50 Ancient Places You Can Still Visit

Most of the ancient world is gone. A temple survives two thousand years not because it was better built but because of an accident: it was buried, or converted into a church, or too remote to quarry, or too heavy to steal. This is fifty of those survivors, chosen on one rule: you can go and stand in them. Each entry gives what it is, roughly when, what you actually see today, and one honest note. Those notes are the point. Knossos is partly Edwardian concrete, painted in colours somebody inferred. Abu Simbel was cut into a thousand blocks in the 1960s and rebuilt inside an artificial hill. The Great Wall you photograph is mostly Ming and is not visible from space. The cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira cannot be visited at all, and the replicas are extraordinary. Several stones at Stonehenge were re erected in concrete. The Terracotta Army was painted, and is now grey. From Göbekli Tepe, six thousand years older than Stonehenge and built before farming, to Machu Picchu, which was never actually lost. Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Britain, Ireland, France, Croatia, Pakistan, Iran, China, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Japan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mali, Morocco, Libya, Mexico, Guatemala and Peru. With honest warnings where a country is genuinely difficult or dangerous to reach, a short essay on the five ways an ancient building survives, a closing on how to visit these places well, and fifteen more for when the fifty are done.

• Which famous sites are heavily reconstructed, and which parts are genuinely ancient
• Where the crowds are unavoidable and where the quieter alternative is better
• The five ways an ancient building survives, and why the finest ones probably did not
• Which sites are deteriorating fast, and why access keeps getting tighter
• How to visit an ancient place so that it means something

• Travellers who want to know what a site is really like before booking
• Anyone who has stood at a famous ruin feeling nothing and wondered why
• Readers who like history with the folklore taken out
• People planning one big trip and choosing between three options
• Anyone curious about how much of a ruin is actually modern

1. 01Introduction: The ones that are still there
2. 02Part One: The Near East and Egypt
3. 03Part Two: The Mediterranean
4. 04Part Three: Europe beyond the Mediterranean
5. 05Part Four: Asia
6. 06Part Five: Africa
7. 07Part Six: The Americas
8. 08Closing: How to visit an ancient place
9. 09Appendix: Fifteen more, briefly

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