How Civilizations Built on Top of Each Other: Discover What Lies Beneath Rome, Troy & Other Cities

The idea of dis­cov­er­ing a lost ancient city under­ground has long cap­tured the human imag­i­na­tion. But why are the aban­doned built envi­ron­ments of those fan­tasies always buried? The answer, in large part, is that such places do indeed exist under our feet, at least in cer­tain parts of the world. When archae­ol­o­gists start­ed dig­ging under the Roman Forum, says the nar­ra­tion of the new Pri­mal Space video above, “they uncov­ered an entire world of ruins deep under­ground that had­n’t been seen for cen­turies.” The even old­er city of Troy “was rebuilt ten times, form­ing ten dis­tinct lay­ers, all built direct­ly on top of each oth­er.” A geo­log­i­cal dig is always a jour­ney back in time, but there even more so.

Each civ­i­liza­tion has its own rea­sons for this kind of phys­i­cal accre­tion. “After the great fire of Rome in the first cen­tu­ry, most of the city had to be rebuilt. But instead of clear­ing away the rub­ble, it was quick­er and eas­i­er to sim­ply flat­ten it out and build on top.” There­after, peri­od­ic dis­as­ters con­tin­ued to neces­si­tate peri­od­ic rais­ing of the streets, a process that would even­tu­al­ly bury old­er struc­tures com­plete­ly.

In the case of Troy, which began as a set­tle­ment built of mud bricks in 3,000 BC, nine civ­i­liza­tions grew and dis­solved (often lit­er­al­ly) on the very same mound, “going from the Per­sians to Alexan­der the Great, and even­tu­al­ly the Romans.” Some­thing sim­i­lar con­tin­ues to hap­pen in cer­tain parts of the world today: Shang­hai, for instance, which is now sink­ing at a rate of one cen­time­ter per year.

Hav­ing grown up around Seat­tle, I had more than one occa­sion to take its “under­ground tour,” which takes place amid the remains of a late-nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry town­scape pre­served just below the mod­ern streets. “In 1889, a dev­as­tat­ing fire ripped through the new­ly formed city, and just like Rome, almost every­thing had to be rebuilt,” the video explains. The after­math brought an oppor­tu­ni­ty to re-design the flood-prone city with streets ele­vat­ed above a sys­tem of drains. This put under­ground not just the low­er floors of the exist­ing build­ings, but also their sur­round­ing side­walks. At ele­men­tary-school age, one is some­how both fas­ci­nat­ed and not par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­prised by the exis­tence of a lost city beneath one’s home­town. For me and my class­mates, noth­ing was more mem­o­rable than the fact that there are still toi­lets down there.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Lost Neigh­bor­hood Buried Under New York City’s Cen­tral Park

What’s Under Lon­don? Dis­cov­er London’s For­bid­den Under­world

How the “Lost Cities” of the Ama­zon Were Final­ly Dis­cov­ered

Under­ci­ty: Explor­ing the Under­bel­ly of New York City

Explore the Ruins of Tim­gad, the “African Pom­peii” Exca­vat­ed from the Sands of Alge­ria

Paris Under­ground

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.