Caral, in the Supe Valley of Peru, is the oldest known city in the Americas — built with pyramids, sunken plazas, and clever earthquake-proof foundations at the very same time as the Great Pyramid of Egypt, yet with almost no sign of war.

Dholavira, a great city of the Indus Valley Civilization, thrived for 1,500 years in a near-waterless salt desert by mastering the art of harvesting and storing the monsoon — one of the most brilliant feats of ancient water engineering ever found.

People have lived at Jericho for around 11,000 years without a break. It holds the oldest known town wall and tower on Earth, and some of humanity’s first portraits — the haunting plastered skulls of its Neolithic dead.

Thousands of years before the Great Wall, the Liangzhu culture built a walled water city, the world’s oldest known dams, and jade masterpieces in the Yangtze delta — a lost cradle of civilization only recognized by UNESCO in 2019.

Mohenjo-daro, one of the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, had grid streets, covered drains, and clean water more than 4,000 years ago — yet we still cannot read a single word its people wrote.

On a flooding reef off Pohnpei, Pacific islanders raised a stone city of 92 artificial islets and 750,000 tonnes of basalt. Meet Nan Madol, the astonishing “Venice of the Pacific.”

A great mound in northeastern Syria suggests cities grew up in the north of Mesopotamia just as early as in the famous south, and it left behind thousands of haunting eye idols.