Think “ancient ruins” and your mind inevitably wanders toward the Colosseum in Rome or the Great Pyramid of Giza, but the world is full of stunning craftsmanship from another time.
Towards the end of Paul Theroux’s 1995 Mediterranean travel book The Pillars of Hercules, he stumbles across the 1,800-year-old Amphitheater of El Jem in Tunisia, where he describes it as more impressive than the Roman Colosseum. This was as much a surprise to me reading it as it must have been for Theroux seeing it, and it got me wondering: How many other ruins are out there, left unheralded by so many travelers?
Here are a few that have perhaps slipped under your radar.