20 Ancient Ruins That Still Have Their Original Paint

In 1974, farmers outside Xi’an, China, discovered a buried army built to guard, in the afterlife, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor to unite China. He had it created between about 246 and 208 BCE. More than 8,000 life-size clay figures were lacquered in black, then painted red, purple, blue, and green. As soon as they were unearthed, the lacquer dried and began to peel off the surfaces of the soldiers in minutes. Today, conservators apply polymer sprays inside sealed, climate-controlled chambers to preserve whatever traces of paint remain on the terracotta warriors.

Tomb QV66 of Nefertari, beloved consort of Pharaoh Ramesses II, was cut in the Valley of the Queens near Luxor, Egypt, around 1250 BCE, as a guide for the queen’s soul into the afterlife. The painted walls are brightly colored with Egyptian blue, yellow ochre, malachite green, and red hematite. Because the tomb was sealed airtight and remained dark for 3,200 years, the paint has been preserved almost perfectly intact. Today, visitors have just a few timed minutes to step inside, as even their breath adds enough moisture to cause damage.

Outside the Italian city of Pompeii, a suburban villa has a dining room painted with scenes that relate to rituals in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and orgiastic ritual. The scene, featuring life-size humans rendered on a brilliant red ground, was preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and shows what seems to be the initiation of a young woman into the cult. Tests suggest that the heat from the volcanic eruption turned some of the yellow ochre pigment originally used into the striking red seen today.

Sometime during the middle of the second millennium BCE, though we don’t know exactly when, a great volcanic eruption buried a Minoan port town on the Greek island of Thera, which today is called Santorini. Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos started excavating it in 1967. It contained multi-story houses adorned with wall paintings such as the Spring Fresco and the Flotilla Fresco. Thick layers of ash and pumice covered them, but they still bear the bright mineral blues, ochre yellows, and terracotta reds originally applied to wet plaster centuries before the start of Classical Greece.

The cliffs at Dunhuang, in China’s Gansu province, along the Silk Road were first carved by monks, merchants and emperors beginning in 366 CE to create Buddhist shrines. Travelers stopped to pray for safe passage across the desert. The dryness of the area has helped preserve the azurite blue, malachite green, vermilion red and gold leaf across hundreds of painted caves and approximately 45,000 square meters of murals featuring Buddhas, celestial beings and camel caravans. The colors haven’t been restored because the air of the desert has kept them from fading.

The Etruscan civilization that dominated central Italy prior to the rise of Rome created the Tomb of the Leopards about 480-470 BCE in the Monterozzi Necropolis of Tarquinia, in what was then Etruria and is now Italy’s region of Lazio. Excavated in 1875, it takes its name from the pair of leopards shown on the back wall of the tomb. On the left, right, and rear walls, guests recline at a meal while musicians play pipes and lyres. Because the paintings were done with minerals in a cavern below ground in porous volcanic tuff, the vibrant blue, red, and yellow pigments survived for nearly 2,500 years.

The Buddhist monks carved their monasteries into a basalt cliff at Ajanta, in India’s Maharashtra state, paid for by local dynasties and painted with scenes from the Buddha’s past lives. The work came in two separate bursts of activity centuries apart, and was done using dry pigment painted onto dried mud plaster, not the wet-plaster fresco technique used elsewhere. When the place was abandoned, it was reclaimed by jungle, protecting the murals from weather until they were rediscovered by British officers in 1819.

In the inner hall of the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Upper Egypt, built between about 54 BCE and 20 CE to honor Hathor, the goddess of joy and music, the ceiling shows the star-studded figure of the sky goddess Nut. Layers of soot from oil lamps and medieval fires had obscured the image for hundreds of years. But when conservators removed the soot between 1990 and 2020, they found Egyptian blue and yellow ochre pigments hidden beneath the grime.

After a succession dispute, Kashyapa, a Sinhalese king, constructed a palace-fortress on top of Sigiriya, a huge granite monolith in Sri Lanka. At one time, artists painted more than 500 female figures on the moist plaster of the cliff-face. Only 21 have survived, preserved in a cleft in the rock that protected them from tropical rain for more than 1,500 years, their earth pigments of yellow, red, and green still discernible. Experts argue over whether the women are heavenly maidens or ladies of the royal court.

King Chan Muwan of Bonampak, in Chiapas, Mexico, had all three rooms in Structure 1 painted circa 790 CE to celebrate his heir’s birth and a victory in battle. The walls and vaulted ceilings display images of royal court processions, bloodletting rituals, warfare, and captives. Over time, rain that dripped down from the limestone ceiling formed a protective layer of minerals on the walls, preserving the pigments of Maya Blue, a distinctive pigment developed by the Maya, along with red and yellow ochre, for 1,100-plus years.

In 1290-1279 BCE, Pharaoh Seti I, along with his son Ramesses II, commissioned a cult complex at Abydos in Upper Egypt for the cult of Osiris, god of the underworld and the afterlife. Seti I built seven vaulted stone chapels, each housing statues of a prominent deity and protecting them from the sun and rain. The relief carvings are considered among the most exquisite of their period, and still retain some vivid Egyptian blue, emerald green, yellow ochre, and reddish-brown skin colors. Here, unlike the sealed, dark tombs elsewhere on this list, there was a solid stone roof that shielded the artwork from the sun and rain.

Long before the rise of the Inca Empire, the Moche people, a culture in coastal northern Peru, constructed a pyramid complex called Huaca de la Luna near the city of Trujillo. They built the pyramid using sun-dried mudbrick. Approximately every century, they buried the pyramid’s base beneath a new platform, which raised the structure. Plaster carvings depicting the Moche’s creator deity and bound warriors, painted red, yellow, black, white, and blue, were sealed inside the layers. These carvings remained concealed and undisturbed for more than a millennium.

The Nabataeans, Arab merchants who built Petra, also built this smaller site known as Little Petra in Jordan. It features a banqueting hall, dated 40 BCE-25 CE, used for celebrating the arrival of caravans with food and drinks and for eating at religious ceremonies. A vaulted ceiling was adorned with frescoes of grapevines, flying figures, and birds, the only significant remaining examples of Nabataean figurative painting. Centuries of Bedouin campfire smoke blackened the ceiling, protecting pigments of lead white, Egyptian blue, and gold leaf, which were not cleaned until 2010.

With the great city of Teotihuacan gone, a trading culture called the Olmeca-Xicalanca constructed Cacaxtla in Tlaxcala, Mexico, where around 750-800 CE they painted a 22-meter mural celebrating their new rulers’ authority. In the Battle Mural, Jaguar warriors defeat Bird warriors in Maya Blue, a synthetic indigo-clay pigment engineered to withstand the elements, along with yellow ochre, cinnabar red, and obsidian black. Discovered in 1975, the mural now exists in the open air only because a contemporary roof protects it from the rain and sun.

At about 500 CE, the Maya at Kohunlich in Mexico’s Quintana Roo state built the Temple of the Masks, which was meant to glorify Kinich Ahau, the Maya sun god, and lend weight to its rulers’ claim of being descended from gods. Five enormous stucco masks, more than 2 meters high, line the staircase. All were originally painted red with iron oxide hematite. Subsequent builders covered the stairs as part of an expansion, and that burial preserved them from the weathering of centuries of rainforest life.

Elite residents of Teotihuacan’s Tepantitla Palace, in central Mexico, painted a courtyard mural known as the Tlalocan, c. 450-550 CE, depicting a mythic paradise in which figures sing, swim, and play games in hues of hematite red, malachite green, and azurite. The collapse of the floors above preserved the lower walls of the room by covering them with rubble. Although 1940s scholars named the mural’s central figure after the rain god Tlaloc, today the consensus identifies her as the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan.

Archaeologist William Saturno discovered a sealed chamber within the Las Pinturas pyramid in San Bartolo, a site in Guatemala’s Petén region. It contained murals from about 100 BCE depicting a Maya creation myth that focused on the Maize God. Before constructing a new, much larger pyramid, the Maya carefully filled the chamber with rubble and sealed it to preserve the fine black line work and pink, red, and yellow pigments of these murals, which date back about 900 years earlier than anything at Bonampak.

In 1968, Italian archaeologist Mario Napoli found a stone box tomb at Paestum, in southern Italy, built c. 480-470 BCE for an unknown young member of the aristocracy of Magna Graecia, the Greek colonies in Italy. The tomb’s five limestone slabs had been painted in true wet fresco: the sides depict a banquet and the ceiling a young man diving into water, a symbol of passage into the afterlife. Because it was sealed airtight underground, it is the only surviving wall painting on a large scale from the Classical Greek world.

Excavators in 1972 opened a stone burial chamber in Asuka Village, in Japan’s Nara Prefecture. Built around 690- 710, it contained the tomb of an unknown prince or noble from the Asuka court. The wall frescoes depicted four court ladies, called the “Asuka Bijin,” in red, yellow, and green pleated robes, and a star map drawn in gold foil. But after its unearthing, mold began attacking the murals, forcing Japanese conservators in 2007 to carefully take the stone chamber apart, stone by stone, to save the murals in a climate-controlled laboratory off-site.

Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos discovered a tomb under a giant dirt mound at Vergina, Greece, constructed for Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, shortly after his murder in 336 BCE. A surviving painting in the tomb from the 4th century BCE is one of only a few ancient Greek depictions of a king hunting lions in a snow-covered forest. Most experts believe the tomb belongs to Philip II. However, some have argued that it’s actually the final resting place of his son Philip III Arrhidaeus, Alexander the Great’s half-brother.

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