The Most Remarkable Ancient Places in Africa
10 places in 6 countries · updated 5 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable ancient places in Africa are Abu Simbel (Egypt), Volubilis (Morocco) and Cyrene (Libya). The list covers 10 ancient places in 6 countries. Egypt has the most, with 5. Last updated 5 October 2026.
Africa was home to some of the world's first great civilisations, and its dry climate has preserved their works unusually well. Along the Nile, Egypt built temples and tombs for three thousand years, and upriver the kingdom of Kush raised its own pyramids. The Mediterranean coast became part of the Greek and Roman worlds, with cities as grand as any in Italy, and long before any of them, people in a greener Sahara carved and painted the animals around them into rock.
In Egypt, the Great Sphinx at Giza is carved from the bedrock of the plateau beside the pyramids, and at Luxor the temples of Karnak and Luxor were once joined by an avenue of sphinxes; Karnak's hypostyle hall is a forest of giant columns. Far to the south, the two temples of Abu Simbel were carved into a cliff for Ramesses II and later cut apart and lifted to higher ground to escape the waters of Lake Nasser. In Alexandria, the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa blend Egyptian gods with Greek and Roman forms in tombs cut deep into the rock.
Beyond Egypt, the steep-sided Pyramids of Meroë in Sudan mark the royal cemeteries of Kush. On the Mediterranean shore, Cyrene in Libya was founded by Greek colonists and grew into one of the leading cities of the Greek world, Volubilis in Morocco preserves Roman streets, mosaics and a triumphal arch, and the amphitheatre of El Jem in Tunisia rises over a small modern town. In Niger, the Dabous Giraffes are two life-size giraffes engraved into sandstone in the Aïr Mountains.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Abu Simbel | Rock-cut architecture | Egypt | ✓ |
| 2 | Volubilis | Archaeological site | Morocco | ✓ |
| 3 | Cyrene | Archaeological site | Libya | ✓ |
| 4 | The Great Sphinx | Sculpture | Egypt | |
| 5 | Luxor Temple | Archaeological site | Egypt | ✓ |
| 6 | Karnak Temple Complex | Archaeological site | Egypt | ✓ |
| 7 | Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa | Catacombs | Egypt | |
| 8 | Amphitheatre of El Jem | Amphitheatre | Tunisia | ✓ |
| 9 | Pyramids of Meroë | Archaeological site | Sudan | ✓ |
| 10 | Dabous Giraffes | Petroglyph | Niger |
01 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.
02 Volubilis
Morocco · 19.1 km from Meknes34.071° N 5.554° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Yolanda from Pixabay 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.
03 Cyrene
Libya · 0.7 km from Shahhat32.823° N 21.857° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Saleh Tarab · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
04 The Great Sphinx
Egypt · 6.4 km from Giza29.975° N 31.138° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay 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.
05 Luxor Temple
Egypt · 1.1 km from Luxor25.700° N 32.639° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay 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.
06 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.
07 Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa
Egypt · 4.5 km from Alexandria31.187° N 29.905° E
Asiatologist · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
08 Amphitheatre of El Jem
Tunisia · 36.8 km from Mahdia35.296° N 10.707° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Cimoi · CC BY-SA 3.0 The amphitheatre of El Jem rises out of a small Tunisian town like something from another scale entirely: a three-storey ring of honey-coloured stone arcades, 36 metres high, looming over low houses and olive country. It was built around AD 238 in the Roman city of Thysdrus, which had grown rich in the second and third centuries on the olive oil trade of the surrounding plains.
Did you know? This is the third amphitheatre built at Thysdrus; the first, cut into a hill of soft tuff in the 1st century AD, held only about 6,000 spectators.
09 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.
10 Dabous Giraffes
Girafes de Dabous
Niger18.030° N 7.581° E
MRF-Freund · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a low sandstone outcrop on the western edge of the Aïr Mountains in northern Niger, two giraffes have been cut into the rock at almost life size. The larger stands about six metres tall, which makes the pair the largest known animal petroglyphs in the world.
Did you know? A thin line runs from each giraffe's mouth to the head of a small human-like figure, a detail whose meaning is still debated.
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 are the most remarkable ancient places in Africa?
- On our list, Abu Simbel (Egypt) ranks first, followed by Volubilis (Morocco) and Cyrene (Libya).
- Which country has the most ancient places in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from Egypt (5), Libya (1) and Morocco (1).
- Why was Abu Simbel moved?
- The construction of the Aswan High Dam threatened to submerge the temples under Lake Nasser. Between 1964 and 1968, in an international campaign led by UNESCO, they were cut into large blocks and reassembled on higher ground.
- Are there pyramids outside Egypt?
- Yes. Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt, built by the rulers of the Kingdom of Kush. The largest group stands at Meroë, where the pyramids are smaller and steeper than those of Giza.
- How old is the Great Sphinx?
- Most Egyptologists date the Great Sphinx to the reign of the pharaoh Khafre, around 2500 BC, which would make it about 4,500 years old.
- How many ancient places are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 10 ancient places in 6 countries. Egypt has the most, with 5.