And I think they probably were aware of it. I think the indigenous people of the area likely knew that the ruins of El Mirador were there. It wasn’t necessarily lost to them. But it was for sure lost to western culture. We had no idea until airplanes started flying over the area in the 1920s. It took the invention of airplanes for us non-indigenous Guatemalan folk to find El Mirador. Pilots noticed these huge, what looked like mountains sticking out of the jungle. These were really pyramids covered in vegetation of course. But still no one really paid the area any attention until the 1960s. That's when they finally started poking around. They discovered that this place, El Mirador, which means “the lookout” was this massive and super sophisticated ancient city. It had tons of pyramid structures, upwards of 30 of them with three major ones, La Danta, El Tigre, and Los Monos. La Danta is sort of the crown jewel sitting at a massive 230 feet tall. That’s not quite as tall as the Great Pyramid in Egypt but, according to expert Richard Hansen, it is actually more massive, like literally has more mass, made of some 99 million cubic feet of rock and fill.

So this is an incredible discovery. There was clearly a very advanced civilization living here. El Mirador is widely considered to be the most important ancient city complex from the Preclassic period. It had a system of highways, what researchers consider to be the world’s first highway system, these 40 meter wide white roads that connected it to other cities, like all roads lead to El Mirador style suggesting that it was the center, the capital city, of the maya civilization at that time. What researchers found most interesting as excavations got underway, because they had already excavated a bunch of Mayan ruins, right, Tikal, Chichen Itza, Palenque, these were excavated in the 17 and 1800s. They sort of knew what to expect. But what was so surprising about the ruins at El Mirador is that they were so much older than all the others, so much older than they were expecting. And you would expect the older ruins to be less advanced, to be simpler, more rudimentary than what they found at Tikal, for example built over a thousand years later but they aren’t. They are actually more advanced and sophisticated.

But by 150 BC, after an 850 year run, it appears the city was mostly abandoned. Just before this, a large wall 3 to 8 meters high had been built along the northern, eastern, and southern borders of the city which suggests that there was a threat of violence at the time. They were trying to keep someone out. There are also theories that it was abandoned due to deforestation. The Maya used stucco to build their houses. Stucco is a type of lime plaster made out of limestone and to make it they had to burn a fire. So to create all this stucco, they had to cut down a lot a lot of trees for these fires. And they put stucco on everything, they plastered it on the pyramids, their houses, the floors, these layers of stucco just built up thicker and thicker. They stuccoed and restuccoed often. They were like stucco obsessed. And this led to deforestation that would have caused the runoff of clay into the marshes and swamps that they depended on for agriculture. They used the fertile mud from these swamps for their gardens to grow food in. But as they filled with clay, they could no longer access the mud. So possibly some combination of violence, warfare, because of the wall, and environmental changes because of cutting down too many trees for all the stucco.

There is evidence that El Mirador was inhabited again after it was initially abandoned, around 700 AD. Not to the extent that it was before, not quite the thriving city it was before but people did live there again for around another 200 years. We know this because they built new buildings then, much smaller, humbler buildings, sometimes looting stones from the older ancient buildings. By about 900 AD El Mirador was abandoned for good and left to be reclaimed by the jungle. Fascinating. I would just love to be able to step into El Mirador during it’s heyday some 2,500 years ago and just experience the hustle and bustle of that super advanced city in the middle of the jungle with its system of highways and its massive stone temples and monuments, its roads and buildings aligned with the sun, its elaborate artwork and extensive trade networks. If only the Spanish had known, you know? They so underestimated these indigenous people, thought themselves so high and mighty by comparison. If only they had known who they were really dealing with. The Maya weren’t just simple, primitive jungle dwellers. They came from a mighty civilization that near put Spain to shame and El Mirador is the proof of that.

We have one more lost city today and while, in my mind it’s like super old and ancient, it’s actually the newest of the four cities in this episode, believe it or not, and it’s one I talked about extensively in episode 18 already but I couldn’t leave it out - Pompeii. So if you already listened to episode 18 this will be more of a refresher. And if you didn’t listen to episode 18, check that one out cause I go way way deeper there. Pompeii was an ancient Roman city established around 700 BC. It wasn’t a major or super notable city. It was more of a working town, average, everyday people living their lives. It was on a port so it saw a lot of action because of that but otherwise it was pretty just like normal. We probably wouldn’t even know all that much about Pompeii or care all that much because it was so un-notable and like working class and boring except that something pretty major happened there in 79 AD - the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the entire city, burying it in a thick layer of ash and debris that hardened to rock.

Okay, so we know this. We know that this happened, this volcanic eruption, it is well documented, we have whole play by plays recorded which I go into in detail in episode 18. We know that there was an ancient Roman city called Pompeii and that it was destroyed, along with a couple other towns, when Mount Vesuvius erupted. And then I guess we just dusted our hands and walked away. Like, there were always people who knew it was there, it just wasn’t worth anything to us for a long time. It was more trouble than it was worth. It was buried under volcanic rock. But we know people were aware of it because it appears on a map from the 300s, around 200 years after it was destroyed. But just, nobody cared. Nobody could be troubled to dig it up. The Roman empire had collapsed, it was the dark ages, people were just trying to survive.

Then, in 1595, Pompeii was stumbled upon by a famous Italian architect named Domenico Fontana during the digging of a canal. They kept running into stone walls while they’re trying to dig. But Fontana just sort of makes a note of it and moves on. They still aren’t trying to do any kind of excavation or anything like that and a big part of that was probably because 1595 was during the inquisition when people were being killed left and right for not being Christian enough, WWJD right? Cause that’s totally what he would do. Sarcasm. So bringing attention to or seeming interested in anything ancient Rome was actually potentially life threatening at the time, ancient Rome being pagan of course. So Fontana just makes a note and moves on like “we’ll just leave that right there, not interested at all, super Christian, don’t worry, ancient Rome, ew, gross.” Moves on.

In 1748 Pompeii is discovered once again by a farmer who is plowing a field. He’s just plowing along and his plow flips over a marble column. And he’s like “hmm, now what’s that doing here?” And this sets off excavations at Pompeii. But mid 1700s, there’s no scientific integrity. Archaeology is barely a thing. They are butchering the excavations and they are letting tourists in left and right. They are letting tourists take whatever they want, cart off these ancient artefacts, ripping entire stucco murals off the sides of houses. Terrible. Today you can tell which parts of Pompeii were excavated first because everything has just been looted. The artwork is missing off of all the houses they discovered first. It happens this way until around the mid 1800s when we see a major step up in the scientific integrity of archaeology. Excavations at Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum are actually what made archaeology basically a field of science. The horrible way they were being handled is what made us realize we needed to be doing things differently and archaeology as we know it was born.

What we have found at Pompeii is truly incredible. This is a town, an ancient Roman town, we otherwise wouldn’t have known that much about because it was just so average, so working class. But because of the way it was preserved by the volcanic ash, like an actual time capsule, we’re able to learn so much about the lives of average, normal, everyday people in Rome. And that’s not something you often get. Usually we just get to learn about the elite because they were the ones about which records were kept so we get this really cool glimpse into the average person’s life in Pompeii. We have graffiti that has survived, we have whole restaurants, bars, shops, apartment buildings. Signs still hang in the streets advertising market days, apartments for rent. It could be anywhere at any time. It could be your city it could be my city because it’s just so quintessentially human. Our needs then were very similar to our needs now. We still recognize Pompeii, it’s familiar to us. Their lives weren’t so different than ours. But many of those average everyday lives were cut short in a very tragic and terrifying way. Of the around 15,000 people we think probably lived in Pompeii, we have uncovered around 1,200 bodies. 90 of these have been turned into body casts by pouring concrete into the sort of hollow space left behind in the ash by the bodies as they decomposed. And this is probably the most striking thing about Pompeii, these body casts, because it’s almost like we’ve resurrected these people. We get to see them in their final moments, their faces, emotions even, their positions, shielding their faces, clutching each other. It’s a glimpse into the past in a way that nothing else even comes close to and it’s really heavy.

So far only around ⅔ of Pompeii has been excavated and, as of right now there are no plans to excavate the other third of the city. It’s too hard to maintain what we’ve already uncovered, to keep it from crumbling away in the elements. So they’re keeping the rest buried for now as a way of preserving it. But it does really make you wonder what’s down there doesn’t it? What’s remarkable about Pompeii is that, okay the first three cities I talked about today, Troy, Mahenjo-Daro, and El Mirador, these are ruins right? Abandoned, exposed to the elements, eventually buried by time, reclaimed by nature. All that’s really left are the stones, some smaller artifacts but most of the signs of everyday life there are gone. They were either taken with the people when they left or erased by time. What’s really remarkable about Pompeii is that it’s all still there, left in place, truly like a time capsule, this glimpse of life in ancient Rome.

So there you have lost cities part one. Troy, a super well known city most people thought was complete fiction. Mohenjo-Daro, a city people didn’t even know about enough to know to look for. El Mirador, a city that shatters our preconceived views of the indigenous people of the Americas. And Pompeii, a time capsule preserving the life of the ancient every-man, something so relatable and yet so often lost to time. I will be back next week with four more lost cities for you. The underwater Egyptian port city of Heracleion, Petra in Jordan, then we’ll head back to the jungle, this time in Cambodia, with the only lost to white people city of Angkor. And finally, we’ll journey to the mountains of Peru to explore the mystical Incan city of Macchu Picchu. That’s all next week so don’t miss it.

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.

Information used in this episode was sourced from the British Museum, BBC, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.

Sources:

Part 2: Perched on the north coast of Egypt, along the Mediterranean Sea is the famed port city of Alexandria. Founded by and named for the Greek Alexander the Great, it has served as a major trading hub for almost 2,500 years, well known for its lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and its famed Library of Alexandria. But, did you know that while Alexandria still carries on, an active sea port and tourist destination, its predecessor lies forgotten just 20 miles away? The Egyptians called it Thonis (thaw-nis). The Greeks called it Heracleion and, in its day, a time before Alexandria, it sat like a beacon of prosperity, welcoming people from all over the ancient world into Egypt. Until it sank, literally and figuratively, out of sight, out of mind. Let’s fix that.

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I am back again this week with four more lost cities for you. If you missed last week’s episode, that was part one, we journeyed to the mythical but surprisingly quite real city of Troy in modern day Turkey, the completely unknown and somewhat baffling city of Mohenjo Daro in modern day Pakistan, El Mirador, surprisingly advanced lost city of the Maya in Guatemala, and we ended at Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. Go back and listen if you missed it, you don’t want to miss those. However, this episode, while technically a part two, does also stand alone. So no worries if you missed part one.

At the end of last week’s episode, I called our first city today Heracleion and I need to clear up some confusion over that. So, for a long time, people thought there were two different cities close together. One of them, they thought, was called Heracleion and the other was called Thonis. Later, it became apparent, when this city was rediscovered, that it was just one city that went by two different names depending on who you asked. The Egyptians called it Thonis and the Greeks called it Heracleion. So I’m going to call it, as do most sources, I’m going to call it Thonis-Heracleion. Same place, two names. This city, Thonis-Heracleion was founded around 700 BC which puts it at predating Alexandria by about 400 years. So 400 years before Alexandria was built, around 20 miles north east of the future site of Alexandria, Thonis-Heracleion is built. Its location is majorly important. It was built along the north coast, the Mediterranean coast of Egypt just next to the mouth of the Nile River. And this poised it perfectly for trade. It was one of the major trading centers of the ancient world, welcoming people from all over into Egypt.

Now, something you have to understand, ancient Egypt spanned an incredibly long time period. People first settled in that area, the Nile valley, over 13,000 years ago. Just over 5,000 years ago, upper and lower Egypt unified into a single empire. That happened in 3,100 BC. For context, construction on the Great Pyramid began, we think, around 2,500 BC. Thonis-Heracleion was not established until 700 BC. So you have to understand, to the people of Thonis-Heracleion, the Great Pyramid at Giza was almost 2,000 years old. It was as old to them as the colosseum in Rome is to us. It was ancient to them. 700 BC Egypt is a different Egypt than 2,500 BC Egypt because of ancient Greece. Ancient Greece, the ancient Greek world officially began in 800 BC and it fairly immediately became intertwined with Egypt because of trade. And so the purpose of Thonis-Heracleion there on the Mediterranean coast is to trade mostly with the Greeks but also with whoever. Jack Shenker writes for the Guardian quote “And yet if you were a European merchant in the fifth century BC – an importer of grain, perfume or papyrus perhaps, or an exporter of silver, copper, wine or oil – then Thonis-Heracleion loomed large on your horizon. The same was true if you were a Carian mercenary, an educated Greek, a professional sailor, or a member of the Pharaonic court. Scattered across a series of interlinked islands, sand and mudbanks, Thonis-Heracleion – part aquatic marshland, part urban sprawl – was ancient Egypt’s bustling, cosmopolitan gateway to the Mediterranean, and thus its nexus with the western world,” end quote. So part aquatic marshland, part urban sprawl, I’m getting New Orleans vibes, Venice vibes. This city was built on very low ground, essentially in the water in some places. Shenker describes its set up a little more quote “Criss-crossed by a network of canals and dotted with harbours, wharves, temples and tower-houses – all joined together by a network of ferries, bridges, and pontoons – the city controlled most of the maritime traffic coming into Egypt from the Mediterranean. Goods would be inspected and taxed at the customs administration centre, and then carried on for distribution further inland, either at Naukratis – another trading port that lay almost 50 miles further up the Nile – or via the Western Lake, which was connected by a water channel to the nearby town of CanOpus and offered access to many other parts of the country,” end quote.

We knew about Thonis-Heracleion a little bit. It had been mentioned by some Greek chroniclers. In Greek mythology it was also the location of Heracles AKA Hercules first journey into Africa. In Homer’s story from the Iliad, it’s the location where Helen of Troy and her abductor Paris hide out after she has been kidnapped. But that’s not actually in the poem, Homer didn’t write that. Both of these mythology references come from Herodotus (Hair-ah-dit-us) who was a Greek historian who I guess liked to dabble in mythology as well just to make things extra confusing for us now. Anyway, we knew about it from these scarce references but otherwise it mostly became lost to time. Because in around 700 AD, the once thriving port city of Thonis-Heracleion literally sank under the Mediterranean Sea, like Atlantis style sank, except in real life. How does this happen? Well it was a combination of factors that caused it. Earthquakes, soil liquefaction, rising sea levels, and the fact that the land they built it on was just already sinking into the sea to begin with. Shenker writes quote “By the second century BC, Thonis-Heracleion’s era of pomp and prestige was already fading. Further along the coast, the new metropolis of Alexandria was rapidly establishing itself as Egypt’s preeminent port, while the hybrid foundation of land and water upon which Thonis-Heracleion was built had begun to feel less secure. It wasn’t a single natural disaster – an earthquake, tsunami, rising sea levels, or subsidence – that doomed the city, but rather a combination of them all. At the end of the century, probably after a severe flood, the central island – already sagging under the weight of the main temple buildings – succumbed to liquefaction. In what must have been a terrifying experience, the hard clay soil turned to liquid in moments and the buildings atop it collapsed swiftly into the water. The supply of pottery and coins into Thonis-Heracleion appears to have ended at this point; a few hardy residents clung on to their homes throughout the Roman period and even into the beginning of Arab rule, but the last vestiges of the city sunk below the sea at the end of the eighth century,” end quote.

Just literally sank and was mostly forgotten about. Alexandria had taken over anyway. Who cares about Thonis-Heracleion. It wasn’t until 1933 that a pilot flying over the area spotted ruins in the water. Sort of like with El Mirador, it took the invention of flight for us to gain enough of a vantage point to be able to spot what was left. But then, nothing. I don’t know if we just didn’t have the technology in 1933 to do anything about it or what but excavations at Thonis-Hercleion did not start until the year 2000. And even when they did start, headed by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology, they weren’t even really interested in the ruins of Thonis-Heracleion at first, they came to check out some old French ships that had sunk in the late 1700s. But soon the focus shifted, of course, to the entire sunken ancient Egyptian city there. Excavations are still ongoing. According to Shenker, 95% of the area’s urban footprint has not yet been explored. So, so much left down there to find. But they have already made quite a few incredible discoveries: massive, colossal statues of kings and queens, carved steles, a huge granite statue of Hapy, god of fertility, who once stood at the entrance to Nile River. And a lot of smaller things as well: goblets, figurines, jewelry, coins, ritual objects, ceramics, animal sarcophagi. There’s a lot of evidence there of this sort of blending of Greek and Egyptian cultures which we know happened at this time: anchors from Greek ships, Greek helmets embedded in the sea floor, Greek coins, perfume bottles from Athens. And there’s a lot of evidence that Thonis Hercleion was a massive sea port at one point. They’ve discovered more than 700 ancient anchors and as many as 125 shipwrecks dating from the 6th to 2nd century BC. So if there are that many ships that wrecked there, imagine how many travelled there that didn’t wreck. Absolutely bustling.

Thonis Heracleion was taken down by natural forces, the land upon which it was built literally sank into the sea. Shenker writes quote “At a time of looming ecological catastrophe, it is perhaps unsurprising that we should find the tale of Thonis-Heracleion so fascinating. Its rediscovery is a testament to advanced technology and human ingenuity, but the city’s fate – and the eerily inanimate memories of a long-forgotten urban life left behind – are a reminder of how fragile many of our own contemporary cities are,” end quote. It disappeared literally because it sank but I think it disappeared figuratively, from our collective memory, because of something else. Because of the Greeks. Because of Alexandria. Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC which is also around the time he built Alexandria. And here we see a major shift happen in Egypt. We see a fusion of Greek and Egyptian cultures, religion, customs. By the time Thonis-Heracleion sank, they didn’t need it anymore. They had Alexandria. Alexandria was better anyway, more Greek, so they just moved on and put it behind them where it remained until those excavations began in 2000. And there’s still so much more to uncover and learn there. 95% untouched. Fascinating.

For our next city we have to go to Jordan. Where the heck is Jordan right? Jordan is in the Middle East, right next to Israel and Syria and Iraq. So, not a great tourist destination really at the moment. But this is the cradle of civilization. My husband Joey actually brought this up the other night randomly. He was like “why are the places where human civilizations literally began, also the places where modern human civilizations are struggling the hardest, like Africa and the middle east it’s just constant chaos over there.” And I think that’s a very complicated question with a very complicated answer that mostly has to do with foreign invaders and conquest but I don’t have time to dive into it right now, but something to think about. Anyway, in Jordan, we have the ancient not really all that lost city of Petra. This is one we’ll call only lost to white people. That’s probably offensive. Only lost to the western world, then. Western world is like the PC term for white people, all the white people countries, so we’ll go with that. I mean there are non white people living in those countries too so yeah it’s a more inclusive term. This one was only lost to the western world.

Petra was the capital city of the Nabataean (NOB-a-tee-un) people, an Arab tribe, who lived in this area and started building Petra around 300 BC but they really flourished around the turn of the millennium, what do you call that? They really flourished around the time BC turned into AD, Jesus times, right. Now, Petra, what’s left of Petra today is all of these facades carved into the sandstone. Like just the fronts of buildings. They’re amazing, they have columns and stuff. They are very intricately carved into the sandstone rock faces and they have interior spaces too, these rooms carved into the rock. There are a lot of tombs like this, carved out of the rock too. That’s all that really left, some 600 stone facades. But at one point there would have been a lot of free standing buildings as well, houses and whatnot. These are gone now, these were mostly destroyed by an earthquake in 363 AD. But at one point, before that earthquake, it’s believed that Petra was home to some 30,000 people. The earthquake leveled the houses which is why only the stuff carved into the rock faces remains. But researchers also believe that it destroyed the cities water related infrastructure. Okay, so Petra is in the desert big time. And so to get water there, the Nabataean (NOB-a-tee-un) people had set up this water harvesting system. They piped water from springs outside the city and they carved channels into the rock to collect rainwater. But this system, like the houses, was destroyed by earthquakes and the city was gradually abandoned. People moved to areas closer to those springs, closer to those water sources. The city was also taken over by the Romans in 106 AD so by the time it was abandoned it was technically a Roman city. Foreign invaders and conquest, I told you. Also natural disasters seem to be a running theme here.

Anyway, Petra is one of those that local people continued to always know about because there it is this huge carved stone facade with full on columns in the middle of the desert, how can you not know about that? But the western world mostly ceased to realize it existed. According to Carolyn Wilke writing for National Geographic quote “The ancient trade center once housed tens of thousands of people. But the city’s population had long dwindled by 1812 when the Swiss adventurer Johann Burckhardt pretended to be a Muslim pilgrim looking for the tomb of the prophet Aaron and convinced a Bedouin guide to bring him to the city, which many Westerners had come to believe was a myth,” end quote. Good ol fashioned ignorance and trickery. And so Petra was discovered by the western world in 1812 which is of course why we know about it, why I know about it, I should say. Now, like Thonis-Heracleion, most of Petra remains unexcavated and there are few surviving documents describing the people who lived there, the Nabataean (NOB-a-tee-un) people. Which means that Petra remains sort of mysterious and illusive. Most of the archaeological remains in Petra are tombs, because, you know, they were built to last, cut into the rock and all. They actually just discovered a tomb with 12 bodies in it in 2024 in the treasury building which is the main facade, like if you google Petra, it’s one of the main images you’ll see. So new discoveries yet but for the most part, Petra is very untapped because of reasons that have to do with like preservation and whatnot.

Let’s get out of the desert, out of the middle east, and head to the jungle once again, this time in Cambodia. Another, probably the most classic example, of an only lost to the western world lost city is the city of Angkor. Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire. If you’ve heard the word Khmer before, you probably listened to episode 72 about hte Khmer Rouge which was a violent communist revolutionary group that rose to power in Cambodia in the 1970s. It is actually one of my most listened to episodes if you missed it. It is probably also one of the heaviest and most shocking content wise so, you’ve been warned. Anyway, the Khmer Rouge was called that, Rouge because of red because of the communism, but Khmer as a reference to the Khmer empire which once flourished in Cambodia from around the 800s to around the 1400s. So in that window, the Khmer empire built the city of Angkor as their capital city.

According to Grant Olson writing for the Natural History Museum of Utah quote “The vast metropolis of Angkor served as the center of a mighty Khmer Empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries. It covers 154 square miles and is home to 72 major temples and hundreds of smaller temple sites. The most famous is Angkor Wat, which was constructed to represent the Hindu universe. Spanning 400 acres, this awe-inspiring site is considered the world’s largest religious monument,” end quote. But it might actually be even larger than that. In 2007, an international team of researchers clocked Angkor, including its urban sprawl at around 390 square miles. This made it the largest, by surface area, the largest pre-industrial city in the world. This size alone meant that it had to have an elaborate and advanced infrastructure, with a complicated water management network that allowed for irrigation in order to sustain an estimated 750,000 to one million people. Kind of like with El Mirador, you wouldn’t think it now because it’s been sort of reclaimed by the jungle. Angkor in particular has these massive vines and tree roots and tree trunks and things growing through and on top of the buildings like the jungle is actually grabbing on and trying to swallow the ruins of the city whole. So that gives it this sort of primitive long forgotten vibe but, in its prime, Angkor was this extremely advanced, sprawling metropolis. It was eventually abandoned in the 1400s because of a number of factors including climate change and invasion from outsiders pressing in.

Now here’s the thing about Angkor though, and Grant Olson is quick to point this out. Angkor was never actually lost. The people of Cambodia always knew it was there and they visited it frequently to connect with their Khmer ancestors. Olson writes quote “As with other supposedly lost ancient cities, Angkor was “discovered” by a Westerner who received guidance from locals. In other words, [Henri] Mouhot (moo-ho), the French explorer who sometimes receives credit for finding Angkor, could more accurately be described as one of its first tourists. But the fact that people in the Western world were unaware of an ancient city’s existence has traditionally been an adequate reason for them to dub modern visitors as “discoverers.” And it discredits the knowledge and traditions passed down by indigenous peoples. All that matters in the common yet inaccurate Western narrative is that a great civilization once existed, and an explorer was intrepid enough to bring it to the world. Searching the phrase “lost city of Angkor” in Google serves up more than two million results, many of which perpetuate the myth of a city that vanished from the face of the earth until it was discovered in the 1800s. Whereas, Angkor is both a window into a rich past and a living space where people carry out a way of life directly related to their Khmer ancestors,” end quote.

So the story goes that this French explorer and naturalist, a guy named Henri Mouhot, air quotes discovered Angkor in the mid 1800s. What actually happened was, in January of 1860, Mouhot made his way to Angkor while exploring Cambodia. Angkor was already in charted territory. It was already on Cambodian maps. Mouhot goes there. He records in his journal over a period of three weeks detailed observations about the city, now in ruins, its palaces and temples, pools and moats and terraces. He records all of this with illustrations and this later gets published back in the western world and people are like “What??? What is this amazing place no one even knew about in the jungles of Cambodia that Henri Mouhot totally discovered?” And they have to be eye rolling hard in Cambodia because they all already knew about it they just didn’t bother to tell the white people. But, so, because of that, there is this misconception that the French, specifically Henri Mouhot, discovered Angkor in the 1860s. Nope. Mouhot just happened to write about it and draw nice pictures to go with it which captured peoples attention for the first time ever and made them realize that it existed.

But, although it was never really lost, there is still a lot to learn about Angkor, a lot to discover in the true sense of the word. Olson concludes quote “While there may not have been a true “discovery” of Angkor in the 1800s, there are still countless mysteries being uncovered as experts from Cambodia and around the world study the site and seek the knowledge of the modern Khmer people,” end quote. Seek the knowledge of the modern Khmer people. Yes. Thank you. These people are still here. They did not get abducted by aliens or vanish into some mysterious green mist. They still live there. They know things. Ask them. It’s just like with the Maya in Guatemala. They aren’t this mysterious group of people no one knows anything about. They still exist. Go ask them. Stop trying to turn everything you don’t personally understand into some big mystery. It’s okay to not know. It’s okay to ask people who don’t look like you to share their knowledge with you. Because they have knowledge. They have valuable knowledge and all of this comes from a historical disregard for their intelligence and a devaluing of that knowledge that they hold, because they don’t look like you. We gotta move past it.

Our final lost city, also not really lost at all of course, is Machu Picchu in the mountains of Peru. Machu Picchu is the newest of our lost cities by a lot. It was built in the 1420s which means it’s really not that old at all. But it has this sort of ancient mysterious air about it, not because it’s actually all that ancient, but because it was built by a people that we neglected to get to know once again. And those people of course were the Inca. So there’s the Aztec, the Inca, and the Maya right? These are the three big, major civilizations of the Americas, of central and south America at least. The Maya were much older than the other two. Remember, El Mirador was built in like 1000 BC. The Aztec and the Inca were much more recent. The Aztec Empire emerged in the 1400s, basically just by conquering and combining a bunch of smaller groups in the are of Mexico. And the Inca empire down in South America started unofficially in the 1200s but officially in the 1400s as well. So these guys popped up like right before the Spanish conquistadors came over. They hadn’t been there long, not on that scale, not as major organized empires. I don’t think many people realize that. I think people assume the Aztec and the Inca were like these ancient civilizations. No. Nope. They were up and coming during the Renaissance in Europe. This is, they’re not that old.

Machu Picchu is seen as rather mysterious. It’s often referred to as the “Lost City of the Incas” because we don’t know a whole lot about it. It’s believed to have been built as an estate for the Inca emperor, Pachacuti but we aren’t sure because there aren’t any contemporary records to confirm that. The Inca did not have a written language in the traditional sense. They used a system of knotted strings called quipu to convey mostly numerical information. Narrative information was likely passed down through storytelling. So we don’t have the Inca writing down that Machu Picchu was built for this emperor Pachacuti. That doesn’t exist. We do know that it was abandoned only about a century after it was built in the 1500s, radio carbon dating confirms that. We don’t know for a fact why it was abandoned but the circumstantial evidence is screaming that it was because of conquest by the Spanish. I mean, it’s pretty obvious. Spain conquered the Inca empire starting in 1532 which lines up perfectly with evidence from radio carbon dating that says Machu Picchu was occupied between 1420 and 1530. It’s likely most of the people at Machu Picchu left because of Spanish conquest in other parts of the empire and because of most of them dying of smallpox brought by the Spanish. And the crazy thing to me is that now we’re like “We don’t know why they left. Who did they build the city for and why did they leave it? It’s such a mystery.” Umm, guys, why didn’t you ask them? Why didn’t you just ask them? This wasn’t that long ago. The Inca didn’t have written records for the most part but the Spanish sure as heck did. They didn’t write it down? Why didn’t they write it down? Oh cause they never bothered to care enough to ask them anything about their way of life. Got it.

So now we have this mystery yet again. This mysterious “Lost City of the Incas” that no one knows anything about. Once again, the local people of the area knew about Machu Picchu already, always knew about it. Knew it was there. But it was discovered by the western world in the early 1900s, first in 1902 by a Peruvian explorer and farmer named Agustin LizAragga and then again in 1911 by an American historian from Yale University named Hiram Bingham III. And Bingham is the one, of course, who brought the ruins to international attention, who air quotes “discovered” them. It’s believed that Machu Picchu was originally called Huayna Picchu or even just Picchu. It straddles two mountain peaks, Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, those are the names of the two mountains. Calling it Machu Picchu after the larger of the two mountains, that was Bingham. He just picked that one and wrote it in his field notes. It probably wasn’t even called that.

Machu Picchu wasn’t a huge city like Angkor, it was more of a royal estate, as theorized but not confirmed. It was built in the classical Inca style with big stones fitted together perfectly without using mortar. Buildings were also engineered to be earthquake resistant. This very specific style of building is something we see repeated somewhat on Easter Island, Rapanui over 2,500 miles away which serves as evidence that the two groups of people likely came in contact with one another. But that’s episode 110. So Machu Picchu was small. It’s estimated that around 750 people lived there and they mostly worked for the emperor Pachacuti who we think the estate was built for, because he was emperor at the time it was built not because anyone bothered to ask. In later excavations, we have found the remains of some of these people of course. And studying the chemical composition of their skeletons has yielded some interesting results. We’ve learned that they didn’t live in that area for very long. They were brought to Machu Picchu to work from elsewhere, from all different regions. Many of them were from the coast. A lot of the remains show bone damage caused by a species of water parasites not found anywhere near Machu Picchu. Chemical analysis also shows changes in their diets. Many of them went from eating fish to eating corn. So this all suggests that these were immigrants from coastal areas who moved to Machu Picchu, possibly to work as support staff for the emperor whom the estate probably belonged to. This might have also been seasonal work. Evidence suggest that, while as many as 750 people may have lived there in the summer months, that may have dropped down to just a few hundred in the winter. So it’s possible they even came to work for the summer, for the season, and then went back to their homes on the coast. They also seem to have brought animals to Machu Piccue, llamas and alpacas which are not naturally found at that high of an altitude, as well as guinea pigs which are often found in tombs and so thought to have been a common ritual sacrifice offering at burials. They also found the remains of 6 dogs which were buried along with humans suggesting that they served as companions.

But, let’s go back a little bit because there was a lot of controversy surrounding excavations at Machu Picchu. Bingham air quotes discovered it and starts excavating. He is sending all sorts of artifacts back to Yale University, but then this starts to cause problems with the Peruvian people who claim that the Americans are coming in and destroying this historic site and preventing the people of Peru from being able to get in there and learn about their own history, which yeah, yeah I agree that’s totally what was happening. So all this sort of comes to a grinding halt. The locals basically kick Bingham out of Machu Picchu at a certain point and by 1981 the government of Peru had declared Machu Picchu a historic sanctuary. It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1983. Today, Machu Picchu is Peru’s most visited tourist attraction and it brings in a lot of revenue to the country but tourists traipsing through all the time, of course, causes issues with preservation of the site.

You know, in every single one of these eight lost cities I’ve talked about between last week and this week they all fell to ruin because of one of two reasons I’m realizing. Some of them had both reasons going on at the same time. It was either because of conquest by outside invaders or because of climate change or like natural disasters, environmental stuff. In the four lost cities that we talked about this week, every single one of them experienced some sort of invasion, some sort of conquest by outside forces. So we have Thonis, an Egyptian city that was taken over by the Greeks becoming Heracleion. We have Petra, which was a Nabataean (NOB-a-tee-un), Arab city that was taken over by the Romans. We have Angkor, which was a Khmer city that was taken over by neighboring groups in Cambodia, and then we have Machu Picchu, which was an Inca city, or royal estate probably, and the Inca empire was, of course, taken over by the Spanish. So I find myself coming back to Joey‘s question from a few nights ago. Why are these oldest cradles of civilization, these places that humans were literally birthed out of as a species, why are these also the places that are struggling the most now. Why are they so riddled with controversy and violence and chaos at all times if they were at one point so conducive to human life? I think the answer to that becomes obvious when you study the reasons for the downfalls of these air quotes lost cities. Conquest. No one wants to conquer places that aren’t conducive to human life. These places flourished for reasons and the same reasons that caused them to flourish also caused them to be invaded by others who wanted to flourish and ultimately lead in many cases to their demise.

But the real lesson I think is, just because something is gone does not mean that it’s lost. And just because you didn’t know about it, doesn’t mean no one else did either. We have to stop throwing the word discovered out so haphazardly. Claiming to have discovered something that whole civilizations of people have already known about for millennia speaks volumes. And continuing to retell the stories as if they were actual discoveries, heralding guys like Christopher Columbus, Hiram Bingham, and Henri Mouhot as heroic discoverers of untold wonders only serves to perpetuate the Eurocentric cesspool they climbed out of. And wow I was not planning to take it there this week. Guess I got a little lost.

Information used in this episode was sourced from the Guardian, The British Museum, franckgoddio.org, National Geographic, the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.

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