Nine Mythical Places Archaeologists Think May Have Actually Existed
Historical evidence is helping to pinpoint the exact locations of fabled sites, from King Arthur’s castle to Solomon’s Temple
History is haunted by mythical lands. From the homes of legendary kings to the earthly abodes of gods and monsters, civilizations have always dreamed of extraordinary places hiding in plain sight.
But while it’s unlikely that either Atlantis or Shangri-La was real, there may be more truth to some myths than anyone realized. A growing body of archaeological research suggests certain places—the Minotaur’s maze from Greek mythology; Vinland, the first North American Viking settlement mentioned in the Norse sagas; Solomon’s Temple described in the Bible; and others—could have been more than just fables.
From western Turkey to Jerusalem and coastal England to the Colombian Andes, evidence indicates that these nine mythical places may have actually existed.
Troy, Turkey
Troy, the city at the heart of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, is one of the most legendary sites of classical Greek mythology. Fantastical details are woven into the tales—the interference of the gods in the Trojan War, the half-divine heritage of the Spartan hero Achilles, the apocryphal gift of a wooden horse filled with Greek soldiers—but archaeologists believe some aspects of the stories were true. “I believe the Trojan War was a historical event,” says Rüstem Aslan, director of excavations at Troy in present-day Turkey, just “not the kind that Homer described.” Close to 150 years of excavations at the site have revealed that, not only was it occupied for 4,000 years, but also during the Late Bronze Age (when Homer’s Trojan War allegedly took place) “the Trojans suddenly began preparing for an insurgence from the outside,” says Aslan.
While researchers are still looking for proof of the battle that raged beyond the city’s walls for ten long years, Aslan does not doubt that it’s there, buried under 65 feet of alluvium, which built up alongside the shifting Scamander (now known as Karamenderes) River nearby. It’s the mouth of that river that makes Troy so important in the first place. “Troy is settled again and again because if you control the harbor, you control the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas,” he says.
Troy, however, isn’t the only mythological site discovered in the region’s archaeological record. Apollon Smintheion (an imposing temple built for the god Apollo on top of a settlement from the sixth century B.C.E.), Antandros (an ancient shipbuilding settlement) and the sacred forests of Mount Ida are all historical sites that archaeologists have found to correspond to places mentioned in the Iliad and Aeneid. Together, they make up Turkey’s Aeneas Route, a tourist corridor following the epic journey taken by Aeneas, the father of Rome, after escaping Troy’s sacking by the Greeks.
Gorham’s Cave (Medusa’s Cave), Gibraltar
To ancient mariners, Gorham’s Cave, a natural cavern at the base of the Pillars of Hercules in the Strait of Gibraltar, was the edge of the known world. But a 2021 study in PLOS One suggests that the subterranean site may have played an even greater role in Greek mythology. Deep inside the cave, archaeologists found fragments from the head of a large, ceramic Gorgon dating to around the sixth century B.C.E. The Gorgons were three monstrous sisters who terrorized Greek sailors by turning them to stone with a single look. Legend places their lair, in which the hero Perseus beheaded the most evil of the siblings, the snake-haired Medusa, while she slept, near the Rock of Gibraltar.
Other Medusa figures have been located in the region, but this is the first to be discovered inside a cave. Combining archaeological evidence with historical accounts, geography and myth, researchers have concluded that Gorham’s Cave was likely the spiritual site that early seafarers believed to have been the home of the Gorgons, and the site of Medusa’s defeat. Visitors can examine the cave’s entrance on biweekly summer tours offered at the British territory of Gibraltar’s Gorham’s Cave Complex World Heritage Site, a stunning limestone ridge off the southern tip of Spain.
Tintagel Castle (King Arthur’s Castle), England
Since writer Geoffrey of Monmouth described Tintagel Castle as the place of King Arthur’s conception, the dramatic 13th-century fortress on the rocky coast of Cornwall, England, has been associated with his legend. But until recently, no one knew that beneath the castle’s ruins lay an even older settlement with features that could correspond to the legendary leader. We have “very strong evidence that it was an exceptional place where goods and luxury commodities were arriving from the Mediterranean world in great numbers,” says archaeologist Jacky Nowakowski, project lead for the Tintagel Castle Archaeological Research Project. Though the team can’t say for sure who ruled the earlier site, King Arthur “fits the profile in terms of what we’d expect at this critical time in British history of the fifth and sixth century,” she explains.
What Nowakowski does know for certain is that, whether he was actually there or not, King Arthur has “very much become a part of the story” handed down over generations around Tintagel. Even the castle built there by Richard of Cornwall around 1203 C.E. was constructed, in part, to draw a connection between his authority and the legendary king. Interestingly, though, Arthur’s myth is not the only one to which Tintagel is connected. “There’s also the story of Tristan and Isolde,” says Nowakowski, a Celtic legend retold in the 12th century as a story of forbidden love in which the knight Tristan falls for the princess Isolde even though she is set to marry King Mark of Cornwall. “If you look across Cornwall, there are several places you can pinpoint that are associated with King Mark, Tristan and Isolde. The story was popularly circulating around Europe at the same time as King Arthur’s, but it’s not attached to Tintagel in the same way. I think that’s partly to do with the success of Victorian writers and painters [who associated Tintagel] with the ruins of King Arthur’s castle.”
L'Anse Aux Meadows (Vinland), Newfoundland
For years, explorers searched for evidence of Vinland, a far-off place of lush meadows, teeming salmon and wild grapes described in the 13th-century Greenlanders’ Saga. If the legend was true, the seaside site briefly settled by Viking Leif Erikson and his crew around 1000 C.E. would be the first place “discovered” by Europeans in the New World, preceding Christopher Columbus by almost 500 years. So, when evidence of Norse-designed sod-walled buildings on the far north coast of Newfoundland, Canada, were uncovered in the 1960s, archaeologists were hopeful that the site was the one.
The identification of other European artifacts—a bronze cloak pin, a spindle whorl, a gilded fragment of brass—along with a place for smelting and working iron soon followed, convincing scholars that the site on which they’d stumbled was the fabled Vinland. Archaeologists today continue to study the long-held secrets at what’s now called L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site; the site includes reconstructions of the original dwellings where the Vikings lived on-and-off for about 20 years.
Lake Guatavita (El Dorado), Colombia
Spanish conquistadors first described a mythical South American kingdom of unfathomable riches ruled by El Rey Dorado, a chief whose initiation rites included covering himself in gold dust and ceremonially dropping treasure into the center of a sacred lake in 1541. In the centuries that followed, explorers searched feverishly for the kingdom of “El Dorado” throughout Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil, but to no avail. Eventually, they gave up hope of finding the site. Juan Pablo Quintero-Guzmán, archaeologist and curator at Colombia’s Museum of Gold, says that doesn’t mean there isn’t truth to the story. “All lakes in the Muisca territory were places of offering,” he says. “It is possible that rituals similar to those of El Dorado were carried out in some of them, but I believe that Lake Guatavita was, for some time during the Muisca period [600 to 1600 C.E.], the place where this ritual was carried out with the greatest impact.”
Over the past 400 years, numerous artifacts have been pulled from Lake Guatavita—from tumbaga (an alloy of gold and copper), emeralds and human-like clay vessels to hair, cotton and animal skulls. In his research, Quintero-Guzmán has found evidence that rituals were taking place at the water’s edge, at what “could have been a temple, a ceremonial site intended for making prestigious offerings,” he says. While the findings do not definitively prove that Lake Guatavita was the site spoken of by the conquistadors, “it does not contradict the possibility that the legendary El Dorado ceremony was carried out here,” either, says Quintero-Guzmán. For now, at least, the Muisca chiefdom of Guatavita, once a prestigious ceremonial pilgrimage site known for the skill of its goldsmiths, is the most likely origin of the myth.
Ain Dara (Solomon’s Temple), Syria
In 2018, armed conflict destroyed Ain Dara, a 3,000-year-old temple in northwestern Syria that some archaeologists identified as the biblical Solomon’s Temple in the 1980s. The ancient site shared more features with the temple described in the Book of Kings than any uncovered before or since, including walls carved in reliefs of lions and cherubs, a courtyard paved in flagstones, a monumental staircase guarded by sphinxes and a multistory hallway. Even its location on a raised platform overlooking a city echoes the temple’s depiction in the Bible. Although the bombing and plundering of the site prevents archaeologists from finding more evidence of its legendary status, some of its most important artifacts can still be seen at the National Museum of Aleppo.
Kastelli (Minotaur’s Labyrinth), Greece
While building a new airport on the island of Crete this summer, workers uncovered something unexpected. With its central circular building surrounded by eight stone rings intersected by walls, the site resembled the style of tomb constructed by the Minoan civilization around 2000 to 1700 B.C.E. But to anyone familiar with Greek mythology, the spot evoked something else, too: the Minotaur’s labyrinth.
The Minotaur, a ferocious creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man, was trapped in a maze built by the Greek architect Daedalus. Every seven years, Athens sacrificed seven young men and seven young women to the monster until Theseus, a prince of the city, volunteered to kill him. Tracing his route with a ball of thread, Theseus found his way through the labyrinth, murdered the beast, rescued his not-yet-sacrificed victims, then followed the thread back out to safety.
Although archaeologists have yet to thoroughly study Kastelli, its architectural similarities to the mythical maze, combined with evidence of ceremonial offerings and communal feasting found at the site, may suggest that it was part of the story’s origin. The site is not open to the public, but Knossos, the ancient palace previously believed to be the site of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, is.
Steinkjer, Norway
Although the Norse sagas tell of an ancient trading center that was, for a brief period, the largest in the Viking world, no one knew where, or even if, it really existed. Then, in 2013, archaeologists found some intriguing evidence. In archaeological investigations conducted before expanding Norway’s main highway near Steinkjer in Nord-Trondelag County, researchers uncovered two separate boat graves associated with a wide variety of high-status trade goods, including a silver button, a set of balance scales, imported jewelry and amber beads. The findings add to the area’s unusually rich archaeological record, which includes 22 examples of a special trade-related Viking-age sword. Taken together, the bevy of artifacts suggest that Steinkjer was the major trading city described in the Norse sagas—and that its center was likely where its modern church stands today.
Pool of Siloam, Jerusalem
In the New Testament’s Gospel of John, Jesus returns the power of sight to a blind man at the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem. Christians searched for the site for centuries before repair work on a water pipe south of the Temple Mount in 2004 revealed two ancient stone steps. In the archaeological investigations that followed, researchers discovered a 2,700-year-old, 225-foot-long trapezoidal pool, which they believe to be the site where Jesus allegedly conducted his miracle. In addition to being an important part of early Jerusalem’s water system, the architectural feature was also likely a ritual bath used by visiting pilgrims. Careful excavation and restoration work over the past 20 years have preserved the ancient Pool of Siloam, which opened to the public last year as part of the City of David National Park.
