8 Ruined Cities That Remain a Mystery to This Day

The world is full of ruined cities, but some have such mysterious rises and falls that they haunt our imaginations. Even if we know who built them, certain aspects of the city may simply defy comprehension in the modern age. Here are 8 ancient cities that we may never fully understand. Photo via Franck Goddio 1. atalhyk, Turkey

In 7,500 BCE, this city in the Mesopotamian region (now Turkey) held thousands of people and is believed by many to be one of the world's earliest urban settlements. But the culture of the people here was unlike anything we know today. First of all, they built the city like a honeycomb, with houses sharing walls. Homes and buildings were accessed by doors cut into the roofs. People would stroll on the streets across these roofs, and climb down ladders to get to their living quarters. Doorways were often marked with bulls' horns, and dead family members were buried in the floor of each home. It's not clear what happened to the culture of the people who lived in this city. Their architectural style seems to be unique, though archaeologists have found many fertility goddess figurines in the city that resemble others found in the region. So it's likely that when the city was abandoned, its culture radiated outward into other cities in the Mesopotamian region.

Ancient graves suggest that family didn't really matter 9,000 years ago

atalhyk is one of the world's most ancient settlements, founded in what is now Turkey around 7,500 BCE. New analysis of the village's dead reveals something strange about this ancient village: nobody cared very much about family ties. First discovered in the 1950s, atalhyk was once home to about 10,000 people and covered roughly 100,000 square meters. It represented the most dramatic departure yet for humans from the nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence that had defined our species and our evolutionary ancestors for millions of years. The agriculturalists of atalhyk lived in mud-brick houses, all of which were crammed tight together without any streets in between. Instead of doors, residents would climb ladders and then enter the houses through the roof. As you might imagine, these houses were a defining aspect of the lives of their various residents, who decorated the walls with elaborate artwork and buried their dead under the floor, with each house containing about thirty corpses beneath them. It's those bodies that drew the attention of US military anthropologist Marin Pilloud and Ohio State's Clark Spencer Larsen, who set about trying to determine just how the corpses were related. After nearly a hundred centuries, there's no DNA evidence left to tie the various bodies together, but Pilloud and Larsen hit upon the next best thing: teeth. Generally speaking, family members will share similar features in their teeth, and in the absence of other means can be used as a way to establish in a general way who was related to who. And that's where things get weird - according to their analysis of 266 corpses, people generally weren't buried with their relatives. Only a single house from atalhyk defied that rule, with every other building a mishmash of unrelated corpses. This is particularly intriguing because strong family ties are often considered the defining characteristic of hunter-gather societies, a way of life that atalhyk residents had only relatively recently left behind. Pilloud explains: "It speaks a lot to the type of social structure that they might have had. It doesn't look as if there was a strong genetic component to determining who would be buried together. I'm not trying to argue that biological relationships would not have been perhaps meaningful to the people at atalhyk. [It] wasn't the sole defining principle much like we presume it was in the hunter-gatherer era."

This new research offers some of the most persuasive evidence yet for a particularly interpretation of how society was organized at atalhyk. Instead of arranging people in terms of blood relations, the houses were defined in terms of what tools and food resources its members could claim ownership. In this view, the houses were divided into several homes, and while these smaller units might have been organized as families, the house as a whole was more concerned with who was best equipped to handle various tasks, regardless of biological relationship. Pilloud continues: Before you were hunters and gatherers, in loose groups that were very highly mobile. Now you're all tied together, and you're all living in close quarters. They might have called on other groups of individuals, outside of their biological family, to do things like take the herd to the pasture or to help with the harvest, things that might have required more people." Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder, who has directed excavations at atalhyk since 1993, says this is evidence that the shift to a more complex agricultural society required the village's inhabitants to rely on stronger bonds that mere biological kinship: "Membership of the house was not based on biological kin but on a wide range of processes by which people could join the house. What distinguishes each entity is their co-ownership of a series of resources. I think that as society becomes more sedentary and complex that kinship itself doesn't seem to be sufficient to hold it together. This is suggesting that they've got [a] sufficiently complex level that they needed something more complex than kinship." 2. Palenque, Mexico

As one of the largest and best preserved of the Maya city-states, Palenque is emblematic of the mystery of the entire Maya civilization which rose up, dominated parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, then vanished with little explanation. Though descendants of the Maya are still thriving in Mexico and Central America, no one is sure why the great cities of the Maya fell into ruin and were finally abandoned in the 1400s. Palenque was in its heyday during the classical period of the Maya civilization, from about 700-1100 CE. Like many Maya cities, it had temples, palaces, and marketplaces. But Palenque, located near what is today known as the Chiapas region, has some of the most detailed sculptures and inscriptions from the Maya civilization, offering reams of historical information about kings, battles, and daily life. Theories for why this and other Maya cities were abandoned include warfare, famine, and climate change.

What really destroyed the Maya civilization?

One of the biggest debates in archaeology is what destroyed the extensive, highly-advanced Maya civilization 1,000 years ago. It's known that the empire went through a long collapse from roughly 800 to 1,000, leaving behind a network of pyramids and monumental architecture in the Yucatn jungles. But why? We have only educated guesses, and one of the most widely-believed theories is that some kind of climate catastrophe drove the Maya to abandon their cities in droves. Now, two Earth scientists have carefully analyzed rock samples from the Yucatn, which revealed water levels in local lakes, as well as chemical traces that show likely rainfall over the decades of the collapse. What the scientists found was more evidence that the region suffered from drought during the typically rainy summers but the drought was fairly mild. There were probably fewer hurricanes in the ocean driving rainstorms to land. In a paper published today in Science, researchers Martn Medina-Elizalde and Eelco J. Rohling call it "a succession of extended drought periods interrupted by brief recoveries." Is it really possible that a mild drought, no matter how many centuries it lasted, could really topple an empire? After all, civilizations in Europe have endured everything from plagues to the Little Ice Age, and people did not abandon the cities. Medina-Elizalde and Rohling suggest:

If these repeated episodes of drier climate had a significant role in the fate of the Classic Maya civilization, as suggested by archaeological evidence, then this would imply that the ecological carrying capacity of the Yucatn Peninsula is highly sensitive to precipitation reductions. In other words, it's possible that it didn't take much of a drought to usher in a catastrophic series of crop losses or other environmental problems. And these problems, in turn, could foment dramatic social upheavals. The scientists note that this does not bode well for the future of the region, since in coming decades the Yucatn Peninsula is likely to experience "modest reductions in precipitation" like those during the collapse of the Maya civilization.

Were the Maya brought down by a small shift in climate, or were there complicated political issues involved as well? Other archaeologists explain that the Maya were at war for much of the collapse period, and indeed, had enormous wars throughout much of their history. Ultimately, we have to consider the possibility that it wasn't simply a mild drought that destroyed the Empire, but that the Empire also destroyed itself the way many great European and Asian powers have by waging war until their resources were depleted and no willing soldiers were left. The Maya probably weren't just passive victims of climate change. They were a powerful polity, spread out across huge swathes of the Yucatn. They had advanced agricultural techniques, and new LiDAR studies of regions

around Maya center Caracol reveal that they remolded much of the land in the area to make way for farms, roads, and homes. Given their technological sophistication, it's possible that the Maya might have survived the drought if it hadn't been for war taxing their resources. In other words, the Mayan Empire's demise may have resulted from a mix of social and environmental factors, and would have been far more complex than mere food shortages due to drought.

Volcanoes caused a "little ice age" in Europe 500 years ago, say scientists

From 1550 to 1850, Earth mysteriously got colder. Communities from Greenland to the Alps were swallowed up by glaciers, and bodies of water like the Baltic Sea and Manhattan Harbor froze over. But what caused this Little Ice Age? A lot of explanations have been put forward to explain this mysterious cooling, including particularly weak solar activity, changes in the Earth's orbit, and just the general variability of climate over time. Indeed, one of the more intriguing proposals is that the massive waves of death that struck the human population - first with the Black Death in the 14th and 15th centuries, and then the widespread death of indigenous Americans after European contact - caused massive amounts of former agricultural land to become forests again, absorbing lots more carbon dioxide and cooling the planet. They're all intriguing theories, and it's certainly possible that a combination of more than one of these could have played a role in sparking the Little Ice Age, but the precise cause of it all has remained elusive. Part of what makes this mystery so difficult to solve is that no one knows exactly when the Little Ice Age got started - we know its effects kicked in around 1550, but it's likely that Earth's climate was quietly cooling down long before that. Now an international team of American, British, and Icelandic scientists think they may have located the main culprits behind the Little Ice Age: a quartet of massive eruptions by tropical volcanoes. Around 1300, there was a fifty-year period in which the four volcanoes went off, shooting up enough ash and aerosol particles into the atmosphere to make summers to blot out sunlight and make summers cooler.

That in and of itself was just a temporary effect, but it kicked off a chain reaction that would almost freeze Europe solid 250 years later. According to the scientists' computer simulations, these volcanocooled summers would cause sea ice to expand, sending huge glaciers hurtling down the then relatively temperate Greenland coast. As the sea ice reached the North Atlantic, it would have melted, mixing with the regular ocean water. The problem is that the ice had almost no salt in it, which caused the less salty surface water to stop mixing with the denser water below. This in turn would have wreaked havoc on ocean currents in the Atlantic, with the upshot being that less and less warm water could make its way back to the Arctic. An Ice Age was now on its way. In a statement, lead author Gifford Miller explains the team's findings: "This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age. We also have provided an understandable climate feedback system that explains how this cold period could be sustained for a long period of time. If the climate system is hit again and again by cold conditions over a relatively short period-in this case, from volcanic eruptions-there appears to be a cumulative cooling effect." To support their model, the scientists have identified over 150 samples of dead plant material from newly uncovered ground on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Carbon dating revealed that a huge number of the plants had died between 1275 and 1300, which definitely suggests some short-term climate catastrophe - like a series of massive volcanic eruptions, say - washed over the world around that time. Analysis of the annual layers of sediment trapped in an Icelandic glacial lake also show signs of a cooler climate in the late 1200s, supporting the idea that this was a global phenomenon. The Little Ice Age seems unreal to us today, and it brought its fair share of tragedy - the Norse colonies in Greenland were among the first wiped out by this period of cooling, and advancing glaciers destroyed mountain communities. Crops failed in the colder temperatures, sparking devastating famines, and historian Wolfgang Behringer has suggested that the revival of witch-hunts was a reaction to the otherwise mysterious loss of agriculture. But this transformed world also left some remarkable images and stories of how the world dealt with this unprecedented cold. In Europe, artists generally interpreted the world as one gigantic ice skating rink, as you can see in the painting up top created by Hendrick Avercamp in 1608. Across the world, people could walk on ice from Manhattan to Staten Island, and makeshift inns were set up on the frozen Baltic Sea as people sledged from Poland to Sweden. For more on The Little Ice Age, check out Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History. Scientific paper in Geophysical Research Letters.

No, the Sun is not about to plunge us into a new Ice Age

The Sun has been unusually quiet lately, with the solar wind the slowest it's been in 50 years and the sunspot cycle reduced to nothing more than the occasional belch. But don't believe reports that this spells doom for humanity. The Sun should be on an 11-year sunspot cycle, in which huge disturbances on the Sun's atmosphere become more and more pronounced until they reach a maximum of activity in 2013. But despite a few dramatic examples of sunspot activity, we're still way behind where we should be for this solar cycle, and it looks like the 2013 maximum is going to be one of the weakest on record. Moreover, this cycle may be so weak that it spawns an even more anemic cycle, meaning the predicted maximum in 2022 will be barely noticeable. The magnetic fields that create these sunspots have been weakening for some time now, and the winds that should be found beneath the visible surface of the Sun have not been detected. All signs point to the Sun entering a period of mini-hibernation, perhaps even entering what's known as a grand minimum in which sunspots are not seen again for decades. The last known grand minimum was the Maunder Minimum between 1645 and 1715, a period of general cooling that is sometimes known as the Little Ice Age. This has been picked up by a number of news outlets, with the more sensational conclusion being that we're headed for a mini ice age all our own. There are a number of problems with this idea, not the least of which is the fact that not all climate scientists are convinced that grand minima can actually cool the Earth - it's possible that the Little Ice Age was coincidental to the Maunder Minimum. But even if a grand minimum can cool the Earth, its effects would be very minor relative to existing climatic pressures. Climate scientists recently simulated what would happen to the Earth if a grand minimum started now and lasted until 2100, a good thirty years longer than the Little Ice Age. They found that global temperatures would at most drop by about 0.3 degrees Celsius. While even that might have some minor effects, it's nothing compared to the predicted temperature increase from global warming, as greenhouse gases are predicted to raise global temperatures anywhere from 2 to 4.5 degrees. So then, the effects of the grand minimum would need to be about ten times stronger than the simulations suggests they ever possibly could be for them to have any chance of overriding the effects of climate change. A Little Ice Age might sound rather nice under the current climate circumstances, but unfortunately the Sun won't be able to bail us out of this mess.

3. Cahokia, United States

Located across the Mississippi River from what is today St. Louis, Cahokia was for hundreds of years the biggest city in North America. Its inhabitants built enormous earthen mounds some of which you can still visit today and vast plazas which served as markets and meeting places. There is strong evidence that the inhabitants had very sophisticated agricultural practices, and that they diverted tributaries of the Mississippi several times to water their fields. Like the Maya, the people of Cahokia were at their civilizational height between 600-1400 CE. Nobody is certain why the city was abandoned, nor how the region was able to support such a high-density urban civilization of up to 40,000 people for hundreds of years.

10 Civilizations That Disappeared Under Mysterious Circumstances

For almost as long as we've had civilization, we've lost it. There are records going back hundreds of years of explorers discovering huge temples encrusted with jungle, or giant pits full of treasure that were once grand palaces. Why did people abandon these once-thriving cities, agricultural centers, and trade routes? Often, the answer is unknown. Here are ten great civilizations whose demise remains a mystery. 1. The Maya

The Maya are perhaps the classic example of a civilization that was completely lost, its great monuments, cities and roads swallowed up by the central American jungles, and its peoples scattered to small villages. Though the languages and traditions of the Maya still survive up to the present day, the civilization's peak was during the first millennium AD, when their greatest architectural feats and massive agricultural projects covered a vast region in the Yucatn today, an area stretching from Mexico to Guatemala and Belize. One of the largest Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya made extensive use of writing, math, an elaborate calendar, and sophisticated engineering to build their pyramids and terraced farms. Though it's often said that the Maya civilization began a mysterious decline in roughly the year 900, a great deal of evidence points to climate change in the Yucatn combined with internecine warfare, which resulted in famine and abandonment of the city centers.

2. Indus Valley Civilization

One of the great civilizations of the ancient world is called simply the Indus or Harappan civilization. Thousands of years ago, it may have boasted up to 5 million people, almost 10 percent of the world's population, spread over a region that encompassed parts of today's India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. But its grand walkways (with sophisticated roadside drainage), metallurgy shops, and massive, multistory, brick hives of houses were abandoned over 3,000 years ago. It's likely that this ancient civilization, like the Maya, suffered from gradual changes in rainfall patterns that made it difficult for its peoples to raise enough food for their massive population.

Climate change ended one of the great ancient civilizations

The Indus or Harappan Civilization was one of the greatest societies in the ancient world. Contemporary with Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, its population is thought to have made up 10% of the world at one point. Yet, between 3900 and 3000 years ago, the cities crumbled and the people disappeared. What went wrong, and what can we learn from its demise? Top image: Comrogues on Flickr A recent, major interdisciplinary undertaking has delved into the geology of the region in this period, and it seems that this major civilization sprung up in a perfect climactic window which then closed, bringing about its eventual downfall. The Indus Valley at this point was in the process of gradually declining monsoons. These onceunstoppable torrents of water had rendered the area uninhabitable for permanent settlements. But as the monsoons reduced, they left in their wake ultra-fertile soil. For 2,000 years, the ensuing society relied on crop surpluses brought about by manageable monsoons, and the rich soils they brought. However, the rains continued to lessen, and these monsoon floods became unreliable. This caused a shift away from the large cities and the surpluses that the Harappans needed to continue, and instead people migrated Eastward. Dorian Fuller of University College London said in a press release: "We can envision that this eastern shift involved a change to more localized forms of economy: smaller communities supported by local rain-fed farming and dwindling streams. This may have produced smaller surpluses, and would not have supported large cities, but would have been reliable...thus cities collapsed, but smaller agricultural communities were sustainable and flourished. Many of the urban arts, such as writing, faded away, but agriculture continued and actually diversified."

By combining millennia-old soil samples, satellite photos and topographic data collected by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), and archaeological data, the researchers unearthed what caused the collapse of an immense and sophisticated urban culture thousands of years ago.

3. Easter Island

The people of Eastern Island represent another classic "lost" civilization, famed in part for its enigmatic, enormous stone statues of human heads (called Moai) lined up along the island's coastline. How did this thriving Polynesian civilization disappear after centuries of monument-building and navigating hundreds of miles of ocean waters to go from island to island? Jared Diamond sums up what many scientists now believe in his book Collapse, which is that the Easter Islanders were incredibly sophisticated, but their methods weren't sustainable. During the time they settled Easter Island, possibly between 700-1200 AD, they used up all the island's trees and agricultural resources, and then had to move on. 4. Catalhyk

Often called the world's oldest city, Catalhyk was part of a large city-building and agricultural civilization thriving between 9,000-7,000 years ago in what is today south-central Turkey. What's

interesting about Catalhyk is its structure, which is quite unlike most other cities since. It contained no roads as we know them, and was instead built sort of like a hive, with houses built next to each other and entered through holes in the roofs. It's believed that people farmed everything from wheat to almonds outside the city walls, and got to their homes via ladders and sidewalks that traversed their roofs. Often, these people decorated the entrances to their homes with bull skulls, and buried the bones of their honored dead beneath the packed dirt of their floors. The civilization was pre-Iron Age and pre-literate, but they nevertheless left behind ample evidence of a sophisticated society, full of art and and public ritual, that was possibly 10,000 strong at many points in its 2,000 year existence. Why did people eventually abandon the city? It is unknown. 5. Cahokia

Long before Europeans made it to North America, the so-called Mississippians had build a great city surrounded by huge earthen pyramids and a Stonehenge-like structure made of wood to track the movements of the stars. Called Cahokia today, you can still see its remains in Illinois. At its height between 600-1400 AD, the city sprawled across 6 square miles, and contained almost a hundred earthen mounds as well as an enormous grand plaza at its center. Its population might have been as much as 40,000 people, some of whom would have lived in outlying villages. The people of this great city, the biggest so far north in Mesoamerica, were brilliant artists, architects, and farmers, creating incredible art with shells, copper, and stone. They even diverted a branch of the local Mississippi and Illinois rivers to suit their needs for irrigation. It's not entirely certain what led people to abandon the city starting in the 1200s, but some archaeologists say the city had always had problems with disease and famine (it had no sanitary system to speak of), and that people left for greener (and healthier) pastures elsewhere on the Mississippi River. 6. Gbekli Tepe

One of the most mysterious human structures ever discovered, Gbekli Tepe was probably built in 10,000 BCE, and is located in today's southern Turkey. A series of nested, circular walls and steles, or monoliths, carved evocatively with animals, the place probably served as a temple for nomadic tribes in the area. It was not a permanent residence, though it's possible a few priests lived there all year. It is the first permanent human-built structure that we have ever found, and probably represented the pinnacle of the local Mesopotamian civilization of its era. What were people worshiping there? When did they come? Were they there to do something other than worship? We may never know, but archaeologists are working hard to find out.

The mysterious remains of one of the world's first organized religions

Homo sapiens may have had religion since the dawn of our evolution, but building vast monuments to our beliefs is a relatively recent development. And by "recent," I mean 11,600 years ago. Archaeologists believe they've found the oldest temple ever built, in southern Turkey. Called Gbekli Tepe, it is perhaps the world's first example of a vast, monumental architecture project. And these photographs of it reveal a world where spiritual beliefs are, possibly for the first time, dramatically remolding the landscape. It is both an utterly alien and utterly familiar place. In National Geographic, Charles C. Mann explains what we're seeing in Vincent J. Musi's incredible photos:

To [archaeologist Klaus] Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loinclothdraped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle-as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says-a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems . . . Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones-a second, smaller ring, inside the first. Sometimes, later, they installed a third. Then the whole assemblage would be filled in with debris, and an entirely new circle created nearby. The site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.

Schmidt said the amazing this about this find is that it proves that nomadic people are capable of creating vast, monumental architecture. He added: These people were foragers. Our picture of foragers was always just small, mobile groups, a few dozen people. They cannot make big permanent structures, we thought, because they must move around to follow the resources. They can't maintain a separate class of priests and craft workers, because they can't carry around all the extra supplies to feed them. Then here is Gbekli Tepe, and they obviously did that. This sheds a new light on early human development, in which our ancestors spent tens of thousands of years as foragers. It also offers the possibility that humans first learned to settle down by creating monuments where worship, feasting, and general social bonding took place. Maybe cities started with monuments devoted to dancing.

Read more about the weird, unexplainable remains they've discovered at Gbekli Tepe via National Geographic

7. Angkor

Most people have heard of the magnificent temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia. But it was only one small part of a massive urban civilization during the Khmer Empire called Angkor. The city flourished during the late middle ages, from 1000-1200 AD, and may have supported up to a million people. There are a lot of good reasons why Angkor may have fallen, ranging from war to natural disaster. Now most of it lies beneath the jungle. A marvel of architecture and Hindu culture, the city is mysterious mostly because we still aren't certain how many people lived there. Given all the roads and canals connecting its many regions, some archaeologists believe it may have been the biggest urban site in the world at its height. 8. The Turquoise Mountain

Though not every crumbling monument represents a lost civilization, some of them do. Such is the case with the Minaret of Jam, a gorgeous architectural feat built in the 1100s as part of a city in Afghanistan, where archaeological remains suggest that it was a cosmopolitan area where many religions, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, lived together harmoniously for hundreds of years. It's possible that the incredible minaret was part of the lost medieval capital of Afghanistan, called Turquoise Mountain.

A medieval monument to religious pluralism, hidden in the mountains of Afghanistan

One of the great wonders of the medieval world is a very tall, heavily ornamented minaret nestled in a green valley at the edge of the Jam river in what is now Afghanistan. Often called the Minaret of Jam, the monument was almost a millenium ago illuminated by a torch at its top, and surrounded by a thriving town with small industries and outlying farms. What's remarkable is that the writing on the minaret and archaeological remains nearby strongly suggest that the city harbored a population of Muslims, Christians and Jews. Writing on the minaret is a detailed transcription from the Koran that celebrates the life of Mary, mother of Jesus, highlighting the connections between Islam and other religions. Nearby there is a Jewish graveyard, which is another hint that people of different religions were living peacefully together. Was this lost city once a bastion of medieval tolerance?

Some archaeologists believe the region around the Minaret of Jam was once called Firuzkuh and was the summer capitol of the Ghurids () , a Muslim empire in the 11th and 12th centuries, that spanned all of what we know now as Afghanistan as well as parts of eastern Iran and northern India. This map shows its location.

Today, it is a very remote outpost in Afghanistan's Ghor province, surrounded by a few farms and little else.

It is almost impossible for outsiders to get to the area, though it was declared a world heritage site, and preservation groups are working to prevent the tower from falling over (earthquakes in the area have caused it to lean). Several years ago, UK architecture critic Dan Cruikshank described his difficult journey past police and insurgents to reach the minaret and film it for a BBC special.

But, he said seeing this incredible monument was still worth the risk: The minaret is made of hard yellow brick. As I stood before it, I saw that it is in this material that the building's most striking message is written. Its shaft is a dazzling display of virtuoso brickwork, with geometric forms incorporating Islamic eight-pointed stars and Kufic lettering. There is a panel bearing the date of construction: 1193/4. But, more importantly, the lower portion bears the entire 19th sura of the Koran. This chapter, called Maryam, tells of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, both venerated in Islam, and of prophets such as Abraham and Isaac. It's a text that emphasises what Judaism, Christianity and Islam have in common, rather than their differences. It seems the Ghorids placed the text here to appeal for harmony and tolerance in the land, a message that is more relevant now than ever.

Inside, I found a stupendous, engineered construction, with two spiral staircases winding around each other to form a double helix. This strong construction, combined with the fine brickwork, has preserved the structure from earthquakes and neglect.

The minaret is the second largest of its kind in the world. It still stands today, a monument to humans' constant struggle to live in peace together, against all odds. Read more, and see more pictures, via Dark Roasted Blend (thanks for the tip, Marilyn Terrell!)

9. Niya

Now a desolate spot in the Taklamakan Desert of Xinjiang province in China, 1600 years ago Niya was a thriving city in an oasis along the famous Silk Road. For the past two centuries, archaeologists have uncovered countless treasures in the dusty, shattered remains of what was once a graceful town full of wooden houses and temples. In a sense, Niya is a relic of the lost civilization of the early Silk Road, a trade route that linked China with Central Asia, Africa, and Europe. Many groups traveled the Silk Road, from wealthy merchants and religious pilgrims to scholars and scientists, exchanging ideas and creating a complex, enlightened culture everywhere the 4,000 mile Silk Road passed. The route underwent many changes, but its importance as a trade route waned as the Mongol Empire collapsed in the 1300s. Traders afterwards preferred sea routes for trade with China. 10. Nabta Playa

From 7000 and 6500 BCE, an incredible urban community arose in what is today the Egyptian Sahara. The people who lived there domesticated cattle, farmed, created elaborate ceramics, and left behind stone circles that offer evidence that their civilization included astronomers as well.Archaeologists believe the peoples of Nabta Playa were likely the precursor civilization for the great Nile cities that arose in Egypt thousands of years later. Though the Nabta civilization is today located in an arid region, it arose at a time when monsoon patterns had shifted, filling the playa with a lake and making it possible for a large culture to bloom.

4. Derinkuyu, Turkey

Derinkuyu is an enormous, ancient underground city that dates back to the early Byzantine Empire. It's unknown when the city was begun some sources say as early at the 7th century BCE but it wouldn't have reached its greatest size until the period between 500-1000 CE, when it was five stories deep with room for 20,000 people, plus livestock, kitchens, a church, and a wine-making facility. Locals dug tunnels and rooms beneath their homes, deep into the soft, sandy volcanic rock of the central Turkish region of Cappadocia. An entire underground civilization was thriving here during the middle ages, which could provide a model for future communities trying to survive an apocalypse. For centuries, people had fled to the area to find a safe haven from anti-Christian Romans, bandits, and later, anti-Christian Muslims. Massive rocks could be rolled across the entrances, and air shafts kept the place ventilated while people lived inside for months at a time. Eventually, long shafts were dug to connect Derinkuyu with other underground cities in the area. The was city was sealed up at some point after the 10th century, and was only reopened to the public in 1969. 5. Pompeii, Italy

There are ample historical records that document the Roman vacation town of Pompeii, which was entombed in ash after the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. We know that the city was partially destroyed by an earthquake years before the volcano erupted, and that many of its greatest homes were already abandoned by the time the final blast erased the city forever. We even know, from historical records, that Vesuvius started smoking and causing quakes in the days leading up to the fatal eruption. So what's the mystery? ecause Pompeii was perfectly preserved in the exact configuration it had in 79 CE, there are hundreds of historical details that are utterly alien to contemporary eyes including decorative penis statues, weird graffiti, inexplicable art, and living arrangements that are unlike anything you'd see in a modern city. It's one thing to read historical accounts of ancient Rome, and another thing to walk the streets of a Roman city unchanged since the height of the Empire. The mysteries of everyday life are often greater than the mysteries of how a civilization collapses.

The Lost City of Pompeii: Pictures of an Alien World, Frozen in Time

In the year 79 AD, Italy's Mt. Vesuvius erupted with superheated ash that rained fiery death on several Roman cities nearby. But none was hit harder than vacation town Pompeii, which was buried in a thick layer of broiling ash in a matter of seconds. That ash killed over 1,000 people instantly and buried the town, which was eventually forgotten. But 1,800 years later, explorers and archaeologists discovered Pompeii again. The disaster that had wiped out this bustling town also preserved it like an insect in amber. Beneath layers of muddy ash was a snapshot of everyday life in a Roman town, complete with bank receipts, graffiti, "for rent" signs, public mosaics depicting extremely graphic sex, and penis decorations on street corners. The more we learn about Pompeii, the more it seems that the origins of Western culture are nothing like Western culture today. What was daily life really like in the Roman Empire? Here's what we know, based on the time capsule of Pompeii. The most famous aspect of Pompeii's ruins is no doubt the hundreds of plaster casts that archeologists have made of the volcano's victims. When the ash poured down over the city, people were killed instantly, in the exact poses they struck when they noticed their impending doom. As their bodies decomposed, they left perfectly-formed hollows in the ash. Historians can inject these hollows with plaster, recreating the positions of the bodies, and sometimes their terrified facial expressions.

Contrary to popular belief, Pompeii wasn't hit without warning. The volcano had been erupting for almost a day before the deadly ash rushed into the city on winds that some scientists estimate to have been 900 degrees. By that time, thousands had already fled. Those who remained were the holdouts, the unlucky, and probably many people who were too poor to travel elsewhere. Indeed, the city had been emptying out for nearly two decades after a devastating earthquake (also caused by Mt. Vesuvius) hit it in 62 AD. That quake had reduced a lot of the city to rubble. Many homes were still in ruins at the time the ash hit, which indicates that a lot of residents left after the earthquake and never came back. A vacation spot Pompeii, founded as early as the 7th century BCE, is in a beautiful region of Italy, and Romans were avid tourists. So the city was a resort town, and many of its villas and apartments were obviously designed for wealthy visitors. It had plenty of public spots for parties, including a generously-sized brothel where anthropologists have found a lot of hilariously obscene graffiti. There were also public baths, an arena, gladiators' barracks, restaurants, and even a hotel.

In this map, you can see the outlines of the city. Green areas are unexcavated, pale blue marks public buildings, yellow marks businesses, orange marks private houses, and dark blue marks temples. Like many Roman towns, Pompeii was walled. When you entered through the arched gates, you would find yourself on or near one of the three main streets that bisect the town. Most businesses were on these main streets, and took the form of storefronts attached to insulae (apartments) and villas (palatial houses), though there were plenty of smaller shops on side-streets. Many of the buildings in the most modern parts of town were two stories high, with big, floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floors open to the air. There was an elaborate system of pumps for distributing running water throughout the city, and many houses had heat created by sending hot air through hollows in the walls and under the floors. So how did a centuries-old, prosperous, beautiful city get buried not just by ash but by forgetfulness? It's likely that Pompeii was lost in the cultural shift from Roman values and ideals to Christian ones in the Western world. It disappeared geographically, but also became socially unintelligible as the centuries wore on. In fact, the first people in the modern era to discover the city seem to have taken a few peeks at its pornographic frescoes and reburied them. The city was first uncovered in the sixteenth century by an architect working on digging a canal nearby he reported seeing some decorated walls, which he then inexplicably reburied rather than investigating. Perhaps he was motivated by time constraints, or perhaps as some historians argue he was unsettled by seeing a world where everything we consider private was on public display. Two hundred years later, in the mid eighteenth century, adventurers and scientists began unburying the city in earnest. HIC BENE FUTUI

Outside one shapely building on a main street in Pompeii, you can see this piece of graffiti: "Hic bene futui," or "Here you'll get a good fuck." It's a brothel, so perhaps there's no surprise that people have scribbled comments like that on its walls. But it was hardly the only place in the city where you'd find sexual references. Oxford archaeology professor Andrew Wilson, whose pictures of the brothel you can see here, explains that Pompeii's suburban baths contain this bit of graffiti: Si quis hic sederit, legat hoc ante omnia. Si qui futuere voluit Atticen, quaerat a(ssibus) XVI. "If any is sitting here, let him read this before anything. If he is someone who wants to fuck Attike, he needs 16 asses" That's asses as in the As, a bronze coin used in Rome. So Attike must have been one expensive lady.

These same baths are full of incredibly detailed paintings of different sexual positions. Here's one of my favorites, of a threesome with two men and a woman. It's interesting to compare this image to threesome porn of today, where inevitably the woman would be in the middle. Here, the man is in the middle, pitching and catching at the same time. Ah, Rome.

Threesome etiquette isn't the only cultural difference between Roman sexuality and our own. Take a look at this Pompeii street decoration of four perky, disembodied penises floating around a chalice. Similar

penis imagery was found in most houses, sometimes disembodied and sometimes attached to satyrs or the mythological figure Priapus. Historians are quick to point out that these are "fertility symbols," comparable to a picture of a cornucopia or flowers. That's true, but still doesn't change the fact that Romans were used to thinking of penis pictures as nice decorations. They flaunted the very same body parts that the Christian church would later call dirty, shameful, and best kept hidden.

I mentioned earlier that villas and insulae usually had storefronts in them, which the owners could rent out. It seems that several of these storefronts were rented to sex workers, or so archaeologists guess based on the way decorations in one room would suddenly become extremely pornographic (though sexual imagery was everywhere, actual pictures of explicit fucking seemed limited to the brothels and baths). Here is one such house, where one particular room (marked on the floorplan) was full of explicit pictures of sex. Other rooms in the house didn't have paintings like this. One conclusion we can draw from this is that Pompeii's residents considered sex work to be like any other kind of work not the kind of thing you hide away, but something that happens in public storefronts attached to your home. A very different idea of privacy The Romans of Pompeii had a notion of public and private life very different from what we see in many Western cultures today. Sexual imagery we would keep hidden was out in the open, but many other parts of private life were open too.

Yale history professor Diana Kleiner explains the ideal layout of a Roman house, which we see at Pompeii, is devoted almost entirely to public areas. The main part of the house, which would have been open to the street, was called the atrium. It was a big public room where the homeowners would conduct business around a large pool designed to collect rainwater from a pool-sized hole in the ceiling. Not only was the center of the house open for public business, but it was literally open to the sky as well. Another large part of the house would be devoted to a big garden, which was sometimes open to the public too. By contrast, bedrooms generally located off the atrium were often small and windowless. These private areas were obviously not places where people expected to spend any length of time. They were subordinated to the public spaces of the house. As Kleiner puts it, Western homes today are considered private sanctuaries. That idea would have been alien to the Romans, whose homes were built mostly as public spaces. Indeed, the "ideal" Roman house, according to Latin architectural writings, would include two or more storefronts (possibly containing sex workers, as we learned earlier). Privacy as we know it now the kind where you shut your door and close the windows on the world didn't exist in Pompeii.

Archaeologists know a great deal about the houses of Pompeii and the people who owned them at the time of the volcano disaster. Some have inspired a lot of speculation, such as the so-called "House of the Tragic Poet," a small home packed with tons of art (including this incredible tile floor with "cave canem," or "beware of dog" written on it).

Others are fascinating because they remind us how similar Romans were to today's city dwellers. The house of Julia Felix, one of the largest in the city, advertises baths and rooms: To let, for the term of ve years, from the thirteenth day of next August to the thirteenth day of the sixth August thereafter, the Venus bath, tted up for the best people, shops, rooms over shops, and secondstory apartments in the property owned by Julia Felix, daughter of Spurius. Like her neighbors, Julia Felix considered large parts of her house to be public. Renting out rooms and baths after the 62 earthquake had left many people homeless made good business sense.

An alien history The people of Pompeii had many things we would recognize from modern city life, including heated houses and advertising. But they also lived in a culture that was so different from ours that simply seeing the decorations on their houses would be shocking to many sophisticated urbanites. As we excavate the city from the ash that smothered it, we have a chance to visit an alien world a world before Christian morals dominated the West, and where the line between public and private was often hard to find.

It was also a time when people casually kept slaves, and women who ran their own businesses like Julia Felix were exceedingly rare. Why have some traditions from that time, like "beware of dog" signs, endured into the present almost unchanged, while pretty pictures of penises have vanished from our street corners? Cultural memory is a weird thing. Though people in Western countries can trace the origins of their societies back to the Roman Empire, it's likely that we wouldn't feel at home in the culture that gave birth to ours. Still, it would be familiar. We come from an alien world. Further reading: If you want an introduction to the entire city, its layout, and all the homes and businesses that have been excavated over the past two and a half centuries, you can see them all in detail at AD 79, a website devoted to Pompeii and other cities in the region affected by the disaster. For an introduction to Roman architectural history, I highly recommend historian Diana Kleiner's Yale lecture series, available on video. Discovery Channel has a nice timeline of the Vesuvius eruption. Oxford archaeologist Andrew Wilson has a great set of lecture slides devoted to love and sex in the Roman Empire, which deals a lot with Pompeii.

6. Machu Picchu, Peru

A lot remains mysterious about the Inca Empire, which dominated parts of the regions now known as Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina for hundreds of years before the Spanish invaded, destroyed its cities, and burned its libraries of quipu records (the Inca language was "written" with knots and rope). Though we know a lot about Inca technology, architecture and advanced agriculture all of which are in evidence at major Inca city Machu Picchu we still can't read what's left of the tapestries that contain their written records. And we don't understand how they ran a vast empire without ever building a single

marketplace. That's right Machu Picchu and other Inca cities contain no markets. This dramatically different from most other cities, which are often built around central market squares and plazas. How did such a successful civilization exist without a recognizable economy? Maybe one day we'll discover the answers.

The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire was the largest South America had ever known. Rich in foodstuffs, textiles, gold, and coca, the Inca were masters of city building but nevertheless had no money. In fact, they had no marketplaces at all. Centered in Peru, Inca territory stretched across the Andes' mountain tops and down to the shoreline, incorporating lands from today's Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru - all connected by a vast highway system whose complexity rivaled any in the Old World. The Inca Empire may be the only advanced civilization in history to have no class of traders, and no commerce of any kind within its boundaries. How did they do it? Many aspects of Incan life remain mysterious, in part because our accounts of Incan life come from the Spanish invaders who effectively wiped them out. Famously, the conquistador Francisco Pizzaro led just a few men in an incredible defeat of the Incan army in Peru in 1532. But the real blow came roughly a decade before that, when European invaders unwittingly unleashed a smallpox epidemic that some epidemiologists believe may have killed as many as 90 percent of the Incan people. Our knowledge of these events, and our understanding of Incan culture of that era, come from just a few observers - mostly Spanish missionaries, and one mestizo priest and Inca historian named Blas Valera, who was born in Peru two decades after the fall of the Inca Empire.

Wealth Without Money

Documents from missionaries and Valera describe the Inca as master builders and land planners, capable of extremely sophisticated mountain agriculture - and building cities to match. Incan society was so rich that it could afford to have hundreds of people who specialized in planning the agricultural uses of newlyconquered areas. They built terraced farms on the mountainsides whose crops - from potatoes and maize to peanuts and squash - were carefully chosen to thrive in the average temperatures for different altitudes. They also farmed trees to keep the thin topsoil in good condition.

Incan architects were equally talented, designing and raising enormous pyramids, irrigating with sophisticated waterworks such as those found at Tipon, and creating enormous temples like Pachacamac along with mountain retreats like Machu Picchu. Designers used a system of knotted ropes to do the math required to build on slopes. And yet, despite all their productivity, the Incas managed without money or marketplaces. In The Incas: New Perspectives, Gordon Francis McEwan writes: With only a few exceptions found in coastal polities incorporated into the empire, there was no trading class in Inca society, and the development of individual wealth acquired through commerce was not

possible . . . A few products deemed essential by the Incas could not be produced locally and had to be imported. In these cases several strategies were employed, such as establishing colonies in specific production zones for particular commodities and permitting long-distance trade. The production, distribution, and use of commodities were centrally controlled by the Inca government. Each citizen of the empire was issued the necessities of life out of the state storehouses, including food, tools, raw materials, and clothing, and needed to purchase nothing. With no shops or markets, there was no need for a standard currency or money, and there was nowhere to spend money or purchase or trade for necessities. So the Inca did engage in trade, but only with outsiders - not among themselves. The secret of the Inca's great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life. Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society. In another quirk of the Incan economy, nobles who died could still own property and their families or estate managers could continue to amass wealth for the dead nobles. Indeed, the temple at Pachacamac was basically a well-managed estate that "belonged" to a dead Incan noble. It's as if the Inca managed to invent the idea of corporations-as-people despite having almost no market economy whatsoever.

Food, Not Markets

One of the outstanding questions for scientists and historians who study the Incas is why this wealthy, sophisticated culture developed scientifically and culturally without ever inventing markets. One possibility is that life was so difficult to sustain in their environment that all their innovations revolved around agriculture rather than economics. In other words, the Inca Empire was optimized to prevent starvation rather than to foster trade.

A few years ago, a group of archeologists took core samples in Cuzco valley in Peru, and found evidence for thousands of years of agriculture in the area, including animal husbandry, most likely of llamas. In a paper summarizing their findings, archaeologist A.J. Chepstow-Lusty and his team suggested that the Incas focused their technological and cultural institutions around food production and land management, rather than market economies. This may have been necessary in a region where droughts had likely wiped out a previous civilization (the Wari), and where climate fluctuations were a constant hazard. The rise of the Inca Empire coincided with a period of relative climate stability, but the peoples in the area would be well aware that this temperate spell could end at any time. Chepstow-Lusty and his colleagues write: The scale of anthropological manipulation and transformation of the landscape in the south-central Andes appears to have increased after ca. AD 1100, probably in response to a climatic backdrop that was relatively warm, dry and essentially stable. The development of major irrigated terracing technology may have been increasingly necessary in these regions to obviate conditions of seasonal water stress, thereby allowing efcient agricultural production at higher altitudes. The outcome of these strategies was greater long-term food security and the ability to feed large populations. Such developments were exploited by the Inca of the Cuzco Valley, who were emerging as the dominant ethnic group of the region as early as ca. AD 1200. A healthy agricultural surplus supported their economic and political potential, enabling them to subjugate other local independent states and to effectively centralize power in the Cuzco region by ca. AD 1400. So how do you become a continent-dominating empire without cash? In the case of the Incas, it's likely that the technologies that granted them agricultural surplus (extra food and textile materials) helped them with their expansive empire-building. Food was their coin; pure labor structured their economy. Some have argued that the Inca Empire was the ideal socialist state, while others have called it an authoritarian monarchy. In truth, the Inca probably created an empire like many others. Its leaders were distracted by civil war and internecine squabbles among the nobility. And its slaves and laborers built the dramatic works dreamed up by pre-Columbian civil engineers. What's remarkable is that evidence suggests those slaves and laborers were probably well fed. Perhaps more remarkable, in this era where markets are associated with civilization, is the idea that an empire could achieve so much without ever spending a dime.

7. Thonis, Egypt

In the 8th century BCE, this legendary city was the gateway to Egypt, a port town that was full of incredible monuments, rich merchants, and huge buildings. Now it is entirely submerged in the Mediterranean Sea. Thonis began its slow decline after the rise of Alexandria in the 300s CE. But eventually that slide became literal, as the city drowned in the sea that was once the source of its wealth. Nobody is certain how it happened, but by the 8th century CE the city was gone. It may have been the victim of liquefaction after an earthquake. Recently rediscovered by archaeologist Franck Goddio, the city is slowly being excavated. Above is a video reconstruction of what the city might have looked like in its heyday. 8. Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe

One of the great mysteries of southern Africa is the enormous, walled city known today as Great Zimbabwe. The city was home to as many as 30,000 people, and was at its peak from 1200-1450, when it was the heart of an international trade region that stretched as far as China and India. Wealth poured into the city from distant lands, but it was also rich in gold from local mines and vast herds of cattle. Still, there are some unknowns here it's not clear how far the city's influence stretched, nor what all its industries were. Clearly, though, it was technologically advanced. The BBC describes the greatest remaining monument from the city:

The Great Zimbabwe monument is built out of granite which is the parent rock of the region - i.e. it predominates locally. The building method used was dry-stone walling, demanding a high level of masonry expertise. Some of the site is built round natural rock formations. The actual structure comprises a huge enclosing wall some 20 metres high. Inside there are concentric passageways, along with a number of enclosures. One of these is thought to be a royal enclosure. Large quantities of gold and ceremonial battle axes, along with other objects have been found there. Like many cosmopolitan cities of its era, Great Zimbabwe suffered a mysterious decline. Famines caused by overgrazing may have contributed to its demise, or perhaps a shift in preferred trade routes. If we understood more about the city's local industries and trade partners, we might understand better what led to its downfall. Annalee Newitz is the author of the book, Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. Follow her on Twitter.