The Lost Greek City Buried Under Afghanistan for 2,000 Years

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]4,000 mi from Athens in what is now Afghanistan, Greek men trained naked in a gymnasium every morning. This was completely normal to them. I can Lady Moon in Usuzbck was a fully functioning Greek city built at the edge of the known world. Founded by one of Alexander's successors around 300 BC at the junction of two rivers in Bactrea, it had everything a Greek citizen would expect. A theater seating 6,000. A palace courtyard surrounded by 118 Corinthian columns between 5 and 10 m tall. Grid streets, temples, aristocratic houses with mosaic floors and colonated courtyards, a library where parchment fragments of Greek tragedy and philosophy were still sitting there when archaeologists found them. And someone had carved the maxims of deli on a stone in Greek 3,000 m from Deli. Oxford classicist Robin Lane Fox wrote that the citizens of I can enjoyed their temples, gymnasiums, and arenas exactly as if they were in a city on the Greek mainland. They weren't performing Greekness. They simply were Greek in Afghanistan. Around 145 BC, nomadic tribes swept in from the step. The buildings burned. The city was abandoned. 2,000 years of desert covered everything. In 1961, the king of Afghanistan went hunting and found a Corinthian column capital in the ground.

[00:01:20]The French excavated for 13 years. Then the Soviet invasion came and looters took what was left. The maxims of Deli are still there under the dust. What other lost cities should we uncover?