Died of Disaster

The first empire the world ever built. Sargon of Akkad forged it around 2334 BCE; about 180 years later, drought and the Gutians did what no rival army could.

A Minoan trading town on Thera (modern Santorini), evacuated just before the Minoan eruption tore the island apart around 1600 BCE — its frescoes, painted ships and drains left intact under 60 metres of pumice.

A Bronze Age society of gridded cities like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, with indoor plumbing and an undeciphered Indus script, that vanished as its rivers shifted.

A Bronze Age Canaanite tongue with the world's first alphabet in cuneiform form, buried when its harbour city of Ugarit, at Ras Shamra in Syria, fell to the Sea Peoples.

An Anatolian superpower whose capital Hattusa fought Egypt to a draw at Kadesh, then vanished so completely the Bible was almost its only memory.

The gold-masked warlords of Bronze Age Greece — Agamemnon's world, the Lion Gate, the first written Greek. Around 1100 BCE the palaces burned, the writing was forgotten, and Greece fell into four centuries of darkness.

The incense burned twice daily in the Jerusalem Temple. Its eleven ingredients were known; one — the one that made the smoke rise in a perfectly straight column — was a secret held by a single family, the Avtinas. They died with the Temple in 70 CE.

A wealthy Roman seaside resort of about 5,000, entombed by Vesuvius in 79 CE under a wave of 400°C gas that preserved it far more completely than Pompeii — its wooden furniture and the Villa of the Papyri's 1,800 scrolls intact beneath up to 18 metres of hardened rock.

A Roman port of 10,000–20,000 people, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 24 August 79 CE under six metres of ash in a single afternoon and forgotten for 1,700 years.

The Nubian kingdom that ruled Egypt as the pharaohs of its 25th Dynasty and then outlasted it by a thousand years, raising two hundred pyramids at Meroë. Aksum sacked it around 350 CE — and its own script still cannot be fully read.

The largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas — a metropolis of pyramids the Aztecs found already abandoned and named 'the place where the gods were created,' its builders and rulers still unknown.

For six centuries the lowland Maya raised stone cities and read the heavens more precisely than anyone then alive. Across a hundred years of drought and war — the Classic Maya collapse — they walked out of their great cities and let the jungle take them, though the Maya themselves never left.

A great Andean capital that ruled the southern Lake Titicaca basin for centuries before the Inca, raising the Gateway of the Sun and the cut-stone blocks of Pumapunku at 3,850 m. A prolonged drought broke its raised-field farming, and the city was emptied around 1000 CE.

Bankers to Edward I of England for twenty-two years, financing his wars on the back of England's wool trade. When war with France came in 1294 and the king demanded funds they could not produce, he seized everything they had — and the firm that financed a kingdom was gone.

Cliff-dwelling architects of the American Southwest who built Chaco Canyon's great houses and Mesa Verde's cliff palaces, then walked away during a megadrought.

A Florentine bank that ran England's mint, customs and wool revenues for Edward I and II — until Parliament's Lords Ordainers expelled all foreign financiers in 1311 and left £150,000 in loans unpaid.

The third of Florence's great 'super-companies', founded 1282, banker to the kings of Naples. It failed in 1343 — not from England's royal defaults, like the Bardi and Peruzzi, but from financing Florence's war against Lucca.

For a few centuries it was the largest city in North America — up to 20,000 people, bigger than London. By 1350 CE no one lived there.

It built Angkor, the largest pre-industrial city on Earth. Then the water it had engineered for centuries turned against it, and a weakened capital fell to Ayutthaya in 1431.

Tenochtitlan, an island city of a quarter-million souls, undone in 1521 less by Cortés's armies than by the allies it had made into enemies — and a smallpox it had never met.

The largest empire the Americas ever built, felled in a single year when Francisco Pizarro's 168 men seized the emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 — amid a war between royal brothers and a plague that arrived before its conquerors did.

The Augsburg house that once owned Venezuela — the colony contemporaries called Klein-Venedig. It financed the Holy Roman Emperor so heavily that when Spain went bankrupt in July 1614, the Welsers followed within a week.

It founded Jamestown and sent some 6,000 colonists to Virginia. Roughly 4,800 of them died — 347 in Opechancanough's attack of 1622 alone — it never turned a profit, and in 1624 the king revoked its charter and took the colony for the Crown.

Scotland bet roughly a quarter of its liquid wealth on William Paterson's Darien colony in Panama. The colony lasted less than a year, the money was gone, and the ruin helped force the 1707 Union with England — which dissolved the company.

'The bankers' banker' — the firm that rescued others in the panic of 1825. Forty years later it begged the Bank of England for the same help, was refused as 'rotten', and its collapse on Black Friday, 10 May 1866 — owing about £11 million — set off the wider crisis.

The 'Financier of the Civil War' invented the mass bond market, then bet the firm on the Northern Pacific, a railroad through empty country. When it suspended payments on 18 September 1873, it triggered the Panic of 1873 and dragged the United States into a six-year depression.

A construction company the Union Pacific's own bosses owned, so they could pay themselves to build their own railroad at double the cost. The 1872 bribery scandal it spawned — Congressman Oakes Ames buying votes with discounted shares, even Vice President Schuyler Colfax implicated — became the byword for Gilded Age corruption.

A Scottish bank that hid losses above £6 million for years behind falsified accounts. When it failed in 1878, unlimited liability fell on its 1,200 shareholders — ruining all but 254 of them.

Ferdinand de Lesseps, the conqueror of Suez, raised a billion and a half francs from 800,000 small French investors to dig Panama at sea level. Twenty-two thousand workers died of fever, the money vanished, and the bankruptcy became the Panama Scandal that reached deep into the Republic.

Spun from the golden filaments of the largest clam in the Mediterranean, sea silk was finer than cashmere and lighter than air. The craft is down to perhaps one practitioner, Chiara Vigo in Sardinia. The clam that produces the fibre, Pinna nobilis, lost an estimated 99% of its population to a haplosporidian parasite in 2016–2020.

Martinique's cultural capital — theatres, cafés, 28,000 people — erased in under two minutes by a pyroclastic surge from Mont Pelée at 8:02 a.m. on 8 May 1902.

New York's third-largest trust backed a failed scheme to corner United Copper, and the run on its doors one October morning set off the Panic of 1907 that brought down the American banking system.

A silver leviathan that promised luxury flight across oceans, until the Hindenburg burned at Lakehurst in 1937 and a single hydrogen fireball took the dream out of the sky.

Epidemics and war drove it into one man's memory; Sesostrie Youchigant handed it to the linguist Mary Haas in the 1940s, and then it was gone.

Its 'End of the Plain Plane' campaign painted the fleet in fourteen colours, had Halston dress the crew, and flew Concorde on US domestic routes; then airline deregulation stripped its routes and doubling fuel prices grounded it for good.

Atari invented home gaming — Pong, then the Atari 2600 — and reached $2 billion in sales by 1982, before the 1983 video-game crash it helped cause broke the company apart in 1984.

A Colombian market town of 29,000, buried in the dark by walls of volcanic mud — lahars from the Nevado del Ruiz eruption moving at 50 km/h; three-quarters of its people were dead before dawn on 14 November 1985.

"When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen" — until America's second-largest brokerage pleaded guilty to 2,000 counts of fraud in a 1985 check-kiting scandal and never recovered.

It was the airline of the future — its logo flew on the spaceplane in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Then deregulation and the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of Flight 103 grounded it, and the real 2001 came with Pan Am already a decade dead.

A union of South Slavs that held together under Tito, then tore itself apart in the wars of 1991–1992 once he was gone — ended by ethnic cleansing and the Srebrenica genocide.

Capital of Montserrat for over 300 years, evacuated in 1996 and buried under volcanic ash from the Soufrière Hills volcano — still the official capital of a British territory, with a population of zero.

A needle-nosed delta that hurled a hundred passengers across the Atlantic faster than the planet turned — until the Air France Flight 4590 crash and a fragile balance sheet grounded the dream for good in 2003.

Founded to help rebuild Seattle after the great fire of 1889, it was seized by federal regulators 119 years to the day later and sold overnight to JPMorgan Chase — the largest bank failure in American history.

A winged spaceship meant to make orbit routine: across 135 missions from 1981 to 2011 it deployed the Hubble telescope and built the Space Station, but never shook the shadow of Challenger and Columbia and the fourteen astronauts they took.