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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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.
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