10.
The City of Teucer Salamis is an ancient archaeological site
in Cypress, located at the mouth of the River Pedieos.
Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation here dating back to the 11th century
BC, from the Late Bronze Age when tribes from Turkey and Greece first settled on the island.
But the site also has some interesting ties to mythology.
Locals once believed the city was founded by Teucer, the son of King Telamon.
He was a renowned archer, a great warrior, and he even had a small part in the Trojan
War fighting alongside his half-brother Ajax the Great.
After Ajax fell on his sword committing suicide and Teucer returned home without his body,
he was disowned by his father and banished from his kingdom.
Teucer was forced to live a life of shame in Cyprus.
But instead of being shamed, he founded the city of Salamis and became a hero.
It's important to say that nobody knows how much of that story is true or if Teucer was
ever a real person, but his legend lives on in these ancient ruins.
By the time the Romans came along, Salamis had become a province of Cilicia.
It was no longer the capital, but the Romans still took interest in the city's prosperity.
They built new buildings and installed gymnasiums, theaters, and public baths.
And then an earthquake destroyed the place, crumbling the structures to the ground.
It declined after this and was finally abandoned by the 7th century AD.
9.
The Sculpture of Decebalus The Sculpture of Decebalus is kind of like
the Mount Rushmore of Romania.
Overlooking the mighty Danube River on a rocky outcrop at the border of Romania and Serbia
is a face carved in the mountain.
It's a spectacular sight unlike any other in Europe.
The face is monumental, like something you would expect to read in a Lord of the Rings
book about some forgotten ruler carved in the stone of a mythical land.
But the truth is that the face belongs to someone who lived roughly 2000 years ago,
between 87-106 AD.
The face belongs to Decebalus, who was the last king of Dacia and battled fiercely against
two of the most notorious Roman emperors: Trajan and Domitian.
Decebalus fought three major wars.
The first was against a raiding party of Romans trying to invade his region.
He beat them back and managed to secure full independence for Dacia.
But then when Trajan came to power, Dacia faced invasion yet again.
This time, Decebalus was defeated in the year 102 AD.
Even with his defeat, he managed to remain in power.
He regrouped and fought the emperor again in 105 AD, but was utterly decimated.
Emperor Trajan reduced the Dacian capital to a pile of smoldering ruins and the last
king of Dacia was dead.
Now here's the twist.
The sculpture of this great king was made 2000 years after his demise!
Even though it does look like an ancient place from a storybook, it was constructed between
1994 and 2004.
Still, you can just ignore that part and marvel at the face of one of the last great kings
of old.
8.
The House of the Eagles There are two ancient historic sites in the
small Mexican town of Malinalco.
The first is a stunning complex constructed by the Aztecs back in 1476.
The other side is an Augustinian monastery built-in 1540 named Divino Salvador, which
is still in use to this very day.
The contrast is amazing because one section of the town has the ruins of an Aztec temple
known as the House of the Eagles, carved on the side of a hill – and on the other side
is a monastery left behind by the Spanish invaders.
Only about six decades separate the two structures, so we can physically see in the same place
just how quickly Mexico changed.
The great temples of the Aztecs were forgotten and the monumental churches to the Christian
God rose in their place.
But the House of the Eagles is astonishing for another reason.
Like I said already, it was built directly into the hillside.
That makes it the only example of a rock-hewn structure anywhere in the Aztec world, and
one of only a few in the Americas.
The Aztecs didn't carve temples out of caves but preferred to build freestanding structures.
And here's the thing about Divino Salvador.
This monastery features incredible murals of biblical scenes.
But they weren't painted by Spaniards.
The Spanish forced the subjugated Aztecs to do the paintings for them.
The result is something truly epic in the world of Christian artwork.
The Aztecs were sour about being defeated by the invaders and then forced to do their
dirty work.
And so, they managed to slip their own religious and cosmological beliefs into the art, melding
Aztec symbology with Christian ideas.
7.
The Temple of Amada The Temple of Amada in Egypt is the oldest
temple ever found in Nubia.
It’s part of a larger archaeological compound with three ancient monuments rising from the
sand.
These monuments are all that have been spared from the rising waters of Lake Nasser.
The temple was built during the reign of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, around 1458 to 1401
BC.
Later rulers built upon the original structure as the years went by, such as Thutmose IV
and Akhenaten.
At one point, the name Amun was scrubbed from every part of the structure in a desperate
bid to get rid of the ancient Egyptian gods.
It was Akhenaten who did that.
But shortly after his death, Seti I restored the old gods, and the temple was returned
to its former glory.
Nubia is a region in the south of Egypt and the north of Sudan, defined by the first cataract
of the Nile River.
It was the farthest corner of the Egyptian Empire but was more closely associated with
the Nubian Kingdoms.
They had the largest number of pyramids in the world and were known for being a thorn
in Egypts side.
6.
Lepenski Vir Lepenski Vir can be found on the banks of
the Danube River in modern Serbia.
The site is something of an archaeological mystery.
It shows evidence of habitation going back 8000 years, yet the culture that lived here
is puzzling at best.
We know they had their social structure, their mysterious religious practices, and their
unique architecture.
But we don't know who they were.
One of the weirdest things about Lepenski Vir is the collection of stone sculptures
that have been excavated from the site.
Most appear to be human-like, alien figures, and they may have had something to do with
astronomical events.
The site was discovered relatively recently, in the 1960s.
Serbian archaeologists uncovered 136 residential buildings unexpectedly after the construction
began on a hydroelectric power plant.
But at first, they didn’t discover anything except the ruins.
It would be nearly five years until they came across the first objects, and they've never
been able to properly place them since.
The thing is that whichever culture lived here, it was one of the very first in Europe.
They don't have a name, we don't know who their dozens of bizarre sculptures were supposed
to imitate – only that they may have been used in cosmic rituals.
They show evidence of being the most advanced civilization in Europe during the Neolithic
era, yet scientists are left grasping at straws trying to describe who they were.
5.
The Ancient City of Thera The ancient city of Thera was founded about
3000 years ago in the 9th century BC by Dorian colonists.
Like many ruined cities in the Mediterranean that started during the rise of civilization,
Thera has its roots in mythology.
Legend has it the great Warrior Theras was a descendant of Cadmus of Phoenicia and the
son of the king of Thebes.
He established his new city on an uninhabited island, and he named them both after himself.
No matter who founded Thera, the city prospered over the centuries as a trading hub.
It connected Greek cities on the mainland with those on other Greek islands.
They had direct ties to places like Athens and Rhodes.
And by the 3rd century BC, the legendary city of Thera had become a major maritime station.
The city underwent dramatic reconstruction, changing the whole grid to better accommodate
the navy.
Because of this, almost no buildings from the first 700 years of its life have been
found.
They were all demolished or rebuilt into more contemporary structures.
That does seem like the smart thing to do after nearly 1000 years of continuous habitation.
And again, like many other cities in the Mediterranean, destruction came at the beginning of the 8th
century.
A great eruption of the Santorini volcano buried Thera in pumice and ash and it was
abandoned after 726 AD.
4.
The Lost City of the Inca The city of Cusco in Peru was the epicenter
of the Inca civilization.
It was from Cusco where men and women set out to the other great sites high in the Andes,
like Machu Picchu.
But there was also another city in the region, one shrouded in the Peruvian Amazon and lost
for centuries.
It's called Paititi, and explorers have been trying to find it for the last 400 years.
The closest anyone came was in 1979 when a pair of French- Peruvian explorers uncovered
the lost settlement of Mameria.
This proved that there are lost cities in the Amazon jungle of Peru, but that they’re
tough to find.
All these years later, Paititi still has not been found.
Some don't even believe it's a real place, and that it’s more of a ghost story than
anything.
The only reliable record of its existence goes back to 1600 when a missionary named
Andres Lopez wrote a letter to the Vatican describing a lost city filled with gold deep
in the jungle.
Its name was Paititi.
People are still searching for it.
As recently as 2016, expeditions have been made to locate the lost city in the jungle.
But as of right now, it looks like this mysterious place simply refuses to be found.
3.
The Borobudur Temple Compounds Borobudur is a place not too many people have
heard of, yet it's one of the biggest and most complete collections of Buddhist reliefs
in the world.
It's the biggest Buddhist temple on Earth, constructed in the 9th century in Central
Java, Indonesia.
It was an unbelievably impressive feat of engineering 1100 years ago, consisting of
nine stacked platforms topped with a huge central dome.
It’s decorated with over 2600 relief panels and over 500 statues of the Buddha.
And as if all that wasn't impressive enough, the central dome is hemmed by a collection
of 72 immense Buddha statues, each one sitting inside of its perforated stupa.
The point I'm trying to make is that the temple here is pretty amazing.
It was built in a typical Javanese Buddhist style during the reign of the Sailendra Dynasty.
It also mixes ancient Javanese beliefs with the Buddhist idea of attaining Nirvana, a
kind of artistic blend of Southeast Asia and India.
But just what in the world is the point of this massive, megalithic temple?
Well, it was intended to be a shrine to the Buddha, just as any cathedral is a shrine
to the Christian God.
It is also to this day a major destination for Buddhist pilgrimages.
The temple represents the three levels of Buddhist cosmology.
There's the world of desire, the world of forms, and then the world of formlessness.
Pilgrims must ascend the temple by moving through the three symbolic layers, winding
through a system of stairways and corridors to reach the very top.
2.
Ukrainian Mega Structures Archaeologists in Europe have discovered some
interesting new facts about a Ukrainian megastructure discovered in a prehistoric settlement.
The discovery was made near the tiny village of Maidanetske, roughly 146mi (235km) from
the capital.
And although it may be occupied by modern Ukrainians now, 4000 years ago it belonged
to the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture.
It was also one of the biggest establishments in Eastern Europe, housing roughly 10,000
people in a space of several hundred acres.
Because so much time has gone by, not much evidence of the culture’s social identity
is left.
They're most renowned for the amazing pottery scraps that have been found scattered throughout
their settlements.
But recently, Robert Hofmann from Kiel University in Germany used high-resolution magnetometry
surveys to see what was buried underneath the soil.
They uncovered evidence of plenty of normal houses, most no larger than 49ft (15m) long.
But they also found massive megastructures over 210ft (64m) long, like enormous longhouses.
So far, the team has identified over 100 of these structures throughout 19 mysterious
European settlements.
At first, it was all very confusing.
But archaeologists now believe they were used as a sort of town hall structure.
In other words, these were giant public buildings.
Yet nobody knows what went on inside of them.
They probably held meetings or tribunals.
There's just no way we can look into the past and see what kind of crazy community activities
were happening in these places 4000 years ago.
1.
Chogha Zanbil Chogha Zanbil is a destroyed palace and temple
complex in the southwestern region of Iran.
There's not much left except broken stone now, but it was once a pretty impressive place.
The most important part of Chogha Zanbil was its magnificent ziggurat, likely the biggest
one ever built in Iran.
It’s still 80ft (24m) tall, and experts guess it was once more than double that.
But the ziggurat wasn't just a towering, tiered pyramid that loomed over the city and cast
a shadow over it.
This was also a stunning sight.
Its entire facade was once covered in blue and green terracotta, which would have made
it shimmer brightly in the hot desert sun like a glistening jewel.
The interior of the ziggurat was decorated with glass and ivory, and there was a huge
temple dedicated to the bull god Susa standing near its entrance.
People came from far and wide to see the ziggurat, treating it almost like a stairway to heaven.
There were even rumors that Susa himself lived in the temple in secret and ascended to the
heavens each night to rest.
The temple complex was so big that it never even got finished.
When it was attacked in the year 640 BC by the Assyrians, there were still a lot of projects
that hadn't been finished.
But the Assyrians didn't care.
They burned Chogha Zanbil to the ground and it’s remained a ruin ever since.
Which of these amazing archaeological sites would you love to see with your own two eyes?
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