Ancient (Greek?) City w/Harbor - please help identify?

[Gidde]

I know, right?! It's a shame. It makes for an incredibly beautiful city. I've been looking around googlemaps for MONTHS trying to find something similar and came up with a big nothing. But I never thought of looking at regular mountain cities like Macchu Picchu. Great idea!

[markem]

There was a book I read a few years back. This book held images of the greatest cities ever buit pre-modern era. There were two cities in the Mediterranean that were listed. One was on an island in the Mediterranean which still hasn't been completely excavated. Anyone can go to this island. It is covered with the remains of the city that covered it. The thing about the island was that it had no fresh water on it. So ships traveled daily to the mainland and filled huge cisterns with water and then they would return to the island to offload the water. I want to say it was Crete - but I don't remember the name of the island/city. The second city was built in the manner you have talked about. This set of ruins is found in a region where mountains come directly down to the water. I thought you were first talking about this city. Sadly, I don't remember if I own the book or if I just was looking at it at Barnes & Nobles. The largest city actually is in South America. A gigantic city was built during the time frame of the Mayans and Aztecs, it was occupied for a very long time and was mainly made out of dirt and stone. If I remember correctly it spanned 35 square miles and was only recently found again. I just glanced at Amazon.com and did not see the book. But I remember it was about ancient cities that rivaled today's largest cities. A very interesting book to look at. If I find it again I'll post again.

After looking at all of the books on Amazon.com I think the island city may be Cyprus. The problem of not having the book with you. :-(

[Chick]

The book was most likely Great Cities of the Ancient World by L. Sprague de Camp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_C..._Ancient_World

and the city probably Tyre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyre,_Lebanon

[markem]

Unfortunately - no it isn't that book. It doesn't cover cities in the New World (which I'm taking to mean South America also). :-/ I'll....er.....no I won't be able to see if I have already scanned it in to my computer (One of my projects is to take all or most of my books and digitize them via my Fujitsu scanner. Unfortunately, I'm backing up my computer and it has over 400GB of stuff on it so I can't do anything until it finishes. :-( Hackers attacked so I am backing everything up, then I have to wipe the hard drive, and then re-install everything (which will probably take forever and a day). I plan on then making another backup (of the good system) so in case I need to do so I can just restore my system. I did this kind of thing after just installing the OS but I have so many graphics projects I really need to back up my system after I have everything restored. :-/

[Wingshaw]

@Markem:
--it is possible the city you describe is Santorini, on the island of Thera. Thera was a volcanic island that erupted, causing huge tsunamis to engulf Crete, and hastened the destruction of the Minoan civilisation. The island is unlikely to have its own source of fresh water. Crete and Cyprus, on the other hand, almost certainly do have fresh water available.
--other cities you could try looking at: Mycenae (fortified town in mainland Greece), Rhodes (city and island in the Aegean), Knossos (main settlement on Crete, mostly excavated), Syracuse (Athenian colony in Sicily)
--as for South American cities: Tenochtitlan (Aztec), Teotihuacan (Mayan), Cuzco (Inca)

There's probably a whole bunch that I've skipped, but those are certainly the best known examples of large towns.

THW

[markem]

I know it is not Mycenae or Knossos. Not as sure it isn't Rhodes or Syracuse. It is an island in the Mediterranean. (Which contains hundreds of islands.) It has not sunk. Er....Herculaneum just popped into my head. They are still finding all sorts of things on this island. According to the book I had - someone had found a handful of coins just before the book went to print. Ugh. I really need my computer. It was at 87% this morning. Hopefully it is through by the time I get home. Of course, my graphics computer I caused the hard drive to freeze up. As a computer person of over 40 years - I could not believe I did what I did to my graphics laptop. The exit vent was clogged with dust (we have cats and so high dust and hair). Well, after I had pulled this huge gob of dust out of the vent I blew on the vent like an idiot and that caused the dust inside of it to go back in to the laptop and obviously something short circuited in the laptop which blew the hard drive in it. Needless to say I was not a happy camper. I'm holding off getting it back up and running until after I get my main computer back up and running.

Anyway - unknown about the South American cities. Like I say - need my computer back up and running. So I can go look at my scanned in books.

[Wingshaw]

@Markem: Well, you say you have cats, so I like you already. You've peaked my curiosity, now. I am an archaeologist, urban planner and amateur urban historian, so if you find out what the city was, I'd really like to know. Maybe it is one I have never heard of before, which is always exciting. You say the city had only recently been discovered; do you remember the date of publication for the book?

THW

[markem]

I believe it was about five years ago I got the book and the discovery had been made a few years before that. The city is something like 35 square miles. Mainly mud and wood buildings. (How something like that could survive all of these years is beyond me.) I'll post as soon as I get my system back up (and I'm crossing my fngers that I didn't lose the scanned in book). Speaking of which - it FINALLY finished the backup. I moved the last archive file over to the external hard drive. Took six hours to do the low level format of the 500GB hard drive (to ensure no hacker stuff was still on the hard drive). Then I re-installed Windows XP. But when I went to install the drivers for the laptop - I've only got System 7 drivers! Some of them installed but most just went "Wrong OS" and stopped. *sigh* I remembered that this was brought up in the forums and some kind soul posted all of the drivers needed. So today at work I had to download all of the XP drivers for my system. Now all I have to do is a quick format, re-install the OS, and then install all of the drivers. Why do I have to do this? Because I want to ensure that everything gets installed properly. If you install the wrong drivers then things can go along ok for a while and then suddenly everything freezes. So better to just start over at this point.

I believe I've kept the front and back covers to all of the books I've scanned in. (Just remembered this.) I can pull those out and see if I still have the covers.

Cats AND dogs at our house as well as some birds, a skink, horned toad, and American Boa. My wife seems to have a knack for finding stray dogs and cats and being a science teacher she has the birds and reptiles at work (and brings them home over the summer).

[markem]

I believe it was....drum roll........Chan Chan

I tried Googling it again using "largest ancient city in south america" and it came up. Built of Adobe bricks covering over 20 square kilometers. The area is very dry which is why the bricks worked.

[Wingshaw]

Chan Chan...that does ring a bell. My Honours supervisor at uni was actually an expert on Peruvian archaeology, so he probably mentioned it (but he was also the most boring lecturer in the world, so I doubt I was paying much attention). Thanks for solving the mystery.

I think science classes in America must be a lot more interesting than what we have in Australia. We never had all those animals in my lessons (and there's no shortage of snakes and reptiles to be found here, as you can imagine).

THW