Oldest To Newest

c. 9600 BC

Massive stone pillars erected by hunter-gatherers, thousands of years before agriculture and settled life.

c. 7300 BC

Two thousand hand stencils, nine thousand years old, and almost every one is a left hand.

c. 3200 BC

Once a year, for seventeen minutes, the sun reaches the floor of a five-thousand-year-old room.

c. 3000 BC

Bought at auction for £6,600 in 1915, then given away three years later.

c. 2600 BC

The oldest city in the Americas; they built pyramids before they made pots.

c. 2560 BC

The only one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world still standing.

c. 2500 BC

A city with planned streets and covered drains, built more than four thousand years ago.

c. 2000 BC

Thirty pharaohs kept adding to the same building site for two thousand years.

c. 1539 BC

Pharaohs hid their tombs in a desert gully, and the priests still had to move the bodies.

c. 1264 BC

A temple carved into a mountain was sawn apart and moved uphill to escape a lake.

c. 1000 BC

A marble metropolis that housed one of the ancient world's great libraries, reborn from the ashes of history.

c. 814 BC

Rome erased the city, then a century later built its own on the same hill.

c. 700 BC

Ming builders mixed sticky rice into the mortar, and it is part of why the bricks still hold.

c. 575 BC

Its gate stands in Berlin, and not one Babylonian text mentions the hanging gardens.

c. 518 BC

Alexander burned it in one night; the world forgot its name for centuries.

c. 500 BC

Figures too large to see from the ground, on a desert too dry to erase them.

c. 400 BC

A rainforest capital with no river, which solved that problem by paving its plazas.

c. 300 BC

A city carved into rock, whose most famous facade is a tomb with nothing inside.

c. 300 BC

Sudan has roughly twice as many pyramids as Egypt, and almost all of them are missing their tops.

c. 250 BC

For a time the largest city on earth; each dynasty built a new one beside the last.

Carved into mountainsides by hand by the Ifugao people, and still planted with rice today.

A landscape soft enough to carve, so people carved churches and whole cities into it.

An emperor's hometown, a two-language dedication, and a harbour that made a city.