Encyclopedia

Ancient cities

The cities of the Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Persian worlds as places — their sites, plans, monuments, excavation histories and the museums that hold what came out of them.

14 cities

This layer covers cities as places: where they stood and why, how they were laid out, what was built in them, what has been dug up and where those finds are now.

It runs alongside the Civilizations layer rather than replacing it. Where both cover the same name — Athens, Sparta, Rome and Babylon — the division is between the place and the polity: Athens the city is the Acropolis, the Agora and the Long Walls, while Athens the civilization is the democracy. Each page carries a line at the top pointing at the other.

Population figures get the same treatment battle numbers get elsewhere on this platform. There is no ancient census of any of these cities. “Rome had a million people” is an inference from the grain dole and an assumed density, not a result, and every estimate here carries what it rests on and what it is worth.

So does the archaeology. Alexandria is mostly under a modern city and under water; Memphis was built of mudbrick on a floodplain and has largely dissolved; Sparta deliberately built almost nothing monumental, which Thucydides predicted would mislead posterity. Where a famous structure is known only from texts, the page says so.

City-states

Athens, Greece
Athens
The best-excavated city of the classical Greek world — an acropolis, a civic square, a fortified corridor to the sea, and the archaeology that lets all three be read against the texts.
Sparti, Greece
Sparta
A city that deliberately built almost nothing monumental, and whose remains are correspondingly thin — as Thucydides predicted they would be.
Ancient Corinth (Archaia Korinthos), Greece
Corinth
A city that owned an isthmus, grew rich on the traffic across it, was destroyed completely by Rome in 146 BCE, and was rebuilt by Caesar as a Roman colony a century later.
Hisarlik, Türkiye
Troy
A mound with nine main cities stacked in it, excavated by a man who dug through the one he was looking for, and the site where the relationship between epic and archaeology has to be worked out.

Imperial capitals

Rome, Italy
Rome
The largest city in the ancient Mediterranean, and the one whose archaeology is hardest to read because it never stopped being lived in.
Al-Iskandariyah, Egypt
Alexandria
The greatest Greek city of the eastern Mediterranean, whose ancient fabric lies almost entirely beneath a living metropolis and beneath the sea.
Mit Rahina, Egypt
Memphis
The administrative capital of Egypt for most of three thousand years, of which almost nothing above ground survives.
Shush, Iran
Susa
An Elamite capital that became an Achaemenid one — the working administrative seat of the Persian empire, and the terminus of the Royal Road.
Near Hillah, Iraq
Babylon
The greatest city of Mesopotamia, a byword in three later traditions, and an archaeological site whose most famous monument is in Berlin and whose second most famous may never have existed.

Sanctuaries

Delfi, Greece
Delphi
Not a city but a sanctuary that behaved like one — the seat of the Greek world's most consulted oracle, and a treasury of dedications from states competing with each other in stone.
Archaia Olympia, Greece
Olympia
A sanctuary of Zeus in a river valley in the western Peloponnese, and the site of the games that gave the Greek world its shared calendar.

Royal and ceremonial centres

Takht-e Jamshid, Iran
Persepolis
A ceremonial capital built to be seen, burned by Alexander in 330 BCE, and preserved by the fire that destroyed it.

Ports

Ostia Antica, Italy
Ostia
Rome's river port, and the best-preserved ordinary Roman town anywhere — the place to see how most Romans actually lived, because it was not destroyed but simply abandoned.

Provincial towns

Pompei, Italy
Pompeii
A moderately prosperous Campanian town destroyed in a single day, and the closest thing archaeology has to a moment rather than a sequence.

How to read the evidence labels

Evidence level: Documented: Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
Evidence level: Probable: Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
Evidence level: Disputed: Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
Evidence level: Literary: Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
Evidence level: Mythological: Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
Evidence level: Unknown: The available evidence is insufficient to decide.

These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.