10: Bandiagara Escarpment Cliff Dwellings Far away in Mali there are some houses carved
right into cliffs!
The Bandiagara Escarpment divides the endlessly hot and dusty lands of the Sahel in the country
of Mali.
The escarpment is 100 miles (160 km) long and was once inhabited by the Tellem people,
who built miraculous dwellings into the sides of the enormous cliffs.
The area is geographically diverse, containing a range of environs from desert to waterfalls,
making them an ideal location for civilization.
They were there up until the 15th century, when they ultimately disappeared.
Where they went remains something of a mystery.
They were either assimilated or forced out due to the arrival of the Dogon culture.
The Tellem were described as small red people, or pygmies, by the current locals, but no
trace of them remains today.
The Dogon, who took the place of the Tellem, turned out to be some of the only people in
Africa that resisted Islamization when it swept through the region.
They also resisted slavery when slave traders descended on Africa.
One of the reasons they resisted so many invasions is that they used the sanctuaries in the cliffs
to conceal themselves.
What's truly amazing is that the homes from 600 years ago were made of nothing but mud
and sticks.
And yet the arid region has kept them immaculately preserved, with houses literally hanging off
the cliffs and defying the natural laws of gravity.
Some of the villages are almost invisible because they blend in with the rocky cliffs,
the same color as the mud the houses are built from.
The only thing you can see from a distance are the thatched roofs sticking out of the
sand.
9: Sarmizegetusa Regia Sarmizegetusa Regia is a lost city in the
country of Romania, hidden in the dense forests of the Carpathian Mountains.
It was the capital of ancient Dacia, where the Dacian people thrived until they were
conquered by the Romans in the 2nd century AD.
Today, the lost city is more of a ruined fortification hiding in the forests of Transylvania.
To date, this is the most important Dacian site ever found.
It was built in the first part of the 1st century BC, its position in the remote forest
giving the residents direct access to huge amounts of iron.
Their seclusion also kept them relatively hidden from their enemies.
King Decebalus was in control when the Romans came, but he was disposed of pretty quickly.
The Romans then took the city and extended it to create a system of fortifications three
times bigger than the original site.
Nonetheless, pretty much nothing remains now.
There are just a few ruins, including a sacred area of temples, the main fortifications,
and a housing area for the citizens.
Archaeologists have found artifacts, a system that supplied water to the residents, and
thousands of pieces of iron scrap.
The site was abandoned shortly after the Romans improved it when they built a new capital
closer to the great Roman roads.
The city was then lost in the forest until modern times.
8: The Black City The Black City, also called Edzina, was first
described by the traveler Marco Polo.
It was built in Inner Mongolia, what is now China, by the Tangut Empire in the 11th century.
The city was founded in 1032, became a thriving center for trade, and was taken over by Genghis
Khan in 1226.
At its height, the city had walls 30 feet (9.1 m) tall, giant ramparts to protect against
invaders, and outer walls stretching nearly 1500 feet (457 m).
But all these fortifications did little when the Mongol Army showed up to take over.
The Tangut rulers were dismissed and the city continued to thrive under its Mongol overlords.
During the reign of Kublai Khan, the city grew even bigger.
It became three times larger than it was under its former rulers, due partly to its strategic
position.
The city was on the crossroads that connected three major regions, Xanadu, Kumul, and Karakorum.
Marco Polo described the Black City as being in the middle of nowhere.
He said it took 12 days of riding by camel from Campichu to reach the city, and on the
other side was 40 days of desert.
After over 300 years of existence, the city was destroyed in 1372 by General Feng Sheng
of the Ming Dynasty and his massive army.
The Mongols were defeated and the city was abandoned in the middle of the desert.
Because it was truly in the middle of nowhere, resettling the Black City was deemed useless
and it was never occupied again.
The desert winds beat the city into a fine dust, forever burying its artifacts.
7: Siq al-Barid Siq al-Barid is not Petra, although the two
may look very similar and were made by the same ancient civilization.
But it is nicknamed Little Petra, and it's still found in the country of Jordan.
The city was founded by the Nabataeans, the ancient nomadic tribe of Bedouins who emerged
from the Arabian Desert.
These people grew to be one of the greatest ancient cultures the world has ever seen.
From a group of sheep herders, they became a political entity and trading superpower
in the 4th century BC.
Their center was the city of Petra, but Siq al-Barid was also important.
It wasn't quite as big, but its architecture is just as impressive.
The city contained giant tombs cut into the rock and housing made by utilizing the natural
stone formations of the desert.
It was more of a suburb to Petra, where the elderly and wealthy could retire no less than
10 miles to the south of the main hub.
As a prosperous suburb, archaeologists also believe Siq al-Barid was a destination of
choice for traders and merchants who wanted a resort-style stay while doing their main
trading in Petra.
But just like Petra, Little Petra was forgotten.
The Nabataeans began to decline about 1300 years ago in the 8th century and the city
was abandoned.
And now for number 6, but first wanted to give a big shout out to
john simonds and Cotty Horn
hi guys and thanks so much for watching and spending time with us!
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6: Lost Egyptian City of Athribis In the lost Egyptian city of Athribis, located
125 miles (201 km) from Luxor, archaeologists have made some fascinating discoveries.
The city itself is at least 2000 years old, forgotten and unexplored until 2003.
That was when archaeologists uncovered a massive temple built for the father of Cleopatra,
Ptolemy XIII.
As it turned out, that temple was built in the city of Athribis, and archaeologists have
since uncovered a sprawling metropolis once home to thousands of people.
But the really cool discovery comes in the form of notebooks.
Archaeologists with the University of Tubingen in Germany have found documents called ostraca.
These were primitive notebooks used by kids in school for writing down grammar exercises,
math problems, and other lessons.
These were also used by ordinary people to create food lists, and to just write down
anything they saw as important.
The difference between ostraca and traditional Egyptian papyrus was that papyrus cost a lot
of money.
Ostraca were just broken pieces of jars that could be written on to make lists.
That's why they were so great for kids to use in school, and for one-time shopping lists.
And in case you were wondering, the notebooks did not contain hieroglyphics. 80% of them
were inscribed in Demotic, a writing style that came around the year 600 BC and persisted
long after the Romans had already gone.
Hieroglyphics weren't used anymore, as the Egyptians were already writing in Coptic,
Demotic, and even Arabic.
5: Great Zimbabwe The lost city of Great Zimbabwe dates back
to the 9th century.
It's considered one of the greatest archaeological marvels anywhere in Africa.
It's one of the only medieval cities still standing in Western Africa.
And yet historians don't know anything about the great civilization that built it.
At least, they don't know a lot.
Archaeologists theorize that Great Zimbabwe was the capital of a major African kingdom.
But they don't know what the kingdom was called.
It was probably the Shona people, but nobody knows for sure.
What we do know is that Zimbabwe translates to “stone houses.”The great capital prospered
from the 9th century to the 15th century, then fell off the map altogether.
The great city of stone housed around 18,000 people at its peak.
It had a royal palace, towering walls 30 feet tall made of dry stone, and its residents
traded as far away as China.
The greatest mystery of all is trying to figure out why such a prosperous city was left vacant.
Around 600 years ago, the locals simply left.
They migrated elsewhere and the city was left a ruin.
4: Secrets of Machu Picchu Machu Picchu is hardly a lost city these days.
It's one of the most Instagramed archaeological sites in the entire world.
But once upon a time, this was a place of mystery.
Recently, archaeologists have taken another look at Machu Picchu in hopes of finding even
more secrets from the city’s past.
And amazingly, they did.
Archaeologists discovered a previously unseen section of the city hiding in the Peruvian
jungle.
They found lost structures, about a dozen of them, clustered less than five miles from
the main site of Machu Picchu Before the Inca were wiped off the map, Machu
Picchu was a site of great spiritual importance.
At the foot of Machu Picchu is the archaeological site of Chachabamba.
Anyone trying to reach the top had to stop here and participate in a spiritual bath.
The only people allowed to the summit, to see Machu Picchu, were those who had been
cleansed and purified.
This new lost city was found not 60 feet (18.2 m) from the main site of Chachabamba.
It was there the whole time, and archaeologists had somehow missed it before.
They've only discovered it now by using LIDAR scanning to identify the remains of the structures
hidden under extremely dense foliage.
They don't know what the place was used for, but suggest it could have been a city for
those who attended the pilgrims passing through Chachabamba.
3: Tongwancheng Tongwancheng was once a great city occupied
by the Huns.
It was the only city the Huns built in Inner Asia.
The great ruler Helian Bobo, founder of the Da Zia Kingdom, made it the regional capital
in 413.
It was a stop along the Silk Road, which brought the residents plenty of wealth.
The city was then abandoned and left to ruin in the Ming Dynasty.
Scientists haven't done much research on this city.
It's barely mentioned anywhere in historical literature, only in passing by several Chinese
historians hundreds of years ago.
One of the reasons the city is so fascinating is that the Huns occupied it up until the
8th century, long after the rest of the Huns had vanished.
The southern Huns were really the last of their people, who dispersed and disappeared
after invading Rome and the empire collapsed in 469.
These Huns cut their losses and moved into what is now China, and became vassals of the
Han Dynasty.
Historians have always believed the Han Dynasty was completely Chinese, but it turns out they
were actually Huns.
It's all quite confusing, but think of it this way.
It's like if one group of Romans moved into Greece after the fall of the empire and gradually
just kind of became Greeks.
That's what happened with the southern Huns in Tongwancheng.
But after 1423, the city was abandoned and nobody knows what became of them.
Nobody found the city again until the 19th century, crumbling and in ruins.
2: Choquequirao Choquequirao is an ancient city in Peru three
times bigger than Machu Picchu and even more well preserved.
It's located in the Andes Mountains, overlooking the Apurimac River in the south.
The only way to reach this place is by hiking two days up the side of the mountain through
dense cloud forests.
The city was constructed around the same time as Machu Picchu, at the height of the Inca
Empire in the late 15th century.
But just like Machu Picchu, its location high up in the mountains allowed it to escape destruction
at the hands of the Spanish.
The Inca still fled the city to escape the invading conquistadors, and it was forgotten
until the Spanish explorer Juan Arias Diaz discovered it in 1710.
Excavations didn't begin for over 250 years later – and even now archaeologists are
trying to uncover the truth of the mysterious jungle ruins.
From what archaeologists have been able to put together so far, Choquequirao was an agricultural
hub for the distribution of coca leaves.
This was a sacred plant to the Inca, and it was here where much of it was produced.
The city has an urban area, which was once lined with beautiful terraces and fountains.
It also has ceremonial complexes and massive agricultural zones.
And to make it even more extraordinary, the whole place is 9842 feet (2999 m) above sea
level.
The Peruvian government is looking to increase access and cash in on tourism to and from
the site as the public are becoming more aware of it.
They recently announced a plan to build a cable car to take 1500 people a day up to
the top.
If you want to see it in its preserved condition without flocks of tourists, now is the time.
1: Chetro Ketl Chetro Ketl is the second-largest great house
in the Chaco Culture National Historical Park of New Mexico.
Previously, Chetro Ketl was occupied by the Ancestral Puebloans, or the Chaco culture,
from between 850 and 1250.
What happened to them after that period is completely unknown.
They built huge, self-contained cities known as great houses all throughout the Four Corners
area of the United States.
There were huge ceremonial structures where rituals were held, trading hubs where visitors
from all over the region came to sell and buy goods, and multi-story houses where the
people lived.
What makes the culture so outstanding is the fact that they built organized cities and
engineered roads in one of the harshest environments in North America.
This is the desert, hot and lifeless.
And yet the Chaco culture thrived there for 400 years.
Chetro Ketl, although it's called a great house, was more of a hive city.
It had 400 rooms minimum, with a surface area of 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares).
At some places, it rose to four stories tall.
It was like a giant apartment building across the desert floor.
Today, only the crumbling foundations of this once magnificent city survive.
Which of these lost cities would you have loved to see in its prime?
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