8 Temples That Sure Would Be Cool, If They Hadn’t Been Destroyed

Probably the most well-known on this list is the Parthenon. Even now, not much more than a skeletal tribute, it’s still an awe-inspiring destination. Imagine how much better it might have been with the insides intact. Unfortunately, any hope of an indoor Parthenon visit was destroyed in 1687, by the Venetian Captain-General Francesco Morosini during the Great Turkish War.

The Temple of Solomon is also known as “The First Temple,” and they weren’t kidding. It was built almost a millennium before the birth of Christ, and Jesus himself never had a chance to see it. Nebuchadnezzar II and the Babylonians destroyed the temple in 586 B.C. You know something got blown up a long time ago when the account of its destruction is in the literal Bible.

Herod’s Temple is also known as the “Second Temple,” and your suspicions are correct — it was the temple built after the loss of the Temple of Solomon, after King Cyrus took control of Jerusalem and again allowed denizens to practice their own religion. Unfortunately this temple, too, would eventually fall, as a result of fighting between the Jews and the Romans. In 70 A.D., the Romans destroyed the Second Temple.

The temple of Zeus in Olympia had a centerpiece that would be an absolute force on Instagram, if it had survived until the modern era. A massive statue of Zeus himself, one that could probably dust the stone Abraham Lincoln from the Lincoln Memorial in a movie someone really needs to make. For a long time, historians thought the massive statue and its surroundings were felled, like many other landmarks, in the heat of battle. Now, though, the prevailing theory is much simpler: They think it was destroyed by an earthquake, and seeing as it happened around the end of the Roman Empire, was never rebuilt.

The Temple of Artemis (or Diana) is another incredible structure to the Greek gods that should have towered over visitors. Instead, they’re the ones climbing through the remnants. This isn’t for lack of effort by the Greeks, who, to their credit, rebuilt it twice. After being burned down in the 4th century B.C., and again after it was destroyed by the Goths (not the mall kind), they restored the temple to its former glory. After it was destroyed a third time in 401 CE by the Christians? They were probably pretty tired of hauling marble.

The illustration shown above is, in fact, not Keshava Deva, but what was built on its ruins. Not to honor it, either, but the exact opposite. Keshava Deva Temple in Mathura was one of the most important Hindu temples in the world. Which is well and good, if you’re Hindu. If you’re the Muslim ruler Emperor Aurangzeb? Not so much. In 1670, he had the temple destroyed, and a mosque erected in its stead. A shrewd, if cruel, move on his part, since the existence of that same mosque has stymied any attempts to rebuild the temple to this day.

All the entries on this list are a significant loss to history and culture, but the destruction of Nalanda? It was a horrifically efficient clearing of an entire swath of important structures. Nalanda was one of the oldest universities in the world, and boasted both Buddhist and Hindu places of worship on its grounds. But the university and the temples within it were completely razed in the 12th century, destroying both knowledge and religion in one fell swoop.

Speaking of places of learning, I do feel that the Library of Alexandria deserves a place on this list. It’s a pretty easy, if saccharine argument that it was a temple to human knowledge. The Library of Alexandria was the largest library in the old world, and was totally burned to the ground roughly two millennia ago, taking with it a trove of information that sure would have been helpful to have around today. It was so completely and thoroughly destroyed that some people have started to wonder if it ever existed at all, or if it was some sort of ancient nerd's Atlantis.