best preserved ancient city ?

by TiNcHoX7

hi, i want to know which city is considered the best preserved like pompeii, cairo, some rome city. a city that have most of the buildings still stand

Agrippa911

I doubt you'll find any ancient city where "most of the buildings still stand". What mostly survives are monumental structures, things that people over the intervening centuries valued (for one reason or another) and kept intact. Note that many such structures disappeared as their stone was looted for construction materials.

But all those smaller buildings? Individual houses, shops, tenement blocks, insulae? They're almost all gone. They were built of more perishable materials and no one felt they were really worth preserving. Whereas nowadays we'd love to find more archaeological data to understand how the 'ordinary' person lived, they didn't feel that way in say the 17th CE.

The exception I think is Pompeii and Herculaneum. While the eruption certainly damaged the cities, the falling ash and pumice entombed the whole city and preserved more ordinary houses as well as rich villas.