The Most Remarkable Ancient Places in Asia
20 places in 13 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable ancient places in Asia are Western Wall (Palestine), Petra (Jordan) and Terracotta Army (People's Republic of China). The list covers 20 ancient places in 13 countries. Armenia has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Asia is where the oldest chapters of the human story are written in stone. Farming, cities, writing and empire all appeared early in the Fertile Crescent and the Iranian plateau, and later in the valleys of India and China, so the continent's ancient places reach back further than almost anywhere else. Many lie in dry climates that preserve carving and plaster, and several sit at the crossroads of trade routes that carried ideas, faiths and styles across thousands of kilometres.
The deepest time belongs to Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia, where hunter-gatherers raised carved T-shaped pillars around 9600 BC, long before pottery or the wheel. Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid kings, still shows processions of tribute bearers on its staircases, and on the cliff of Behistun Darius the Great recorded his victories in three languages. Petra, the Nabataean city carved into rose sandstone, and Ephesus, with the facade of the Library of Celsus, show how Hellenistic and Roman forms travelled east.
Further east, the Terracotta Army guards the tomb of China's first emperor with thousands of life-size soldiers, each face different, and the Ajanta Caves in India preserve Buddhist murals painted in rock-cut halls. Bagan spreads thousands of brick temples across a plain beside the Irrawaddy. Jerusalem holds the Western Wall, the surviving retaining wall of Herod's Temple Mount, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Armenia is one of the oldest cathedrals in the world, and Shah-i-Zinda in Samarkand lines a street of tombs with blue tile.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Western Wall | Archaeological site | Palestine | |
| 2 | Petra | Archaeological site | Jordan | ✓ |
| 3 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 4 | Ephesus | Archaeological site | Turkey | ✓ |
| 5 | Ajanta Caves | Rock-cut architecture | India | ✓ |
| 6 | Persepolis | Archaeological site | Iran | ✓ |
| 7 | Church of the Holy Sepulchre | Cathedral | Israel | |
| 8 | Göbekli Tepe | Archaeological site | Turkey | ✓ |
| 9 | Bagan | Archaeological site | Myanmar | ✓ |
| 10 | Shah-i-Zinda | Necropolis | Uzbekistan | ✓ |
| 11 | Etchmiadzin Cathedral | Cathedral | Armenia | ✓ |
| 12 | Behistun inscription | Archaeological site | Iran | ✓ |
| 13 | Garni Temple | Temple | Armenia | |
| 14 | Sevanavank | Monastery | Armenia | |
| 15 | Walls of Jerusalem | City walls | Israel | ✓ |
| 16 | Pergamon | Archaeological site | Turkey | ✓ |
| 17 | Jōmon Sugi | Remarkable tree | Japan | |
| 18 | Bishapur | Archaeological site | Iran | ✓ |
| 19 | Church of Saint Simeon Stylites | Archaeological site | Syria | ✓ |
| 20 | Shigir Idol | Sculpture | Russia |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Israel · 2.2 km from Jerusalem31.778° N 35.230° E
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jlascar/ · CC BY 2.0 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is not one building but a knot of them, grown over seventeen centuries on the spot that Christian tradition identifies as both Golgotha, the hill of the crucifixion, and the rock-cut tomb from which Jesus rose.
Did you know? When the tomb was opened in 2016, mortar from just above the burial bed was dated to the mid-fourth century, consistent with the age of Constantine.
08 Göbekli Tepe
Göbeklitepe
Turkey · 12.8 km from Şanlıurfa37.223° N 38.922° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Spica-Vega Photo Arts (Banu Nazikcan) · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
09 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'.
10 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.
11 Etchmiadzin Cathedral
Armenia · 16.6 km from Ashtarak40.162° N 44.291° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Marcin Konsek · CC BY-SA 4.0 Etchmiadzin is the mother church of the Armenian Apostolic Church and has a strong claim to being the oldest cathedral in the world. Armenian tradition places its founding between 301 and 303, just after King Tiridates III made Armenia the first state to adopt Christianity.
Did you know? The bell tower once held a bell inscribed with a Tibetan Buddhist mantra, noted by travellers throughout the nineteenth century; it vanished after its removal in the late 1930s.
12 Behistun inscription
Iran · 34.8 km from Kermanshah34.390° N 47.436° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Patrick C, known as dynamomosquito on Flickr, and Pentocelo on this project · CC BY-SA 2.0 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.
13 Garni Temple
Armenia · 20.1 km from Yerevan40.112° N 44.729° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Garni is the one classical colonnaded building that survives anywhere in Armenia — and indeed in the whole territory of the former Soviet Union. It stands on the edge of a triangular promontory at about 1,400 m, where the ground drops sheer into the gorge of the Azat River, with the Gegham mountains rising behind. 7 m high. Its compact, harmonious proportions have invited comparison with the Maison Carrée at Nîmes.
Did you know? In the wars of Shah Abbas in the early 1600s, iron clamps and lead were prised out of the temple to cast bullets, weakening it before the 1679 earthquake.
14 Sevanavank
Armenia · 24.8 km from Gavar40.564° N 45.011° E
Image by Taken from Pixabay Sevanavank stands on a narrow rocky headland above Lake Sevan, the great mountain lake of Armenia lying at about 1,900 metres. Two small stone churches with octagonal drums and conical roofs crown the ridge, with the wide blue water and the mountains of the far shore behind them — one of the best-known views in the country.
Did you know? The monastery is also known as Mariamashen, meaning built by Mariam, after its royal founder.
15 Walls of Jerusalem
Israel · 2 km from Jerusalem31.775° N 35.228° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
איתן פרמן 13:56, 4 December 2006 (UTC) · Public domain The walls that ring the Old City of Jerusalem enclose an area of about one square kilometre that holds sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their line is ancient, but the stones you see today are mostly Ottoman. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ordered the ruined fortifications rebuilt, partly on older foundations, and the work was carried out between about 1537 and 1541.
Did you know? According to legend, Suleiman executed his two architects for leaving Mount Zion outside the walls; two graves inside the Jaffa Gate are popularly said to be theirs.
16 Pergamon
Turkey39.117° N 27.183° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by yusufk53 from Pixabay 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.
17 Jōmon Sugi
Japan30.361° N 130.532° E
Σ64 · CC BY 3.0 Jōmon Sugi is the elder of the cedar forests of Yakushima, a gnarled giant of Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) standing at around 1,300 metres on the northern flank of Mount Miyanoura, deep in the island's mountainous interior. 4 metres around, and with a timber volume estimated at about 300 cubic metres it is counted as the largest conifer in Japan.
Did you know? When first described in 1966, the tree was called Ōiwa-sugi, the Great Rock Cedar, before the name Jōmon Sugi took hold.
18 Bishapur
Iran29.778° N 51.571° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Herbert karim masihi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Bishapur is the city a Persian king of kings built to celebrate beating Rome. Shapur I, the second ruler of the Sasanian dynasty, defeated three Roman emperors in his long reign, and the last of them, Valerian, was taken prisoner in 260.
Did you know? Shapur I founded Bishapur around AD 266, a few years after capturing the Roman emperor Valerian in 260.
19 Church of Saint Simeon Stylites
Syria · 33.5 km from Azaz36.334° N 36.844° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Frank Kidner · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a limestone ridge northwest of Aleppo stand the ruins of what was, for nearly half a century, the largest church in the Christian world. It was built around a single column. Simeon Stylites, born around 390 in the Amanus mountains, became so famous for his ascetic feats that crowds of pilgrims gave him no peace, so he climbed onto a platform atop a pillar some three metres high.
Did you know? A double wall was built around the pillar to hold back crowds, and women, even Simeon's own mother, were not allowed inside.
20 Shigir Idol
Russia · 13 km from Nevyansk57.381° N 60.141° E
Александр Сигачёв · CC0 The Shigir Idol is the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world. It was carved from a larch trunk roughly 11,500 years ago, at the very start of the Holocene, twice as long ago as the building of the Great Pyramid, and it survived only because it lay in an acidic, oxygen-free peat bog.
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 Asia?
- On our list, Western Wall (Palestine) ranks first, followed by Petra (Jordan) and Terracotta Army (People's Republic of China).
- Which country has the most ancient places in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Armenia (3), Iran (3) and Turkey (3).
- How old is Göbekli Tepe?
- Its oldest monumental enclosures date to around 9600 BC, in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. That makes them several thousand years older than Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids, and they were built before farming was fully established.
- Why is the Behistun inscription important?
- Darius the Great had the same text carved in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Copied and studied by Henry Rawlinson in the 19th century, it became the key to deciphering cuneiform, much as the Rosetta Stone was for hieroglyphs.
- When was the Terracotta Army discovered?
- Farmers digging a well near Xi'an found fragments of the figures in 1974. The army was buried with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who died in 210 BC.
- How many ancient places are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 20 ancient places in 13 countries. Armenia has the most, with 3.