why are ancient cities like ancient Greece in ruins? I know that they fell and probably lost wars, but why did no one reconstruct the ancient temples, buildings, and homes?
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I think it was just a lack of respect for them/ not being able to recreate them as well/ a lack of older materials and techniques.
Sometimes they did. For example the [Pantheon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome) in Rome was converted from a pagan temple to a Catholic church and was repaired as necessary over the years, so it’s still in very good condition today.
What’s more common though is that ruined buildings get taken apart for their materials. The stones or rubble can be used in new walls or as landfill. Or if they’re artistically cut pieces, they’ll look nice on your snazzy new building somewhere else. And you can use the foundation to build something new on top, something more suited for current needs than the building that used to be there. Besides, you probably don’t know exactly how it used to be, so it would be hard to recreate if you wanted to.
The ruins we have today were preserved for some reason–maybe they were buried by new construction, or by a natural disaster. Maybe nobody lives there anymore and so anything that survived the elements remained as it was. Archeologists today usually don’t want to mess with study sites too much (though historically they often did), because this can destroy evidence–moving things out of place, or causing confusion between original pieces and newer imitations, makes it harder to understand the builders of the past.
Many were used as quarries for stone building materials. Some were scavenged by collectors. Some got blown up in modern wars. Some were knocked down in earthquakes.
The best preserved were converted to Christian churches like the Parthenon or Islamic temples like Hagia Sophia. Or they were buried and lost like Pompei or the tomb of King Tut.
When you stop maintaining things, they fall apart. The civilizations that created and maintained these things died out thousands of years back.
Imagine that a skyscraper in New York City collapsed tomorrow. Now imagine all of the work, materials, and coordination it would take to rebuild it. You’d need…
* Enough labor to clear the rubble, bring new materials in, and then actually reconstruct the building.
* People with training/specializations — architects, demolition experts, project managers, foremen, contractors, etc…
* A coherent and organized government to ensure a safe rebuilding effort for the years it would take to rebuild the building.
* The infrastructure to remove the debris and then bring new materials in, some of which are going to need to come from large distances away.
* And, of course, enough money to pay all of these people and materials, as well as a nearby place to safely house all the workers.
Without any one of these, it becomes very difficult to rebuild the skyscraper — or, at the very least, you’re not likely to build something that is high quality. If the state of New York was in the midst of a civil war or a massive earthquake, the odds that they have the time or resources to dedicate to rebuilding that skyscraper is pretty low.
A large temple in Ancient Greece was akin to a skyscraper — it was a massive undertaking that took a ton of time, resources, coordination, and wealth. It took the city of Athens 10 years to build the Parthenon — and that was while they were at the peak of their wealth and influence. Plenty of these buildings did get rebuilt or recovered over time when they fell apart… but it was far from a simple undertaking and needed a lot of things to be going right or the building was simply going to be left to ruin… or it was going to be cannibalized for other building projects.
It can make a bit more sense when you consider global population.
The world didn’t have a billion people on it until the 19th century (1800).
In ancient times, the global population was in the low hundred millions. If you wanted to build a city, there was plenty of room to just build in empty space no one else was using. That’s a big part of why we can find Greek cities far away from Greece. The Greeks got on some boats, sailed off, picked a spot, and set up shop. It was easier then to just build a new population center.
Other times though, ancient cities would continue to see use. It was the use that would shift. There’s evidence that the cities of the classic Maya continued to serve as ritual sites with low/occasional population well into the contact period. The cities had shifted from being major trade centers to be acropolises. To this day the Maya will bury their dead under their homes, or even in their homes and then build a new house over it. This is the same process that constructed the great Maya pyramids we marvel at today (just with a lot more stone).
So some cities got abandoned and no one ever went back because of superstitions, disinterest, or there were easier places to build. Many ancient cities were torn down and their materials repurposed for later. Others shifted in use over time, becoming something other than a city people lived in.
Many cities were reinhabited. Babylon would be continually inhabited, ravaged, and reinhabited throughout the Bronze and Iron ages.
Notably, most of the ruins that survive today were religious, trade, and political centers. It’s rare to find an intact ancient house just laying around. Greek houses used by common people were pretty feeble constructions made of mud brick and mud brick doesn’t last long in the scope of time.
Maintaining things is hard. You need a lot of resources, people and time. Sometimes, those cities had huge populations in ancient times, but when they fell out of favor, the population shrank, and there weren’t enough people to maintain those buildings.
For instance, it is estimated that Athens had something like 40,000 people in ancient times, but because different empires conquered the region, at the beginning of the 19th century there were 4,000. That amount of people cannot pool enough money to maintain those buildings, particularly if we take into account that it’s pretty recent the idea of maintaining old things because of tourism or because of some historical sense.
Also, take into account that a lot of those buildings were used as materials for other constructions. For instance, the Great Pyramid was cased in white limestone, but afterwards it was dismanteled bit by bit and used for constructions all accross Cairo since at least the middle ages.
Bear in mind that you’re looking at a relatively small number of survivors. Most ancient buildings eventually collapsed or were dismantled for building materials. Generally, when old buildings have survived, it’s either because they have retained some level of importance, or because they were in a location where nobody wanted to build anything else, or because they were somehow lost (e.g. buried by sand or covered by forest).
If you’re thinking about the Acropolis, it has been used for all kinds of things over the millennia and there have been numerous building and restoration works; however, some of the main buildings were badly damaged in wars. Fully rebuilding them would have been expensive, and there are always philosophical differences over what to do with sites like that. If you restore it with new materials, arguably you’re taking away some of the authenticity. And since the site has been through so many changes over the years, what era do you restore it to? And whatever your answer, there is only limited information about what the site was like in that era.
So there are a few reasons. One, either by natural disaster or war the structures get destroyed and just not rebuilt. Two, getting building materials was difficult and expensive. So it was easier to just take existing materials from an old unused building to use in your new building. And finally, when a civilization collapses, the vast majority of people leave the city. So you have a massive city with no one living in it. You just don’t have the population or tax base to maintain all those buildings. For example, in 200AD Rome had a population of 1.5 million. By 500AD it had collapsed to just 100k. It didn’t get back to that 1.5 million until the mid 20th century
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