ancient unsolved mysteries Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

When most people hear the words “lost ancient cities,” their first thought is of Atlantis, which, as I discuss in this post I made back in 2019, is definitely fictional and never really existed. There are, however, many very real and highly significant ancient cities whose exact locations are still unknown or disputed. Perhaps the most famous example is the ancient city of Akkad; most people have heard at some point of the ancient Akkadian Empire and its founding king Sargon of Akkad (ruled c. 2334 – c. 2279 BCE), but not everyone knows that archaeologists still aren’t sure exactly where this famous ancient city was. Strong evidence suggests that it was somewhere in the area of modern Baghdad, but no one has ever conclusively identified its ruins.

Akkad is far from the only ancient city that has so far eluded modern archaeology. In this post, I will discuss other major ancient cities that are still “lost” and where archaeologists currently hypothesize they may have been.

The Minoan civilization, which flourished on the Greek island of Krete in the southern Aegean Sea during the early Bronze Age, is one of the most fascinating cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. It saw its earliest beginnings in the second half of the fourth millennium BCE and reached its cultural apogee from around 2000 BCE onward. It flourished for over half a millennium after that until the Mycenaean civilization of mainland Greece conquered it sometime around 1450 BCE. It is finally considered to have died out sometime around 1100 BCE, over six hundred years before the time of Socrates.

Sadly, almost the only time the general public ever pays any attention to the Minoan civilization is when they are indulging in all sorts of completely unfounded pseudohistorical speculations about it supposedly being the historical Atlantis. (As I discuss in this post I wrote back in March 2019, Atlantis is a fictional place that Plato completely made up, his story of Atlantis is primarily inspired by events that happened in the Greek world in his own time, and it almost certainly has nothing to do with the Minoan civilization.)

This is a real shame, since the Minoan civilization poses all kinds of very real unsolved ancient mysteries. Particularly mysterious are the scripts that the Minoans wrote in, all of which remain undeciphered and impossible for anyone alive today to read. The majority of surviving Minoan documents are written in two scripts: Kretan hieroglyphs, which the Minoans developed around 2100 BCE, and Linear A, which they developed a few centuries later, around 1800 BCE. They continued to use both scripts until around the middle of the fifteenth century BCE. It is a third undeciphered script, however, that has proven most alluring to the general public. This script is securely attested only in one place: a single clay disk known colloquially as the “Phaistos disk,” which has captivated both scholars and amateurs for over a century.

Tag: ancient unsolved mysteries

Lost Ancient Cities That No One Has Ever Found

The Baffling Ancient Unsolved Mystery of the Phaistos Disk