eli5: Why were some ancient cities like Palmyra and Machu Picchu left to ruin and fall apart over hundreds of years instead of being repopulated?
In: 1677
To give a very eli5 answer:
People come together and build cities for various reasons. Maybe they trade with other cities or civilisations, or they’re close to something like water, gold or good farmland.
Sometimes, these things change. A river dries up, or the gold runs out, or their trade stops (maybe the other cities start using ships instead, and going around the city instead of through it!).
When this happens, the reason for being in the city ends, and bit-by-bit, people just leave and move to other places. Sometimes this happens so fast that they just leave the buildings behind.
There are “ghost towns” in America which are like this, where this only happened within the last ~200 years; now they’re just a collection of buildings with no-one living there, and in a thousand years, they’ll still be like that.
Ancient abandoned cities are pretty much the same.
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