From a spooky gateway to the underworld to a terrifying city of ghosts, here are ten
of the most mysterious archaeological sites in the world!
10: The Gateway to Hades Hades was the Greek god of the Underworld,
son of the Titan Cronus and he had the helm of darkness which was headgear that allowed
the wearer to become invisible.
The Greeks believed that since he ruled underground, he also had access to the secret wealth hidden
in the Earth such as precious metals, and fertile soil.
He is both terrifying and generous at the same time.
The ancient city of Taenarum is located at the farthest end of the Mani Peninsula in
Greece and it was believed to be the mythical gateway to Hades.
According to legend it was founded by Taenarus, sometimes referred to as the son of Zeus or
Poseidon depending on who you ask.
The city was likely constructed by a group of people known as the helots, a subjugated
race persecuted by the Spartans.
The city quickly rose to fame because of its marble and purple snails.
This might not sound that great but these snails were extremely valuable since this
is where the very expensive purple dye came from in the ancient world.
The inhabitants of the city built as many temples as they could, including one for Poseidon
and one for Apollo.
The temple of Poseidon was a cave-like structure on the coast – and it also doubled as the
gateway to Hades.
It was said that after a person died, they would go through the gateway and be transported
to the River Styx, where the ferryman Charon would judge whether they went to Elysium or
Tartarus, the latter of which was basically Greek hell.
It's even said that Hercules dragged the 3-headed beast Cerberus through this very cave during
his 12 labors.
Located in the ancient city near the sanctuary and temple of Poseidon was an oracle.
It was believed that here, near these gates to Hades, people could speak with the dead
who rose from the underworld and they could ask them questions.
Pilgrims would come for days or weeks and consume hallucinogenic plants in order to
communicate with the dead.
Today the exact place of the sea cave that led to the underworld remains unknown.
9: The Cursed City Chorazin is an ancient village located in
the Galilee region of Israel, and it’s said to be cursed.
But who cursed this ancient city?
Apparently it was Jesus.
The village is part of the Evangelical Triangle, 3 towns where Jesus spent the majority of
his life on Earth.
But before Jesus was ever around, Chorazin was a simple agricultural center with the
occasional temple ritual and quality grain production.
But according to verses from Matthew and Luke, Chorazin was one of only two cities that rejected
Jesus and his miracles – and so he cursed it.
But what does history tell us about the small Israeli village?
We know that it was abandoned in the year 135 and rebuilt about 150 years later.
The entire city was then destroyed shortly after by an earthquake.
It never was rebuilt and its ruins still haunt the landscape today.
It's part of an archaeological park that spans 25 acres.
The mystery here is… well, did Jesus really curse the city 2000 years ago?
After all, it was abandoned shortly after his death, only to be rebuilt and destroyed
by a freak natural disaster.
There have never been any archaeological findings to suggest a curse, but that’s practically
impossible!
How would you find physical evidence of a curse thousands of years ago?
Neither has it been physically confirmed that anyone named Jesus ever visited the town to
perform miracles.
All we know is that it was cursed in the Bible and befell terrible misfortune in real life
before the locals gave up on it.
8: Leptis Magna The ruins of Leptis Magna are nothing short
of mysterious.
This ancient city was initially founded by the Carthaginian Empire before being conquered
by Rome.
Rome was gracious enough to allow the inhabitants of the city to remain under the rule of their
native leaders, though it later became a Roman province of Africa under Emperor Tiberius.
The city quickly flourished and became a main trading hub on the Mediterranean.
But then came the 5th century.
The Roman Empire began to decline, the city of Leptis Magna was captured by the Vandals,
recaptured by Emperor Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire in 533, then overrun 100 years later
during the Muslim conquest and turned into an abandoned ruin.
The city’s history was wiped out overnight.
Since then, this mysterious archaeological site has been a popular playground for colonial
plunderers, specifically the English and French.
During the 17th century, 600 ancient pillars were taken from the city and delivered to
the palace at Versailles in Paris.
The pillaging went on and on and today, there is almost nothing left of what was once a
prosperous and multicultural city.
Over 1000 years of history was literally removed and spread across the world by hungry European
leaders who had an affinity for foreign architecture.
As you can imagine, this has made tracing the true history of the city very difficult.
Everyone’s got a piece!
7: Palmyra Palmyra is located in modern Syria but was
first established during the 3rd century BC.
It’s about 100 miles from Damascus and has been around since the Stone Age.
It started as a small settlement near a desert oasis.
Back then, the area was rich in fertile soil and date palm trees.
It was a great place for farming and herding.
The original name of the city in Arabic was Tadmor, which translates roughly to date palm
after the famous trees!
The settlement grew into a small city ruled by the Mesopotamians before eventually getting
assimilated into the Arab empire.
In 64 BC, the Roman Empire conquered the region and Palmyra became a largely autonomous state
and a reliable trading partner with Rome.
In the 3rd century, a warrior queen appeared named Zenobia.
Her royal lineage went back 6 generations and she and her husband the King rose against
Rome and began to conquer nearby lands.
He was eventually murdered and Queen Zenobia along with her trusted general went and conquered
Egypt, claiming Alexandria as her ancestral city.
She led her army as the warrior queen and conquered Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, creating
her own Empire separate from Rome.
She cut off the wheat and grain supply to the Roman Empire and finally she got their
attention.
Emperor Aurelian was not happy and sent a giant army to fight her.
She lost and was sent to Rome as a hostage.
Over the years Palmyra remained part of the Roman Empire, then the Byzantines.
Then Timurid warlords, a tribe of Mongol origin, completely destroyed the city in the early
1400s.
They reduced it practically to rubble.
Even when the city was rebuilt later, it was far from the grand metropolis it once was.
By 1932, all that remained of Palmyra was a small village under French rule, its mysterious
past largely forgotten.
Yet amazingly, some structures still remain even despite centuries of war.
The ruins of the Temple of Bel still stand, once used for the worship of an ancient Mesopotamian
god.
There are other temples that date to the Romans, an ancient senate meetinghouse, an old bathing
pool once hemmed by huge Egyptian columns, and even a vault crypt steeped in mystery.
Even though the city has largely been destroyed over the years, it still holds many secrets
of the ancient world.
6: The Ghost City The village of Kuldhara in India has been
abandoned since the 19th century, but its roots go back about 800 years.
Today, the village is filled with the ruins of dilapidated houses, roads covered in dust,
and what some say are hordes of ghosts and curses.
This small village holds a dark and mysterious secret and has been known to give visitors
a distinct sense of unease, as if walking somewhere they don't belong.
The village was established in the 13th century by a local clan.
It became prosperous, growing to a size of about 1500 people with somewhere around 400
homes.
But as far as the story goes, in 1825 every last person in the village left in the middle
of the night and was never seen again.
Some say this mass exodus was part of a curse.
Some say their ghosts still haunt the streets of Kuldhara.
Others don't even have an explanation because the story is so strange, and yet historians
agree that it definitely did happen.
Today, the town is a heritage site.
It's also wildly creepy and exceptionally terrifying.
There is apparently a curse still lingering over the village so that nobody will ever
live in it again.
5: Olduvai Gorge On the outside, Olduvai Gorge doesn’t look
like much of an archaeological site.
It just looks like dirt and rocks.
However, this is arguably the most important archaeological site in the entire world – and
one of the most mysterious.
It's located in Tanzania and it is famous because it holds the earliest evidence of
our first human ancestors in the midst of evolution.
Paleontologists have discovered many fossilized bones in the area, along with stone tools
that date back millions of years.
The gorge itself is located near Serengeti National Park.
It was only formed around 30,000 years ago because of geological activity.
A whole lot of years before that, it was a breeding ground for early humans.
Some of the first discoveries came in the 1960s and 70s when researchers discovered
the first ever bones of a new hominin they called Homo habilis, meaning handy human because
the animal seemed able to use tools.
Throughout the years, many skeletons have been found here, with the oldest dating back
around 2 million years.
And while there have certainly been older humanoid fossils found, specifically in Ethiopia,
the sheer number of them found in the Olduvai Gorge suggests some kind of primitive settlement
where hominins were evolving.
The mystery here is that scientists have never been able to pinpoint a specific place in
Africa where humans came from.
But the Olduvai Gorge is definitely one of the best contenders for the origins of human
evolution.
4: Ancient Buddhist Complex Archaeologists working far in the north of
Pakistan made a pretty fantastic discovery when they began investigating a mysterious
archaeological location complete with an old Buddhist complex roughly 2000 years old.
As of right now, this is the largest complex known to historians ever to have been constructed
in the area.
Based on its estimated date of construction, it was built during the Kushan Empire, which
once controlled almost all of modern Afghanistan, Pakistan, and much of northern India between
the years 30 and 375.
This site was first discovered by Italian archaeologists back in the 1930s.
However, the digging stopped and no significant discoveries were ever made.
It wasn't until the 21st century, just a few months ago, that any major discoveries were
announced.
Researchers now know that the area is rich in stupas, schools, meditation halls, and
specialized cells high up in the mountains where monks used to live in complete isolation.
People often think of Pakistan and the surrounding area as being heavily Muslim in influence
– and they definitely are – but not that long ago, the region was primarily Buddhist.
Discovered inside of the Buddhist complex were some very fascinating fresco paintings
depicting images from Buddhist mythology, which was a huge shock because archaeologists
have never before found fresco paintings at any site from the Kushan Empire.
3: Ancient Structure Made of Bones 300 miles South of Moscow in Russia, archaeologists
were absolutely shocked to discover a huge circle of mammoth bones in 2014.
The circle of bones dates back 25,000 years.
It's an almost perfect circle of skulls, tusks, leg bones, rib bones, and every other kind
of bone that you would find in a mammoth.
But 25,000 years ago, it wasn't a flat circle of dead animals.
Rather, it was a structure so large and so imposing that the ice age people who made
it couldn't figure out how to put a roof on it.
But what makes the horrifying bone structure so mysterious is that no archaeologist has
been able to figure out just what it was used for.
It almost looks like the biggest sacrificial pit in history, or like a castle built for
some kind of monstrous warlord from the bones of his enemies – only, no human bones were
made in this particular construction.
How many bones were used, you ask?
Over 60 woolly mammoths were picked apart to create the structure.
Our paleolithic ancestors went through an excruciating amount of labor to get this project
done.
According to Alexander Pyor, an archaeologist working with the University of Exeter in England,
the bones were probably sourced from elsewhere and then dragged all the way to this specific
location.
But unfortunately, Alexander can't say why they did it or even what the structure had
originally looked like.
2: Mysterious Empire A drought in Iraq has revealed a mysterious
empire and a palace that dates back 3400 years.
The discovery actually comes from the Mosul Dam reservoir, which recently lost a significant
amount of its water.
With the reservoir devoid of liquid, the leftovers of an ancient civilization appeared.
A team of archaeologists from Germany then went to investigate, and they found the ruins
of a palace that probably belonged to the Mittani Empire, an extremely mysterious people
who left almost nothing behind.
They are one of the least researched empires anywhere in the Middle East region, or the
Eastern Hemisphere for that matter.
Researchers haven't even identified the capital of the ancient empire yet.
There have only been a couple sites found related to them, they don't know what kind
of religion they practiced, and absolutely nobody knows where they went or even how long
they ruled for.
The remains of the palace in the reservoir were not great.
Archaeologists did manage to find some clay tablets, some walls painted in bright shades
of red and blue, and that was pretty much it.
The water levels have already risen, making further research impossible.
1: River House Ruin The River House Ruin in Utah can be found
near the San Juan River.
The ruin is in the middle of the desert, carved into the side of a rock cliff.
It also dates back nearly a thousand years.
But who built this cliff house and why?
River House was probably built by the ancient Anasazi people who lived throughout the desert
regions of what is today Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico.
They are officially known as the Ancestral Pueblo people since Anasazi was actually a
Navajo word that meant “ancient enemy”.
The ancestral puebloans were the same people who lived in the huge cliff city of Mesa Verde,
which is actually just a few miles away from the River House Ruin.
Both structures were likely made by the same group at the same time, during the 12th century.
The only difference is that Mesa Verde is extremely large and the River House Ruin doesn't
get nearly as much attention.
Ancestral puebloans were living in North America for thousands of years, but they eventually
migrated into the deserts of the southwest and began building their homes directly into
cliffs for protection from others, and from the elements!
They lived in rock structures just like this one for about 100 years, before vanishing
mysteriously in the 1300s, during what historians believe could have been a mass exodus to the
south, probably into what is today Mexico.
But historians can’t tell for sure why the civilization declined.
Have you ever visited the River House Ruins or one of these other mysterious sites?
If so, let me know in the comments!
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