The Most Remarkable Ancient Archaeological Sites in the World

36 places in 17 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Colosseum

   Colosseo

   Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.492° E

   

   The eighty-foot drop beneath the Colosseum's sand floor is where the real machinery of the show lived.

   Did you know? It held an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 spectators, making it the largest amphitheatre ever built in the ancient world.

   More about Colosseum →

2. 02 Western Wall

   Palestine · 2.6 km from Jerusalem31.777° N 35.234° E

   

   What stands in the plaza today isn't a wall of the Temple itself — it's the western retaining wall of the platform the Temple sat on, part of a vast expansion Herod the Great ordered around 19 BCE to turn the Temple Mount into the largest religious platform anywhere in the ancient world.

   Did you know? Radiocarbon dating of mortar shows the first bridge over Wilson's Arch was built between 20 BCE and 20 CE and doubled in width a few decades later.

   More about Western Wall →

3. 03 Roman Forum

   Foro Romano

   Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.892° N 12.485° E

   

   The Roman Forum fills a small valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills that was once a marsh. Drained in the 7th century BC by the first stretch of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that emptied into the Tiber, it became the place where Rome did everything in public: voted, traded, tried criminals, heard speeches, worshipped and celebrated its triumphs.

   Did you know? Long before it was a public square, part of the Forum served as an Iron Age cemetery in the 10th century BC, with cremation urns buried in large clay jars.

   More about Roman Forum →

4. 04 Castel Sant'Angelo

   Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E

   

   Hadrian started building his own tomb in 123 CE and didn't live to see it finished — it was completed in 139 under his successor Antoninus Pius, a cylindrical drum of a monument meant to hold the ashes of an emperor and his family for eternity. Eternity lasted about three centuries as a mausoleum.

   Did you know? The current bronze angel by Peter Anton von Verschaffelt replaced a 1536 marble Saint Michael by Raffaello da Montelupo in 1753.

   More about Castel Sant'Angelo →

5. 05 Trajan's Column

   Colonna Traiana

   Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E

   

   Trajan's Column is a 30-metre marble shaft, 35 m with its pedestal, that has stood in Trajan's Forum just north of the Roman Forum since it was dedicated on 12 May 113. It celebrates Emperor Trajan's two wars against the Dacians in 101-102 and 105-106, and it was most likely designed under the architect Apollodorus of Damascus.

   Did you know? The lettering of the dedication on the base became the classic model of Roman square capitals, and Carol Twombly based her 1989 Trajan typeface on it.

   More about Trajan's Column →

6. 06 Diocletian's Palace

   Dioklecijanova palača

   Croatia · 2.9 km from Split43.508° N 16.438° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Diocletian, the emperor who divided power among four rulers and then did something rare for a Roman emperor — abdicated, in 305 — chose a peninsula on the Dalmatian coast for his retirement, a few kilometres from Salona, the provincial capital.

   Did you know? In the 7th century a small church of St Martin was built above the Golden Gate.

   More about Diocletian's Palace →

7. 07 Knossos

   Κνωσός

   Greece · 4.2 km from Heraklion35.298° N 25.163° E

   

   Knossos, on Kephala hill 5 km south of the centre of Heraklion, was the greatest centre of Minoan Crete and is often described as Europe's oldest city. People settled on the hill around 7000 BC, and by about 1900 BC they had built the first palace: a multi-storey complex around a central court, covering roughly 20,000 m², with storerooms, workshops, shrines and halls of state.

   Did you know? The Throne Room, built in the 15th century BC, is considered the oldest throne room in Europe, and its alabaster seat the oldest stone throne on the continent.

   More about Knossos →

8. 08 Parthenon

   Παρθενώνας

   Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Parthenon looks perfectly straight only because almost nothing about it actually is.

   Did you know? On 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar round hit gunpowder stored inside by the Ottoman garrison, and the blast killed about 300 people.

   More about Parthenon →

9. 09 Petra

   Jordan · 32.1 km from Ma'an30.329° N 35.442° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   For centuries Petra existed mainly in local Bedouin knowledge and old texts, unseen by European travelers, until the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt talked his way in in 1812 by posing as a Muslim pilgrim — the disguise mattered because outsiders weren't otherwise let anywhere near the site.

   Did you know? The city flourished under King Aretas IV, who ruled from 9 BC to AD 40.

   More about Petra →

10. 10 Terracotta Army

    People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head.

    Did you know? Legs were built much like terracotta drainage pipes, and heads, arms and torsos were made separately before assembly.

    More about Terracotta Army →

11. 11 Ephesus

    Efes

    Turkey · 21.6 km from Söke37.940° N 27.349° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Ephesus is one of the largest Roman cities left standing in the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the few where you can walk a marble street from end to end and understand how a great ancient city worked. Founded by Ionian Greeks in the 10th century BC, it became one of the leading cities of Roman Asia, a centre of early Christianity and, until its harbour silted up, one of the busiest ports of the Aegean.

    Did you know? The Temple of Artemis took about 120 years to build and was burned down in 356 BC.

    More about Ephesus →

12. 12 Pompeii

    Pompei

    Italy · 23.2 km from Naples40.751° N 14.490° E

    

    Pompeii is the most complete picture we have of an ordinary Roman town, and it owes that to the catastrophe that ended it. In AD 79 Vesuvius, about 8 km away, erupted for two days. First came some eighteen hours of falling pumice, which let many of the inhabitants flee; then surges of superheated gas and ash swept through the streets and killed those who had stayed.

    Did you know? After Sulla captured the town in 89 BC it became a colony of his veterans, renamed Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum.

    More about Pompeii →

13. 13 Hadrian's Wall

    United Kingdom55.024° N 2.292° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Hadrian's Wall crosses the whole width of northern England, from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the Solway Firth in the west — 80 Roman miles, or about 117 km. The Emperor Hadrian ordered it built in AD 122 to mark the northern edge of the province of Britannia.

    Did you know? Around 15,000 soldiers from three legions, helped by men of the Roman fleet, built most of the wall in about six years.

    More about Hadrian's Wall →

14. 14 Volubilis

    Morocco · 19.1 km from Meknes34.071° N 5.554° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Volubilis sits on a gentle ridge below the Zerhoun massif, looking over a plain of olive groves north of Meknes, and the olive is the key to the whole place. Rome's westernmost towns rarely looked this prosperous: the city's wealth came from oil, and the remains of dozens of presses are scattered among the houses, one of them rebuilt with a full-size replica of a Roman press.

    Did you know? Hebrew inscriptions show a Jewish community here in the 3rd century, the most south-westerly ancient Hebrew inscriptions ever found.

    More about Volubilis →

15. 15 Trajan's Market

    Mercati di Traiano

    Italy · 0.5 km from Rome41.896° N 12.486° E

    

    Trajan's Market is a curved cliff of Roman brick set into the side of the Quirinal Hill, above the ruins of Trajan's Forum and across Via dei Fori Imperiali from the Vittoriano. It was probably built between about AD 100 and 110, most likely to designs by Apollodorus of Damascus, Trajan's architect for the forum and for his campaigns, and inaugurated in 113.

    More about Trajan's Market →

16. 16 Persepolis

    Iran · 16.2 km from Marvdasht29.935° N 52.890° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Persepolis, known in Persian as Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Darius I began it around 515 BC on a vast terrace of grey limestone, looking out over the plain of Marvdasht in Fars. Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I extended it, and building went on until the empire fell.

    Did you know? The great terrace covers about 125,000 square metres, roughly 450 by 300 metres, partly cut from the mountain and partly built up.

    More about Persepolis →

17. 17 Skara Brae

    United Kingdom · 24.3 km from Kirkwall59.049° N 3.342° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Skara Brae is a Neolithic village on the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of Orkney's Mainland, and the most complete settlement of its age in Europe. People lived here from about 3180 BC for some six centuries. The village lay hidden under a grassy mound until the winter of 1850, when a great storm stripped the dunes and exposed the outlines of roofless stone houses.

    Did you know? V. Gordon Childe first believed the village dated from around 500 BC; radiocarbon dating in 1972–73 showed it was some 2,500 years older.

    More about Skara Brae →

18. 18 Paestum

    Italy · 34.9 km from Salerno40.423° N 15.006° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Paestum, on the plain south of Salerno, has three Greek temples in the Doric order that are among the best preserved anywhere, standing in open fields inside an almost complete ring of ancient walls. Settlers from Sybaris founded the city around 600 BCE as Poseidonia; the Lucanians took it at the end of the 5th century BCE, and Rome made it a Latin colony called Paestum in 273 BCE.

    Did you know? Only about 25 of the city's roughly 120 hectares have been excavated; the rest lies under private land, still unexplored.

    More about Paestum →

19. 19 Cyrene

    Libya · 0.7 km from Shahhat32.823° N 21.857° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Cyrene was one of the great cities of the ancient Greek world, founded on a ridge of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain of north-eastern Libya, about 600 m above the sea. By Greek tradition settlers from the island of Thera arrived around 631 BC under Battus I at the urging of the oracle at Delphi, and the pottery found on site confirms a settlement in the mid-seventh century.

    Did you know? Silphium, the herb that made Cyrene rich and appeared on most of its coins, was harvested to extinction by the end of the 1st century AD.

    More about Cyrene →

20. 20 Ġgantija

    Malta · 27.5 km from Valletta36.047° N 14.269° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Ġgantija stands on the edge of the Xagħra plateau on Gozo, the second island of the Maltese archipelago, and it is the oldest of the megalithic temples that make up the Maltese World Heritage listing. Its two temples were raised around 3600 BC, which puts them centuries ahead of the Egyptian pyramids.

    Did you know? Ġgantija is regarded as the second-oldest surviving human-built religious structure in the world, younger only than Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

    More about Ġgantija →

21. 21 Chichen Itza

    Chichén Itzá

    Mexico · 38.4 km from Valladolid20.683° N 88.569° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    El Castillo isn't one building — it's two, one inside the other. Archaeologists have found an earlier, smaller pyramid from around the 8th–9th century CE sealed entirely inside the structure visitors see today, which was built over it roughly a century later; radiocarbon dating of wooden beams from the interior temple points to construction of the outer shell somewhere in the 900–1050 CE range.

    Did you know? The conquistador Francisco de Montejo the Younger tried to make the ruins his capital, Ciudad Real, but besieging Maya forced him to slip away by night in 1534.

    More about Chichen Itza →

22. 22 Göbekli Tepe

    Göbeklitepe

    Turkey · 12.8 km from Şanlıurfa37.223° N 38.922° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Göbekli Tepe changes the order in which the story of civilisation is usually told. On a limestone ridge north-east of Şanlıurfa, a mound about 15 metres high and 8 hectares across holds monumental enclosures built between roughly 9500 and 8000 BC — by people who had not yet adopted pottery and were only on the threshold of farming.

    Did you know? In Turkish the name means Potbelly Hill, while one Kurdish name for the mound translates as Wish Hill.

    More about Göbekli Tepe →

23. 23 The Great Sphinx

    Egypt · 6.4 km from Giza29.975° N 31.138° E

    

    The Great Sphinx of Giza is a lion with a human head, carved directly out of the limestone bedrock of the Giza Plateau and facing east toward the Nile Valley. It is 73 metres long from paws to tail and 20 metres high, and is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt.

    Did you know? In the 1st century AD the Sphinx was dug out again in honour of Emperor Nero, and a stairway over 12 metres wide was built down to its paws.

    More about The Great Sphinx →

24. 24 Bagan

    Myanmar · 29.5 km from Chauk21.172° N 94.860° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a bend of the Irrawaddy in central Myanmar, a dry plain of 104 square kilometres is studded with brick towers and gilded spires as far as the eye can see.

    Did you know? An inscription of 1112 at the Myazedi pagoda repeats the same text in Pyu, Old Mon, Old Burmese and Pali, earning it the nickname 'Rosetta Stone of Burma'.

    More about Bagan →

25. 25 Luxor Temple

    Egypt · 1.1 km from Luxor25.700° N 32.639° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Luxor Temple rises on the east bank of the Nile in the middle of modern Luxor, ancient Thebes, and it is the one great temple of Egypt that sits inside a living town. The ancient Egyptians called it ipet resyt, the southern sanctuary.

    Did you know? The temple was built of Nubian sandstone quarried at Gebel el-Silsila, upriver from Luxor.

    More about Luxor Temple →

26. 26 Behistun inscription

    Iran · 34.8 km from Kermanshah34.390° N 47.436° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    High on a limestone cliff above the old road between Babylon and Ecbatana, Darius the Great had his own story carved in three languages. The Behistun inscription is about 15 metres high and 25 metres wide and sits roughly 100 metres above the ground, far out of reach — which is exactly why it survived.

    Did you know? Pietro della Valle sketched the monument in 1604, and Carsten Niebuhr examined it in 1764 on an expedition sent by King Frederick V of Denmark.

    More about Behistun inscription →

27. 27 Karnak Temple Complex

    Egypt · 2.2 km from Luxor25.718° N 32.658° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak is large enough that Notre-Dame Cathedral would fit inside its footprint, held up by 134 sandstone columns, with the twelve tallest running down the central nave at about 21 metres high and roughly 10 metres around — big enough that a handful of people can link arms around the base of just one.

    Did you know? The obelisk now in front of Rome's Lateran Palace began at Karnak around 1400 BC and was shipped to Rome by Emperor Constantius II in 357 AD.

    More about Karnak Temple Complex →

28. 28 Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa

    Egypt · 4.5 km from Alexandria31.187° N 29.905° E

    

    The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa are the largest Roman-era burial complex in Egypt and one of the strangest: a tomb where Egyptian gods wear Roman armour. Cut into the bedrock of Alexandria in the second century AD, they lay forgotten until 1900, when, as the story goes, a donkey fell through the ground into the access shaft.

    Did you know? The tombs stayed in use for about two centuries, from the 2nd to the 4th century AD, before they were forgotten.

    More about Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa →

29. 29 Pantheon, Rome

    Pantheon

    Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.899° N 12.477° E

    

    The Pantheon is the best-preserved great building of ancient Rome, and its interior is one of the most perfect spaces ever built. The temple first raised by Marcus Agrippa under Augustus burned down; the building that stands today was reconstructed under the emperor Hadrian and completed around AD 126.

    Did you know? Two small bell towers added in the 17th century were mocked by Romans as ass's ears and finally taken down in 1883.

    More about Pantheon, Rome →

30. 30 Pergamon

    Turkey39.117° N 27.183° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Few ancient cities make such a statement with their setting. Pergamon was built on a steep andesite hill rising to about 335 metres above the Caicus plain, and its rulers terraced the slopes so that temples, palaces and public buildings climbed the rock in tiers.

    Did you know? By the middle of the 2nd century AD Pergamon had around 200,000 inhabitants, making it one of the largest cities in Roman Asia.

    More about Pergamon →