Lost Cities: 50 Vanished Places and the People Who Built Them

Hiram Bingham did not discover Machu Picchu. Three families were farming there, and someone had written his name on a wall in 1902.

Cities are rarely lost in the sense of vanishing, and almost never lost to the people living nearby. They are abandoned, buried, overgrown, renamed - or simply written out of the histories that later got read.

Lost Cities is an illustrated account of fifty of them, each with an original painting showing the place as it was rather than as it now lies.

Inside you will find:

• Cities of the First Builders - Çatalhöyük, where people walked across the rooftops because there were no streets, and Uruk, where writing was invented to track debts
• Empires in the Sand - Petra, Palmyra, Merv and Timbuktu, built on trade and emptied when the routes moved
• Jungle and Stone - Angkor, Tikal and Great Zimbabwe, and what laser scanning beneath the canopy revealed about how large they really were
• Cities Beneath the Waves - Port Royal, which slid into its harbour in minutes, and Doggerland, the drowned plain that once joined Britain to Europe
• The Deliberately Emptied - Pripyat, Hashima, Varosha and Centralia, abandoned by decree, by disaster, or by a fire that has burned underground since 1962

Most of these places were not ended by catastrophe. A river moved, a trade route shifted, a water supply failed, or a capital was relocated - and the population went elsewhere and did something else. This book is about what actually empties a city, and about who gets to decide when a place counts as lost.

Illustrated throughout with original paintings.