For as long as we’ve told stories, we’ve mixed fact with fiction: cities swallowed by the sea, warrior women, forgotten civilisations. Most are written off as fantasy, but sometimes there is at least some truth to the tales. From the emerald waters of a Colombian lake that sparked a gold rush to a Greek city once thought to exist only in epic poetry, real evidence shows some myths were very much rooted in reality.

Click through this gallery to discover the ancient myths that have at least some basis in fact...

Ever wondered how the Vikings found their way across open seas? Norse sagas tell of 'sunstones', mysterious crystals said to reveal the sun’s position even on cloudy days, guiding sailors long before the invention of the compass.

In 2013, a crystal of Iceland spar was found on a 16th-century shipwreck. Scientists discovered that this mineral can polarise light, finding the sun’s position even when it’s obscured – just as described in the sagas. While the crystal came from a later period, it shows that the technique was possible in Viking times, and may explain their success in navigating vast, uncharted waters.

Ancient Greek stories speak of the Amazons, a fierce tribe of women warriors who lived apart from men and matched them in battle. These tales have been widely dismissed as fantasies, or cautionary myths about female independence.

However, recent digs in Azerbaijan have uncovered Bronze Age graves of women buried with arrowheads, daggers and even maces – their bones bearing the tell-tale marks of years spent on horseback and firing bows. Similar finds were uncovered in Russia, Armenia and Kazakhstan, so Bronze Age warrior women were a reality, whether or not they directly inspired the Greek myth.

Around the 8th century BC, the ancient Greek poet Homer told of a great city called Troy, besieged for 10 years after its prince stole the wife of the King of Sparta. His epic poem The Iliad told of legendary warriors like Achilles and Hector, divine meddling by the Greek gods and eventually the city’s fall through the ruse of the Trojan horse. For centuries, many assumed this was pure storytelling.

Then, in the 1870s, archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey – and found the ruins of a fortified city destroyed and rebuilt multiple times (pictured). Later digs revealed artefacts and signs of conflict dating to the era Homer described, so Troy did exist – even if many other aspects of the story remain in the realm of myth.

For years, our knowledge of gladiators battling wild animals came only from Roman texts and ancient art, like the mosaic pictured here. But in 2025, archaeologists working with remains from Driffield Terrace in York – the world’s only well-preserved Roman gladiator cemetery – announced the first direct physical evidence of a human fighting a lion.

Forensic analysis of one young man’s skeleton, first unearthed in 2004, revealed holes and bite marks on his pelvis, almost certainly from a lion’s teeth. The groundbreaking find strongly suggests that these brutal set pieces really happened.

For hundreds of years, European explorers chased the legend of El Dorado – a city bursting with treasure somewhere deep in the Amazon, with a ruler so rich he supposedly coated himself in gold dust before plunging into the waters of Colombia's Lago Guatavita (pictured). Many died trying to find it, and the name became shorthand for an impossible dream.

Modern science has breathed new life into the tale. In 2010, satellite images and LIDAR scans revealed more than 200 massive geometric earthworks stretching for hundreds of miles in the upper Amazon. Dating from AD 200 to 1283, they point to a huge, sophisticated society thriving where we once thought nothing but untouched jungle existed, lending some credence to the stories.

In ancient texts – especially the Hebrew Bible – the Hittites appear as a vague and distant people, and for centuries scholars suspected that they were fictional biblical embellishments.

That all changed in the 19th and early 20th centuries when archaeologists uncovered Hattusa, the Hittite capital, at modern-day Boğazköy, Turkey. From 1906, Hugo Winckler’s team unearthed thousands of cuneiform tablets revealing a powerful Bronze Age empire in central Anatolia – with legal codes, treaties, correspondences and religious texts – that flourished between the 17th and 12th centuries BC.

The ancient historian Herodotus tells of Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher who predicted a solar eclipse during a battle between the Lydians and the Medes in 585 BC. When the sky darkened mid-fight, the warring armies were apparently so shaken they called a truce.

For centuries, many doubted such foresight was possible in the ancient world. Yet modern astronomical calculations confirm a total eclipse passed over the region that very day – making it, if Herodotus can be trusted, one of the earliest recorded astronomical predictions.

Ancient Chinese legends speak of the 'Gun-Yu flood', a disaster so great that it lasted for decades, submerging villages and farmland. In these stories, the hero Yu is tasked with taming the waters, an achievement so extraordinary it leads to him founding the Xia Dynasty, supposedly China’s first.

A myth? Maybe not. Geological evidence now shows that around 1920 BC, there was an earthquake-induced landslide dam outburst flood that may have been among the largest freshwater floods in history. Some archaeologists argue that this real event may have inspired the legendary tale of the Xia’s origins.

It is easy to underestimate the technological abilities of our ancient forbears, and, in 1901, divers exploring a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera recovered a corroded mass of bronze that would become known as history's first analogue computer.

Dating to the 2nd century BC, the Antikythera Mechanism contains 30 interlocking gears capable of predicting eclipses, tracking planetary movements and even marking Olympic years. It can't quite compete with a laptop, but it remains a masterpiece of Hellenistic engineering.

The mystery of the lost city of Atlantis endures to this day, but it may be rooted – at least very vaguely – in fact. Around 1600 BC, a volcano on the Greek island of Santorini (then known as Thera) erupted with one of the largest blasts of the past 10,000 years.

We know it happened from the thick ash layers preserving the Minoan city of Akrotiri (pictured), pumice found as far away as Turkey and Egypt, tsunami damage on Crete’s coast and sulphate traces in Greenland ice cores. The blast destroyed settlements, triggered tsunamis and may have inspired stories of lost worlds like Atlantis, which was invented by the Greek philosopher Plato more than a millennium later.

Maya mythology tells of the hero twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who journeyed through trials, died and were reborn as divine figures linked to maize, rain and renewal. At Chichén Itzá (pictured), archaeologists recently conducted a study on 64 infant male skeletons – some genetically identical twins – that were probably ritually sacrificed and buried in a cistern near a sacred cenote between AD 500 and 900. The findings strongly suggest that real ceremonies were inspired by the hero twins story.

Ancient Chinese records describe Prince Gao, a son of China's first emperor Qin Shi Huang, requesting to be buried within the emperor’s grand mausoleum. For centuries, no such tomb was found – until archaeologists unearthed a massive 16-tonne coffin near the Terracotta Army, packed with jade, coins, weapons and gold-and-silver camel figures. The scale and contents match accounts of Prince Gao’s burial, suggesting that this legendary royal resting place may at last have been found.

Ancient Greek texts spoke of Thonis-Heracleion, a glittering Egyptian port where Heracles was worshipped and merchants from across the Mediterranean traded. By the Middle Ages, it had vanished without trace, leading many to believe it was merely a sailor’s tale.

Then, in 2000, underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio found the lost city lying beneath the waves off Alexandria. Temples, colossal statues, gold coins and everyday objects lay preserved on the seabed – evidence of a thriving metropolis swallowed by the sea, likely after earthquakes and rising waters.

Ancient Greek stories claimed that Trojan prisoners founded a city called Tenea after the fall of Troy, but some historians doubted it ever existed. That changed when excavations starting in 2013 uncovered sarcophagi, statues and building remains exactly where legend placed it. Archaeologists have now confirmed the site as Tenea – putting another supposedly lost city back on the map.

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