Finding the Lost Cities: Archaeology and Ancient Civilizations

by Rebecca Stefoff

Assisted by fourteen specially commissioned maps and full-color photographs of sites and artifacts, the reader is invited on a voyage of exploration through twelve ancient cities, once home to the world's ancient peoples. UP.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 1997

Reviews

[Jim Razinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice little find in the clearance section of a used book store. Aimed at young people (describing the two hundred sixteen faces of the Buddha on the Bayon at Angkor Thom, "Many of the faces are taller than a tall person."), adults would enjoy it. Ms. Stefoff descibes twelve "lost" cities, though a few weren't really lost and she notes that in the text: Petra, Ninevah, Hattusha (I miss my rare book on the Hittites), Copán, Chaco Canyon, Angkor, Troy, Zimbabwe, Knossos, Gournia, Machu Picchu, Ur, and a bonus: the Ubar. Large format, gray-scale and full color photos of the sites and artefacts, images of drawings from journals and books. Ms. Stefoff talks about the legends, histories, explorers and archeologists - amateur and professional, the opportunists and profiteers, and others involved in the discovery/rediscovery of some famed and some less well-known cities. Some tragedies with looting (for museums and also private gain), some tragedies from careless removal of artefacts with poor to no documentation, some misguided attempts at restoration...this is also a brief survey of the evolution of archeology. Her last city, Ur, was the best treated (maybe Machu Picchu was as well) because C. Leonard Woolley took painstaking care to excavate and document, contributing techniques to the science such as pouring wax over finds so that the bits and pieces could be removed as found within the wax encasement and examined properly later. Painstaking... he took five years after the discovery of a cemetery to begin excavating it because he wanted to be able to date it accurately.

Not all discoverers were snatch and grab. Henri Mouhot on stumbling across and exploring Angkor Wat during three weeks in January 1860:

What strikes the observer with not less admiration than the grandeur, regularity, and beauty of these majestic buildings, is the the immense size and prodigious number of the blocks of stone of which they are constructed. In this temple alone are as many as 1532 columns. What means of transport, what a multitude of workmen, must this have required, seeing that the mountain out of which the stone was hewn is thirty miles distant!

Serendipitous happenstance that I stopped in that section and found this.

[Carmen Tudor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great 'lost kingdom' book that covers the rediscoveries of Petra, Nineveh, Hattusha, Copan, Chaco Canyon, Angkor, Troy, Zimbabwe, Knossos, Gournia, Machu Picchu, Ur and Ubar. The entries are fairly concise -- I read the entire book in less than a day -- but maintain an interesting tone throughout. The only downside is that it could have done with more photos.

[Roxanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book about finding lost cities all around the world. Loved it.