The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in the World

193 places in 59 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. That underground level, the hypogeum, was added under Emperor Domitian roughly a decade after the amphitheater opened, and it turned a simple oval arena into something closer to a theater with special effects: two stories of corridors, animal cages, and dozens of hand-cranked, counterweighted elevators that could hoist a leopard, a painted backdrop, or a gladiator straight up through a trapdoor onto the sand, seemingly out of nowhere. Slaves and laborers pushed the winches from below in near-total darkness, timing releases to whatever the show above demanded.

   Did you know? Since 2000, Rome has lit the Colosseum in gold whenever a death sentence anywhere in the world is commuted.

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2. 02 Giza pyramid complex

   Egypt · 6.7 km from Giza29.976° N 31.133° E

   

   The Giza plateau, on the edge of the Western Desert above modern Giza, holds the most famous group of monuments on Earth: the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, the Great Sphinx, and the temples, causeways and cemeteries that served them. All were built during Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, roughly 2600 to 2500 BC. Giza is the northernmost part of the Memphis necropolis, a World Heritage Site since 1979 that extends south through Abusir, Saqqara and Dahshur.

   Did you know? The three great pyramids are aligned to the cardinal directions with an error of only about one-fifteenth of a degree.

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3. 03 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. That distinction is exactly why it survived: when Roman legions destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, they were burning a building on top of the platform, not tearing down the retaining wall that held the platform up. The wall stayed standing almost by accident of engineering.

   Did you know? From its foundations to its top the wall rises about 32 metres, in 45 courses of stone, 17 of which lie below today's plaza.

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4. 04 Baalbek

   Lebanon · 33 km from Zahlé34.006° N 36.209° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Nowhere else did Rome build on quite this scale. On a hill in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, where the city of Heliopolis once worshipped a local storm god under the name of Jupiter, the imperial architects raised a sanctuary on a platform whose retaining walls are made of single stones. Three of them, set in a row in the western wall and known since antiquity as the Trilithon, are each more than 19 metres long and weigh in the region of 800 tonnes. A still larger block, the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, lies abandoned in a quarry at the edge of town, and an even heavier one was found beside it.

   Did you know? In 2014 archaeologists found a block beside the Stone of the Pregnant Woman measuring about 19.6 by 6 by 5.5 metres and weighing an estimated 1,650 tonnes.

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5. 05 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. For centuries this cramped rectangle, about 130 by 50 metres at its imperial peak, was the heart of ancient Rome, and around four and a half million people a year now walk through what is left.

   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.

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6. 06 Catacombs of Paris

   Catacombes de Paris

   France · 3.1 km from Paris48.834° N 2.332° E

   

   Twenty metres beneath the 14th arrondissement, in tunnels left by centuries of limestone quarrying, lie the bones of several million Parisians. The Catacombs of Paris are an ossuary created to empty the city's overflowing cemeteries, and the walk through them is one of the strangest in any European capital: a long, cool corridor of stone that suddenly turns into walls built entirely of skulls and long bones, stacked with a care that is almost decorative.

   Did you know? The ossuary holds the remains of more than six million people, yet it occupies only a small part of the old quarry tunnels beneath Paris.

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7. 07 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. By the 5th century Rome's defenders had already folded the tomb into the city's Aurelian Walls as a fortress, because a solid stone cylinder that size, sitting right on the Tiber, was too good a defensive position to leave to the dead.

   Did you know? In 537, as Goths besieged Rome, defenders hurled the tomb's bronze and stone statues down onto the attackers.

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8. 08 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. The shaft is built from 20 huge drums of Carrara marble, each about 3.7 m across and weighing some 32 tonnes, and inside it a spiral staircase of 185 steps, lit by 43 narrow slits, climbs to a platform at the top.

   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.

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9. 09 Butrint

   Albania · 13.4 km from Saranda39.757° N 20.017° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Butrint sits on a hill above the Vivari Channel, close to the Straits of Corfu, and in one walk you pass through some 2,500 years of Mediterranean history: a Greek theatre, Roman baths, a Byzantine baptistery, a Venetian fortress and the castle of Ali Pasha. It is the most important archaeological site in Albania, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992 and the heart of a national park created in 2000.

   Did you know? Butrint's local calendar is among those inscribed on the Antikythera Mechanism, the oldest known analogue computer, made around 150 to 100 BC.

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10. 10 Angkor Wat

    Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth and the one building every Cambodian knows. It appears on the national flag. King Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century as the state temple of his capital, Yaśodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu. It was most likely also intended as his mausoleum. The work seems to have stopped at his death, which is why some reliefs were left unfinished. Unlike almost every other temple at Angkor, it faces west.

    Did you know? The temple was built from an estimated five to ten million sandstone blocks, the heaviest weighing about 1.5 tonnes.

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11. 11 Grand Palace

    Thailand · 2.5 km from Bangkok13.750° N 100.492° E

    

    The Grand Palace in Bangkok is not one building but a walled city of them: throne halls, pavilions, gates and a royal chapel spread over about 218,000 square metres on the bank of the Chao Phraya, gilded spires and roofs of green and orange tile rising within four walls. It was founded on 6 May 1782 by King Rama I, the first of the Chakri dynasty, when he moved his capital across the river from Thonburi to Bangkok; its plan deliberately copied the royal palace of Ayutthaya, and many of its bricks were ferried downriver from the ruins of that sacked city. The kings lived here until the early twentieth century, and the palace is still used for royal ceremonies — the coronation of King Rama X in 2019 took place in the Phaisan Thaksin hall.

    Did you know? The Inner Court was reserved for the king and his consorts, whom ordinary people called the forbidden women, and at times housed nearly 3,000 residents.

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12. 12 Pyramid of Djoser

    Egypt · 15.6 km from Giza29.871° N 31.217° E

    

    On the plateau of Saqqara, above the ruins of ancient Memphis, stands the building where Egyptian monumental architecture begins. The Step Pyramid was raised in the 27th century BC for Djoser, a king of the Third Dynasty known in his own time by his Horus name Netjerikhet. Its six stacked tiers of limestone rise to about 62 m over a rectangular base of roughly 121 by 109 m, and it is usually counted the earliest colossal structure in Egypt built entirely of cut stone. Tradition and most Egyptologists credit the design to Imhotep, Djoser's high official, whose statue with his titles was found in the complex and who was later deified; the Greeks identified him with Asclepius.

    Did you know? The pyramid contains roughly 330,400 cubic metres of material.

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13. 13 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. The residence he built there from around 295 is less a palace than a fortified town: an irregular rectangle roughly 215 by 175 metres, laid out like a legionary camp, with towers along its three landward walls and an arcaded gallery on the side facing the sea. Half of it housed the emperor, the rest his garrison and servants. Most of the white stone came from the island of Brač; granite columns and a dozen sphinxes were shipped from Egypt.

    Did you know? According to ancient sources, when asked to return to power Diocletian replied that anyone who saw the cabbages he grew would never suggest it.

    More about Diocletian's Palace →

14. 14 Cave of Altamira

    Cueva de Altamira

    Spain · 25.7 km from Santander43.383° N 4.117° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, holds some of the finest Palaeolithic art in the world, and no other cave in northern Spain has such complex and crowded painting. The cave is about 270 m long, a series of passages in the limestone of Mount Vispieres. People lived at its mouth during the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, until a rockfall sealed the entrance about 13,000 years ago and preserved everything inside. Uranium-thorium dating shows that painting went on for more than 10,000 years, and some red signs are around 36,000 years old. Altamira is the key site of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palaeolithic cave art in northern Spain.

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15. 15 Somapura Mahavihara

    Bangladesh25.031° N 88.977° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Somapura Mahavihara, at Paharpur in northwestern Bangladesh, is the ruin of one of the largest Buddhist monasteries ever built south of the Himalayas. Seals found during excavation name it as a foundation of the Pala king Dharmapala, who ruled Bengal around the late eighth and early ninth centuries, though Tibetan sources credit his successor Devapala. For some four hundred years it was one of the great monastic universities of eastern India, part of a network that included Nalanda and Vikramashila, and scholars travelled here from as far as Tibet. The teacher Atiśa, who carried Buddhism to Tibet in the eleventh century, is associated with it.

    Did you know? Tibetan sources count Somapura among the five great monastic universities of Pala-era eastern India, and by area it was the largest of them.

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16. 16 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. After an earthquake around 1700 BC it was rebuilt larger and finer, and the following two and a half centuries were its golden age. From about 1450 BC Mycenaean Greeks ran the palace, keeping records in Linear B, the earliest written Greek, until a destruction by fire conventionally dated to about 1350 BC.

    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.

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17. 17 Hampi

    India · 11.1 km from Hospet15.335° N 76.462° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Hampi is what remains of Vijayanagara, capital of the last great Hindu empire of South India. From 1336 until 1565 the city spread along the Tungabhadra River, and by around 1500 it may have been the second-largest city in the world after Beijing, drawing merchants from Persia and Portuguese Goa. In 1565 a coalition of Deccan sultanates defeated the empire's army, and the city was sacked and abandoned. UNESCO counts more than 1,600 surviving remains scattered across a landscape of farmland and huge piles of granite boulders: temples, market streets, palace platforms, stepped tanks, aqueducts, gateways and stables. Local tradition identifies the area with Kishkindha, the monkey kingdom of the Ramayana.

    Did you know? In 1442 the Persian envoy Abdul Razzaq described the city as enclosed by seven rings of fortifications, the inner ones packed with shops and bazaars.

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18. 18 Colossi of Memnon

    Egypt · 4.6 km from Luxor25.721° N 32.611° E

    

    These two seated figures — about 18 metres tall, roughly 720 tons of quartzite sandstone apiece — are nearly all that remains standing of what was once Egypt's largest mortuary temple, built for Amenhotep III around 1350 BC. The temple itself behind them was dismantled and its stone reused for other buildings in antiquity; the colossi survived purely because they were too massive to be worth moving.

    Did you know? The quartzite was quarried at Gebel el-Ahmar near modern Cairo and transported about 675 km south to Thebes.

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19. 19 Palmyra

    Syria · 1.2 km from Tadmur34.550° N 38.270° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Palmyra was a caravan city in an oasis of the Syrian Desert, about 215 km northeast of Damascus, and for three centuries it was one of the richest places in the Roman East. Its merchants ran trade routes between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia and set up trading colonies along the Silk Road, and their wealth paid for a city whose architecture mixed Greek and Roman forms with local Semitic traditions. The inscriptions were in Palmyrene Aramaic and Greek, and the gods worshipped here were Semitic, Mesopotamian and Arab. The spring of Efqa and the palms of the oasis explain why a city could exist at all in this landscape.

    Did you know? Palmyra's tax law of AD 137, carved in Greek and Palmyrene on a 5 m slab, went to the Russian tsar in 1901 and is now in the Hermitage.

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20. 20 Prambanan Temple

    Indonesia · 13.2 km from Yogyakarta City7.752° S 110.491° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Local legend explains Prambanan's scale with a story dark enough that it kept people away for centuries: Prince Bandung Bondowoso wanted to marry Princess Roro Jonggrang, who agreed only if he could build a thousand temples in a single night. With the help of spirits he very nearly managed it — so she had the villagers light fires and pound rice to fake the approach of dawn, tricking the spirits into stopping short. Furious at being outwitted, he turned her to stone as the final, thousandth temple, and locals have long identified her statue with the image of Durga inside the main shrine.

    Did you know? An inscription dated 856 records that the builders diverted a river, now the Opak, away from the main shrine and levelled its old bed to make room for more temples.

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21. 21 Valley of the Kings

    Egypt · 6.5 km from Luxor25.740° N 32.602° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    For nearly five centuries, from about 1539 to 1075 BC, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried not under pyramids but in tombs cut deep into a dry valley on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, modern Luxor. The valley lies beneath al-Qurn, a pyramid-shaped peak that may have been part of its appeal, and its hidden entrances were meant to defeat the robbers who had emptied the older royal tombs. Mortuary temples for the cult of the dead kings were built separately, down by the fields. Some 65 tombs and chambers are now known, from simple pits to KV5, the vast burial complex of the sons of Ramesses II, with more than 120 rooms.

    Did you know? Workmen who cut and painted the royal tombs lived in the nearby village of Deir el-Medina, and their records include what may be history's first documented labour strike.

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22. 22 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. The platform it stands on curves gently upward toward the centre — rising about 10 centimetres over a 70-metre side, a ratio of roughly 1 in 700 — every column bulges very slightly partway up its height (a refinement called entasis) instead of tapering in a straight line, and the columns themselves lean fractionally inward rather than standing truly vertical. None of these corrections is visible to the eye on its own; together they're generally understood to counteract optical effects that would otherwise make a building built with mathematically straight lines look subtly warped or sagging.

    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.

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23. 23 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. What he found had been a real, and surprisingly late, Nabataean achievement: this wasn't some ancient city stretching back to biblical antiquity, but a settlement the Nabataeans built up from around the 4th century BCE — the first solid historical reference to a thriving community there dates to 312 BCE — before it grew into their kingdom's capital by the 2nd century BCE.

    Did you know? The Monastery, Ad Deir, is the largest monument at Petra, about 45 metres tall and 50 metres wide.

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24. 24 Visoki Dečani

    Manastiri i Deçanit

    Kosovo · 13.1 km from Pejë42.547° N 20.266° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Visoki Dečani is a Serbian Orthodox monastery at the foot of the mountains on the western edge of Kosovo, and its church is the largest surviving medieval church in the Balkans. King Stefan Dečanski began it in 1327 as his own burial church; he died in 1331 before it was finished, and his son Stefan Dušan completed the work. The founding charter of 1330 survives, and so does the name of the master builder, a Franciscan friar known as Vito of Kotor, a detail that explains much of what makes the building unusual.

    Did you know? A carved inscription over the south portal names the builder as Fra Vita, a Franciscan friar from Kotor, and says the church took eight years to build.

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25. 25 Rock of Cashel

    Ireland52.520° N 7.890° W

    

    The Rock of Cashel rises abruptly out of the flat farmland of County Tipperary, a limestone outcrop crowned with a ruined cathedral, a round tower and a small Romanesque chapel, all packed together within a single wall. From miles away it reads as one silhouette, part castle and part church, and close up it holds some of the most important medieval architecture in Ireland.

    Did you know? A tympanum of Cormac's Chapel shows a centaur in a Norman-style helmet shooting at a lion, carved decades before the Normans reached Ireland.

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26. 26 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. The villagers' first guess was that they'd disturbed some kind of "Pottery God" idol — it was only after bronze arrowheads and crossbow parts turned up nearby that anyone suspected they'd found something closer to an army.

    Did you know? The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.

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27. 27 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. The sea is now about 5 km away, and the ruins lie in a quiet valley beside the Turkish town of Selçuk.

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

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28. 28 Tassili n'Ajjer

    Algeria25.667° N 9.000° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Tassili n'Ajjer — "plateau of rivers" in Berber — is a sandstone upland of more than 72,000 square kilometres in south-eastern Algeria, near the borders with Libya and Niger, and it holds one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric rock art on Earth. Some 15,000 paintings and engravings have been recorded in its shelters and gorges. UNESCO listed it in 1982 for both its art and its geology, and it is also a national park and biosphere reserve.

    Did you know? Optically stimulated luminescence dating suggests most of the plateau's rock art was made in the ninth and tenth millennia before the present.

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29. 29 Temple of Kom Ombo

    Egypt · 3 km from Kom Ombo24.452° N 32.928° E

    

    The Temple of Kom Ombo is a double temple: two complete sanctuaries built side by side under one roof, above the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt. Every element is mirrored along the central axis — two entrances, two sets of halls, two inner shrines — because the temple served two gods at once. The southern half belonged to Sobek, the crocodile god, honoured here as a god of fertility and a creator of the world, together with Hathor and Khonsu; the northern half belonged to Haroeris, Horus the Elder, the falcon god, with his consort Tasenetnofret and their son Panebtawy.

    Did you know? Because it served two gods, the temple was called both the House of the Crocodile and the Castle of the Falcon.

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30. 30 Palatine Hill

    Palatino

    Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.888° N 12.487° E

    

    The Palatine is the hill where Rome says it began. Roman tradition put the she-wolf's cave, the Lupercal, at its foot and Romulus's founding of the city on its summit, and archaeology is not far off: huts of the early Iron Age have been found here. Later it was the smartest address in the Republic, and from Augustus onwards the emperors built over almost all of it, so thoroughly that the word "palace" comes from its name.

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