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In the popular imagination lost cities are real, prosperous, well-populated areas of human habitation that have fallen into terminal decline and been lost to history.
Lost cities generally fall into three broad categories: those whose disappearance has been so complete that no knowledge of the city existed until the time of its rediscovery, those whose location has been lost but whose memory has been retained in the context of myths and legends, and those whose existence and location have always been known, but which are no longer inhabited.
The search for such lost cities by European adventurers in the Americas, Africa and in Southeast Asia from the 15th century onwards - although initially mostly motivated by little more than greed - eventually led to the development of the science of archaeology.
There was an Arabian city named Ubar, which became abandoned with changes in trade routes, and its location was forgotten for some centuries: it was rediscovered in 1992 by satellite photography revealing the traces of the ancient tracks.
Other cities are lost with little or no clues to guide historians, such as the Colony of Roanoke. In August 1590, John White returned to the former English colony, which had housed 85 men, 17 women (two of them pregnant) and 11 children when he left, to find it completely empty.
Malden Island, in the central Pacific, was deserted when first visited by Europeans in 1825, but ruined temples and the remains of other structures found on the island indicate that a small population of Polynesians had lived there for perhaps several generations some centuries earlier. Prolonged drought seems the most likely explanation for their demise. The ruins of another city, called Nan Madol, have been found on another Polynesian island, Ponape. In more recent times Port Royal, Jamaica sunk into the Caribbean Sea after an earthquake.
Cities have been destroyed by natural disasters and rebuilt, again and again, but the destruction has occasionally been so complete that they were not rebuilt: the classic examples are the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried with many of their inhabitants in a catastrophic flow of volcanic ash from an eruption of Vesuvius. A lesser known example would be Akrotiri, on the island of Thera, where in 1967, under a blanket of ash, the remains of a Minoan city were discovered. The volcanic explosion on Thera was immense, and had disastrous effects on the Minoan civilisation. It has been suggested that Plato may have heard legends about this, and used them as the germ of his story of Atlantis.
Less dramatic examples of the destruction of cities by natural forces are those where the coastline has eroded away. Cities which have sunk into the sea include the one-time centre of the English wool-trade, at Dunwich, England, and the city of Rungholt in Germany which sunk into the North Sea in a great stormtide in 1362.
Cities are also often destroyed by wars. This is the case, for instance, with Troy and Carthage, though both of these were subsequently rebuilt. The various abandoned capitals of the middle east are an interesting case: Persepolis was accidentally burnt by Alexander the Great, while Babylon was abandoned in favor of Ctesiphon, which was in turn abandoned in favor of Baghdad, though all these are fairly close together.
Some of the cities which are considered lost are (or may be) places of legend such as the Arthurian Camelot, Lyonesse or Atlantis, whilst some, such as Troy, having once been considered to be legendary, may actually have genuinely existed in the real world.
Alexandria in Egypt is an example of a large wealthy, world-renowned city that fell into almost complete insignificance, but which was never considered "lost".
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