In the granite hills of southern Africa stand the ruins of a great city built entirely of stone, its curving walls raised without mortar and rising in places to more

For nearly a thousand years, from the first century before the common era to the tenth century after it, the kingdom of Silla ruled from a single valley in the

In an extraordinary landscape of giant granite boulders in southern India lie the ruins of Hampi, the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire, once one of the largest and richest cities

In the desert of northern Iraq stand the ruins of Hatra, a great fortified city that twice defied the might of Rome. A caravan hub on the frontier between the

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it destroyed not only Pompeii but also the smaller, wealthier seaside town of Herculaneum. Buried under a different kind of volcanic material, Herculaneum

In western Turkey, perched above a hillside of dazzling white terraces, lies Hierapolis, an ancient spa city built beside one of the most extraordinary natural wonders in the world. Below

Poverty Point in Louisiana shows hunter-gatherers built massive earthworks and traded across a continent, thousands of years before farming arrived.

Off the southern coast of Tanzania lies a low green island scattered with the ruins of domes, arches, and courtyards built from blocks of coral. For several centuries these were

On the island of Crete stand the ruins of Knossos, the great palace of the Minoans and the centre of the first advanced civilisation of Europe. More than three and

In the mountains of northern Ethiopia stands a group of churches unlike any others in the world. Rather than being built up from the ground, they were carved downward into