Finding Lost Cities: Part Three
What is so exciting about finding lost cities?
Welcome back to Coffee with Clio,
I don’t know about you, but things have suddenly become very busy this week. Ready or not, at least in the UK, Christmas is here!
This is the third instalment of my series on ‘finding lost cities’ (you can find out more about cities and losing them here and here). It will also be my last post of 2025. Therefore:
Merry Christmas (if you celebrate) and a happy vacation wherever you are. And see you in 2025!
I’ll be back with more Coffee with Clio on Friday 10th January and in the meantime, I hope that your vacation, wherever you are and whatever you are celebrating, is restful, relaxing, wild or exciting, depending on what you are hoping for!
In the meantime, let’s go looking for some lost cities now found…
What lurks beneath
In last week’s post, I said that we don’t often think of the layers that lie beneath our feet as being ‘lost’, but very occasionally, digging reveals something really, obviously dramatic.
That is what happened when archaeologists in modern Akko/Akka, in Israel, dug below the Old City.
What they found was the medieval city of Acre (as Akko/Akka was once known), famous from numerous contemporary accounts and later books, films and plays about the Crusades.
The city beneath has since been extensively (but not completely!) excavated and is now a major tourist attraction that I can definitely recommend.
It is an eerie and completely fascinating site, with the same sense you get in Pompeii of a glitch in time.
While Pompeii was destroyed by a volcano, though, medieval Acre was lost as a result of military conflict.
An aside on the weird phenomenon known as ‘the Crusades’
If you already know a lot about the Crusades, or you don’t really care and have seen Kingdom of Heaven, you can probably skip this bit.
Acre had been an important coastal hub in the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries before the Crusades, which began at the very end of the eleventh century. As a result, it was keenly fought over in the complex, politically volatile period that ensued.
In ludicrously brief summary, the Crusades were waves of campaigns, each with slightly different origins, numbers, goals and personalities, launched from Western Europe towards West Asia and North Africa.
The aim was to take control of places that these Europeans considered holy to Christians and therefore thought should be ruled by Christians (or, sometimes, to take places that became strategically useful to the goal of taking the spiritually important places).
Of course, the whole crescent of the Eastern Mediterranean, where most of the events of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scripture and holy tradition had taken place, were also politically, economically and spiritually significant to Muslims and Jews as well.
By the time the Crusades got going, the region had been ruled by Muslims for over 300 years, by Christians for about 300 years before that, and before that by Jews (among others), often under some sort of arrangement with other major regional empires whose rulers were not any of these religions, like the ancient Romans.
Oh, and this is one of the richest, most fertile and well connected regions of the Mediterranean, so it had been being fought over for literally all of recorded history by this point, for religious and non-religious reasons (often, a bit of both).
As a result, the Crusaders found themselves in conflict with large, powerful Muslim empires but also other smaller, local power bases, which might be part of bigger empires, or sort of part of them, or even in conflict with the empires already.
And there were other Christian powers, most obviously the Byzantine Empire, located closer to the region, whose stake in what happened in the East Mediterranean was different from that of either the Crusaders or the local Muslim rulers.
And, once the Crusades got going and managed to take any territory, you also had various ‘Crusader states’, whose rulers, sometimes born and raised in the ‘Holy Land’, were usually desperate for more manpower and military support from Western Europe.
Oh, and all of the rulers involved in this had a real penchant for marrying (and divorcing and having affairs with) one another and therefore, over generations, came to be related to one another in additional complicated ways.
Below the level of ruling elites, large parts of the population were Muslim. Others were Christians, who the Crusaders didn’t really know what to do with: their (various kinds of) Orthodox Christianities didn’t always look very much like the Catholic Christianity of the Crusaders (for more on this distinction, see my earlier post here). They also weren’t always as thrilled to see armies of heavily armed foreigners on their doorstep as the heavily armed foreigners thought they should be. And there were local Jewish communities who maintained traditions rooted in specific holy sites.
And all of these people, who also had groups and identities of their own within and across religious lines, had their own long histories of getting on, not getting on, trading, marrying, and generally being people.
Now, this isn’t a post about the complexities of the Crusades, which were vast and numerous, but they are important context for the ‘lost’ city of Acre. Key things to remember:
This was a time when distinctions between groups, often based on religion, were particularly important in what came to be called the ‘Holy Land’, or the strip from, roughly, Egypt to modern Türkiye. (But this did not mean that people automatically hated each other, or sided with one another, purely on religious grounds.)
The region was very politically fragmented, with small city states and religious, political, cultural or ethnic enclaves competing with one another and also competing and allying with one another in conflicts with big Christian and Muslim empires on both sides, in Egypt and in Asia Minor and the Balkans.
There was a lot of militarism, in the sense of societies spending a lot of resource and ideological energy on staying fighting fit (in terms of infrastructure, supplies and people) and idealising military life: this is one of the high-water-mark periods and places for the whole concept of ‘knightly chivalry’ and is where heroic military figures of the Christian and Muslim traditions, like Richard I (the ‘lionheart’) and Saladin got themselves famous.
‘Non-state’ actors also played an important role, especially orders of Christian monks who were also soldiers. The most famous of these was probably the Knights Templar (about whom most anything you have ever read in novels or seen in films is complete nonsense but who were weird enough as a historical phenomenon to become a magnet for wack-a-doodle conspiracies).
So, with all of that laid down…
Back to the ‘lost’ city of Acre
In the 13th century, Akko became the richest and most important coastal city of the Christian Crusader state known as the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Then, in 1291, in a war between the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Muslim Mamluk Empire, based in Egypt, Acre was defeated.
The city was destroyed and became just another small coastal village again for a few centuries, until it was eventually re-established as a major port by another large Muslim empire in the region, the Ottomans (with their capital in Istanbul). They captured the site in 1516.
By then, the medieval city, destroyed in 1291, had basically been covered up by rubble and the new Ottoman city just rose up on top of it. And that is how those archaeologists, back where our story began, found the ‘lost city’, and what a lost city to find!
Medieval Acre is, I think, worth the tangly introduction it has taken to get us here because it is just so fascinating.
Medieval Acre was a city organised for war, with fortifications and streets designed for defence.
There were also churches and chapels and buildings dedicated to serving the single-sex, celibate lifestyle of warrior monastic orders.
Nevertheless, this was also a city that could not exist without people who weren’t warrior monks or warrior anything: a regular, everyday population of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, including Muslims, Christians and Jews, whose lives were shaped by the Crusades but who were not just a footnote to the politics.
Their experiences are visible in multi-religious designs on ceramics, the layout of houses, the food people ate…
The excavations of medieval Acre give us an unparalleled glimpse into these overlapping, co-existing, realities.
Where you’d least expect
From cities below to cities out in the wild places, last week, we looked at a city, recently uncovered in the Amazon rainforest, but it was another recent find that inspired me to write about lost cities in the first place.
‘Lost Silk Road cities discovered in Uzbek mountains’ read the headline.
Specifically, archaeologists have located two cities located on narrow mountain ridges at 2000m (6600 feet) above sea level. This is high enough for the temperatures to be low and the air thin.
So why, you might ask, would people build a city there?
Just think of the logistics, especially getting water to a large urban population. Catching rainwater in manmade cisterns was probably one way of doing so, but it must also just have been a struggle, particularly in long dry spells.
Just as in the case of the city in the Amazon, there was some challenge in convincing people that what had been discovered was really as big as it was: there just shouldn’t be cities in places like this.
One suggested answer to the ‘why’ is intriguing: making iron.
These cities seem to have thrived from roughly the 8th to the 11th century, which, probably not coincidentally, is when trade across this particular patch of Eurasia, for various political reasons, was extremely active.
Meanwhile, we know that there was great demand for iron tools and weapons. That isn’t specific to the 8th-11th centuries, but suggests a specialist product that people could get rich from when the conditions for trade were good.
And the thing about iron is that it needs smelting at high temperatures.
And the thing about smelting at high temperatures is that it takes lots of oxygen.
And the thing about high ridges is that they are very windy.
Certainly, there seems to have been metal working going on up on those ridges and archaeologists have suggested that, ultimately, these cities were abandoned because the inhabitants stripped and burned the juniper forests around them, that had provided fuel, which all seems plausible.
That still leaves plenty of questions, such as: who were the elites and how did they live compared to others?
How were these cities provisioned? Iron would have had to sell awfully well for people to be able to afford to pay other people to farm surplus food many miles away then to pay still other people to move it across harsh terrain and up those steep slopes, for cooks to cook it and people to bring clothes and medicines and all the other things that people need to live in a city.
As with all research, now we wait and see…
City to village to museum?
Apart from cities beneath our feet, it is only really possible to ‘lose’ a city if people can, or will, no longer live there.
In Uzbekistan, people seem to have run out of trees to burn and then living on top of a draughty mountain ridge began to look less appealing.
Abandoned cities are perhaps the most tantalising of lost cities because they can remain intact in ways that make them seem eerily ‘stuck in time’. Apart from Pompeii and medieval Acre, another example stands out in my own research area and period: Palmyra.
The site of Palmyra, in the Syrian desert close to the Euphrates, has been inhabited for millennia because of a natural oasis. But it was only briefly a city. For a few centuries something changed the fate of this one particular oasis.
That something was booming demand in the Roman Empire of the 1st, 2nd and early 3rd centuries for all things ‘Indian’. Indian didn’t necessarily mean from precisely where the Republic of India is today, but from that sort of direction, including anywhere in South Asia and potentially also Arabia and East Africa, as well as locally-produced knock-offs branded as ‘Indian’.
This was very handy for Palmyra, which was located right on one of the best routes from the top of the Arabian/Persian Gulf, where such goods could be brought by ship, up the Euphrates and then westwards into the Roman Empire.
For a couple of centuries, the community in the oasis made out big on brokering camel hire to merchants on the one hand and watering facilities to the cameleers on the other.
As a result, a unique city grew up out of the desert - a blend all its own, of Hellenistic, Roman and local styles, with huge marble temples to local deities and detailed tomb portraits carved in stone.
But Palmyra was very much akin to the Biblical house built on sand. Over the course of the 3rd century several things happened, sometimes at the same time, sometimes one after the other, sometimes repeatedly, overlaying each other like a cacophonous syncopation of crap (from a Palmyrene point of view).
Those things included (but were not limited to!):
War between the Roman Empire to Palmyra’s west and the Parthian Empire to its east. Parthia also had a strong market for ‘Indian’ goods, so when the frontier was peaceful, Palmyra could make good money in both directions, but war between its two biggest markets, across its territories, wasn’t so promising.
Break-away provinces, civil war, imperial assassinations and hyper-inflation within the Roman Empire: there are debates about exactly how badly this affected specific people and places in the empire, but from a Palmyrene point of view, if your main revenue comes from supplying people in a neighbouring state with fancy luxuries, any kind of disruption, let alone lots of kinds of disruption, look pretty bad in terms of people’s discretionary spending.
Plague. Bad for business whichever way you look at it.
In 224, the replacement of the Parthian ruling dynasty with a new one, the Sasanians, who came with a very different set of attitudes towards external trade and cross-border warfare. In general, they were keener on the latter than the former. Again, tough times to be a small city state, dependent on long-distance trade.
Palmyra’s prosperity slipped. It had a go at becoming a regional military power, which worked while the Roman Empire was tied up with all of those coups and assassinations and civil wars, but it didn’t last, and the city became a village again, in the shadow of its own ruins.
Those ruins were ‘rediscovered’ by 19th- and early 20th-century archaeologists. (Obviously, the villagers had known they were there all along.)
It was decided that Palmyra’s importance as an abandoned city was far greater than its significance as an inhabited village, and so the site was summarily depopulated and turned into a heritage centre and museum, which it remains today.1
The lost had been found, but what exactly is defined as lost, and by whom, and what we think we have found is always a matter of perspective…
The lure of lost cities
If lost cities have caught your imagination, I can strongly recommend this book:
Bahn, Paul G, Lost Cities: 50 Discoveries in World Archaeology (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997).
It is beautifully illustrated, with short summaries of a whole range of cities, from almost every continent and from prehistory to the Middle Ages.
But what is it about these places that matters so much, to scholars or to visitors, to novelists, illustrators and film makers? Why are we drawn to lost cities?
One answer is that finding cities, especially in places where scholars thought there couldn’t be cities, helps us to think differently about our assumptions: one thing studying history has taught me is that people are capable of doing lots of things (from really good to really, really bad and everywhere in between) that logically they probably shouldn’t.
Studying the past is one of the best antidotes reductive theories of what people are capable of.
As a result, ‘lost’ cities in places we weren’t expecting them - from ridges in Central Asia to the Amazon jungle or the Syrian desert - give us glimpses into what people have done and aspired to and broaden our sense of human possibility.
Each lost city, including the ones people knew to look for, like Pompeii, are also an incredibly concentrated store of information.
Cities are, by definition, places where people gather together to do lots of different things. They are places where people have to do lots of things, in order to house, water, feed, clothe and manage large populations in a small place.
They are also places where people can do lots of things that are difficult or impossible outside cities.
Cities offer audiences for performances (of music, theatre, religious ritual or political power). They provide markets for luxury goods (from art and literature to fancy foods and manufactured goods). They create opportunities for all sorts of chaotic human interactions: business deals, marriages, friendships… and all of their shadowy alter-egos: frauds, affairs, disputes…
Lots of these things can happen outside cities, but there are likely to be more of them, happening closer to each other, leaving more traces wherever there are lots of people.
A lost city is an incredible insight into this exuberant complexity.
Finally, there is, undoubtedly, some of the attraction of seeing ourselves in the past, or the past in ourselves.
We live in a world of cities. Even if your individual life is rural, even if you come from a mainly rural area, we all live at a time when more of the human population lives in towns and cities than ever has before (in absolute numerical terms or as a proportion of the population).
Cities, in turn, give rise to all of those complexities I’ve just mentioned, which are part of more people’s lives than ever before and which therefore seep even into rural areas via film, music, art and television. Even if you don’t live in one, most of us live our lives in the echoes of the city.
What all of these things tell us is that a city isn’t a set of things or a group of buildings or a collection of people: it is the constant, dynamic combination of all of those and a lost city is as close as we can get to that messy, vibrant reality in the past.
Or at least, that is my best attempt to explain the addictive feeling that another world is almost visible, fully alive, just behind the veil of time.
It is the week before Christmas and this is a coffee break, so I am not dwelling on the more recent history of Palmyra, as a focus for acts of violent propaganda by the Islamic State in Syria, and immense courage in the face of that aggression. If you would like to find out more, with due caution for the nature of the content, here is as good a place to start as any. Reflecting on very recent events, a political scientist, born in Palmyra, here reflects on what the fall of the Assad regime in Syria might mean for the future of heritage sites like Palmyra and what they mean for the people of Syria, the wider region and the world.
… are you saying that the film National Treasure lied to me about the Knights Templar? They didn’t write a treasure map on the Declaration of Independence?? I am devastated.
In all seriousness though, Medieval Acre is SO cool, my wife and I got to see it a few years ago. Didn’t notice the lattices though!