Sometime around the middle of the second millennium BC, on a prosperous island in the southern Aegean, a town died in fire and ash. Its people had already fled, warned

There are ancient cities that dazzle with their scale and others that charm with their detail. Aphrodisias belongs firmly to the second kind. Tucked into a fertile valley in the

Some of the most important places in human history do not look like much. Arslantepe is a low, grassy mound on the fertile plain near Malatya, in eastern Turkey, the

On a green island in a lake west of modern Stockholm, sheep now graze among grassy mounds where, more than a thousand years ago, one of the busiest marketplaces of

In the far south of Albania, on a wooded peninsula between a shining lagoon and the channel that separates the mainland from the Greek island of Corfu, lie the ruins

Out on the plains of southwestern Iran, rising unexpectedly from the flat landscape, stands one of the most extraordinary monuments to survive from the ancient world: a vast stepped tower

In the middle of the Aegean, ringed by the scattered islands of the Cyclades, lies a small, dry, almost barren island that the ancient Greeks held to be one of

High on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, where two great cliffs called the Phaedriades catch the morning light and throw it down across a valley of silver-green olive trees, the

Beneath the busy streets of Hamadan, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Iran, lies the buried capital of a vanished empire. This is Ecbatana, known in ancient times

On the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia, where a curve of golden sand meets a plain rising gently toward low hills, lie the ruins of a place that is unique in