The Most Remarkable Ancient Places in the World
78 places in 32 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable ancient places in the world are Petra (Jordan), Abu Simbel (Egypt) and Bagan (Myanmar). The list covers 78 ancient places in 32 countries. Italy has the most, with 16. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Ancient places impress twice: once for what they are, and again for having lasted. A Roman theatre whose stage wall still stands to its full height, an aqueduct built without mortar that has carried its own weight for close to two thousand years, a statue raised from the seabed with its bronze intact. Engineering, ambition and sheer luck combine in them, and the age is visible in every block.
This collection leans toward the Roman world but reaches beyond it. The Roman Theatre of Orange keeps its great stage wall, and the Aqueduct of Segovia strides through the city on granite arches held together by their own weight. The Tower of Hercules in A Coruña is the only fully preserved Roman lighthouse still used to guide ships, and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus fills the slope below the Acropolis. Trajan's Column in Rome spirals a carved account of the Dacian Wars up its shaft, while far from the Mediterranean the Nazca Lines cover the Peruvian desert with figures visible only from above.
Places here are chosen for how they look and ordered by how remarkable they are. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a spot on the map, and the section opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Petra | Archaeological site | Jordan | ✓ |
| 2 | Abu Simbel | Rock-cut architecture | Egypt | ✓ |
| 3 | Bagan | Archaeological site | Myanmar | ✓ |
| 4 | Parthenon | Ruins | Greece | ✓ |
| 5 | Karnak Temple Complex | Archaeological site | Egypt | ✓ |
| 6 | Shah-i-Zinda | Necropolis | Uzbekistan | ✓ |
| 7 | Pont du Gard | Aqueduct | France | ✓ |
| 8 | Persepolis | Archaeological site | Iran | ✓ |
| 9 | Ephesus | Archaeological site | Turkey | ✓ |
| 10 | Pyramids of Meroë | Archaeological site | Sudan | ✓ |
| 11 | Colosseum | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 12 | Western Wall | Archaeological site | Palestine | |
| 13 | Nazca Lines | Geoglyph | Peru | ✓ |
| 14 | Roman Forum | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 15 | Castel Sant'Angelo | Castle | Italy | |
| 16 | Aqueduct of Segovia | Aqueduct | Spain | ✓ |
| 17 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 18 | Tower of Hercules | Fortified tower | Spain | ✓ |
| 19 | Stonehenge | Stone circle | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 20 | Diocletian's Palace | Palace | Croatia | ✓ |
| 21 | Knossos | Archaeological site | Greece | |
| 22 | Odeon of Herodes Atticus | Roman theatre | Greece | |
| 23 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 24 | Roman Theatre of Orange | Roman theatre | France | ✓ |
| 25 | Column of Marcus Aurelius | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 26 | Arena of Nîmes | Amphitheatre | France | |
| 27 | Pompeii | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 28 | Laocoön and His Sons | Sculpture | Vatican City | |
| 29 | Ajanta Caves | Rock-cut architecture | India | ✓ |
| 30 | Hadrian's Wall | Archaeological site | United Kingdom | ✓ |
01 Petra
Jordan · 32.1 km from Ma'an30.329° N 35.442° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay 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.
02 Abu Simbel
Egypt22.337° N 31.626° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Olaf Tausch · Public domain Abu Simbel is two temples cut into a sandstone hill on the west bank of Lake Nasser, in Egypt's far south close to the Sudanese border. Ramesses II had them carved in the 13th century BC, at the Second Cataract where Egypt met Nubia, and they were meant to be seen from the river as a statement of pharaonic power.
Did you know? Carving the temples took about twenty years, from roughly 1264 to 1244 BC.
03 Bagan
Myanmar · 29.5 km from Chauk21.172° N 94.860° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by LuisValiente from Pixabay 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'.
04 Parthenon
Παρθενώνας
Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nonbirinonko from Pixabay 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.
05 Karnak Temple Complex
Egypt · 2.2 km from Luxor25.718° N 32.658° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nadkol19 from Pixabay 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.
06 Shah-i-Zinda
Uzbekistan · 3.8 km from Samarkand39.663° N 66.988° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Shah-i-Zinda is less a single monument than a street of the dead: a narrow lane climbing the slope south of the old Afrosiyob hill in Samarkand, lined on both sides by mausoleums whose portals are sheathed in glazed tilework. The name means "the Living King" and comes from Qutham ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad who reached Samarkand with the Arab conquest in the seventh century.
Did you know? Until the 16th century the complex was known simply as the Mazar of the Shah; the name Shah-i-Zinda, the Living King, only took hold afterwards.
07 Pont du Gard
France · 19.8 km from Nîmes43.947° N 4.535° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Sloopng from Pixabay In the 1st century AD the Roman colony of Nemausus, today's Nîmes, needed water and found it at a spring near Uzès. The two towns are only about 20 km apart, but hills covered in dense garrigue lay between them, so the engineers took a winding route of some 50 km, mostly underground, with a total drop of just 17 metres. 8 metres high. 5 cm along its length.
Did you know? Coins found in the outflow at Nîmes suggest the aqueduct was built between about AD 40 and 60, in the reign of Claudius.
08 Persepolis
Iran · 16.2 km from Marvdasht29.935° N 52.890° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
SEYED MOHAMAD AHMADI · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
09 Ephesus
Efes
Turkey · 21.6 km from Söke37.940° N 27.349° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by lucag259 from Pixabay 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.
10 Pyramids of Meroë
Sudan16.935° N 33.751° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by mtorrazzina from Pixabay On a low ridge of sand east of the Nile, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, stand more than two hundred pyramids in three clusters. They are nothing like the pyramids of Giza. The Nubian pyramids are small and steep, their sides rising at a sharp angle to a narrow point, and each once had a little temple-like chapel built against its eastern face, where offerings were made to the dead.
Did you know? The earliest ruler securely identified among the royal burials is King Arakamani, known to the Greeks as Ergamenes, who reigned around 280 BC.
11 Colosseum
Colosseo
Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.492° E
Image by MARTINOPHUC from Pixabay 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.
12 Western Wall
Palestine · 2.6 km from Jerusalem31.777° N 35.234° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0 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.
13 Nazca Lines
Líneas de Nazca
Peru · 25.6 km from Nasca14.697° S 75.135° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by monikawl999 from Pixabay Maria Reiche, a German mathematician, spent roughly forty years on foot in the Peruvian desert measuring, mapping and defending the Nazca Lines from a rented broom cupboard of a house nearby, and it was her work that popularized the idea that the lines formed a giant celestial calendar — tracking solstices, marking the paths of stars, even predicting eclipses.
Did you know? The geoglyphs were made between about 500 BC and AD 500, the earliest by the Paracas culture before the Nazca.
14 Roman Forum
Foro Romano
Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.892° N 12.485° E
Image by jensjunge from Pixabay 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.
15 Castel Sant'Angelo
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E
Image by rainhard2 from Pixabay 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.
16 Aqueduct of Segovia
Acueducto de Segovia
Spain40.948° N 4.118° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 The aqueduct does not stand at the edge of Segovia; it walks straight through it. 5 m above the street, and people pass beneath arches that have carried water, or at least the channel for it, since the Roman period. The whole elevated bridge runs for roughly 728 m and has 167 arches, and the blocks are laid entirely without mortar, held in place by their own weight and careful cutting.
Did you know? According to legend, a water-carrier girl struck a pact with the devil, who built the aqueduct in one night but was beaten by dawn before laying the final stone.
17 Trajan's Column
Colonna Traiana
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E
Raffaele pagani · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
18 Tower of Hercules
Torre de Hércules
Spain · 6.3 km from A Coruña43.386° N 8.406° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Lmbuga) · CC BY-SA 3.0 There were dozens of lighthouses like this one once, scattered around the edges of the Roman world. There is exactly one left that still works.
Did you know? Of the tower's roughly 55 metres, about 34 are surviving Roman masonry; the top 21 metres were added during the 18th-century restoration.
19 Stonehenge
United Kingdom51.179° N 1.826° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Stonehenge wasn't built — it was built, rebuilt, and rearranged over roughly 1,500 years, and what stands today is really the last of several distinct monuments on the same spot. The earliest phase, a circular ditch and bank enclosing cremated human remains, dates to around 3000 BCE.
Did you know? Large Mesolithic postholes found nearby date to around 8000 BC, thousands of years before the first ditch at Stonehenge was dug.
20 Diocletian's Palace
Dioklecijanova palača
Croatia · 2.9 km from Split43.508° N 16.438° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay 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.
21 Knossos
Κνωσός
Greece · 4.2 km from Heraklion35.298° N 25.163° E
Image by davestem from Pixabay 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.
22 Odeon of Herodes Atticus
Ωδείο Ηρώδου του Αττικού
Greece · 1.7 km from Athens37.971° N 23.725° E
Image by 2770862 from Pixabay Built into the southwest slope of the Acropolis, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus shows Athens the Roman way: a steep semicircle of marble seats facing a stage building whose three-storey wall of arched openings still rises about 28 metres against the rock. Herodes Atticus, a rich Athenian orator and patron, completed it in AD 161 in memory of his Roman wife, Aspasia Annia Regilla, and gave it to the city.
Did you know? In 1973 the ancient theatre hosted the Miss Universe pageant, broadcast around the world from the foot of the Acropolis.
23 Terracotta Army
People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by artemtation from Pixabay 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.
24 Roman Theatre of Orange
Théâtre antique d'Orange
France44.136° N 4.809° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fietzfotos from Pixabay The Roman Theatre of Orange is one of the best-preserved Roman theatres anywhere, and its great stage wall still stands to its full original height. It was built early in the 1st century AD under Augustus for the Roman colony of Arausio, founded by veterans of the Second Legion. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1981.
Did you know? The colony it served was founded in 40 BC with the full name Colonia Julia Firma Secundanorum Arausio.
25 Column of Marcus Aurelius
Colonna di Marco Aurelio
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.901° N 12.480° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Column of Marcus Aurelius stands in Piazza Colonna, on the Via del Corso in the centre of Rome, in front of Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian government. It was raised to honour the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his campaigns against the Germanic and Sarmatian peoples north of the Danube, fought from 169 until his death in 180, and was completed around 193.
26 Arena of Nîmes
Arènes de Nîmes
France · 0.9 km from Nîmes43.835° N 4.360° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Roman amphitheatre of Nîmes rises straight out of the city's streets, an oval 133 metres long and 101 wide, its outer wall 21 metres high and pierced by two storeys of sixty arches. Built around 100 AD, only some twenty years after the Colosseum, it is among the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres anywhere and one of the twenty largest of the roughly four hundred known.
Did you know? In the 12th century the fortified arena became a residential quarter with its own churches of St Peter and St Martin.
27 Pompeii
Pompei
Italy · 23.2 km from Naples40.751° N 14.490° E
Glen Scarborough from The Central Coast, Australia · CC BY 2.0 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.
28 Laocoön and His Sons
Gruppo del Laocoonte
Vatican City · 2.4 km from Rome41.907° N 12.454° E
Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 4.0 Laocoön and His Sons is the marble group that launched the Vatican Museums. It was dug up in early 1506 in a vineyard on the Oppian Hill in Rome, and Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo to look at it; Michelangelo went too. It was quickly recognised as the Laocoön described by Pliny the Elder, who knew it in the palace of Emperor Titus and called it preferable to all other painting and sculpture.
Did you know? The outstretched right arm that the priest held for centuries was a restoration made by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli in 1532.
29 Ajanta Caves
India20.553° N 75.700° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
No machine-readable author provided. Soman assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5 The Buddhist monks who carved these thirty caves into a horseshoe-shaped gorge weren't just after dramatic scenery — the site served as a monsoon retreat, a place where monks, pilgrims and travelling merchants sheltered during the rains, when travel across the region became difficult.
Did you know? Cave 1, probably commissioned by Harishena himself, seems never to have been consecrated: its shrine Buddha bears no soot from butter lamps.
30 Hadrian's Wall
United Kingdom55.024° N 2.292° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 18623647 from Pixabay 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.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most remarkable ancient place in the world?
- On our list, Petra (Jordan) ranks first, followed by Abu Simbel (Egypt) and Bagan (Myanmar).
- Which country has the most ancient sites?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (16), Greece (8) and France (6).
- What is the oldest lighthouse still in use?
- The Tower of Hercules in A Coruña, Spain, built by the Romans in the late first century AD, is the only fully preserved Roman lighthouse still used for maritime signalling.
- How does the Aqueduct of Segovia stand without mortar?
- Its granite blocks were cut to fit and stacked so that the arches carry the load by compression alone, the weight of the stones pressing them into place.
- How many ancient places are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 78 ancient places in 32 countries. Italy has the most, with 16.