Lost city is a term that is generally considered to refer to a well-populated area which fell into terminal decline, became extensively or completely uninhabited, and whose location has been forgotten. Some lost cities whose locations have been rediscovered have been studied extensively by scientists. Recently abandoned cities or cities whose location was never in question might be referred to as ruins or ghost towns. The search for such lost cities by European explorers and adventurers in the Americas, Africa and in Southeast Asia from the 15th century onwards eventually led to the development of archaeology.
Lost cities generally fall into two broad categories:
- no knowledge of the city existed until the time of its rediscovery
- location has been lost but knowledge of its existence has been retained in myths, legends, or historical records.
Read more about Lost City: How Cities Are Lost, Rediscovery, Legends
Famous quotes containing the words lost and/or city:
“The other 1000 are principally the ‘old Yankee stock,’ who have lost the town, politically, to the Portuguese; who deplore the influx of the ‘off-Cape furriners’; and to whom a volume of genealogy is a piece of escape literature.”
—For the State of Massachusetts, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)