Around 700 BC, the Neo-Assyrian emperor Sargon II began building a new capital city, named after himself, in the desert of what is now Iraq. Archaeologists have long thought this grandiose project had barely gotten underway when it was abandoned, leaving only the ruins of a construction zone. But a newly published survey of the site upends that idea. Visualizations of data from a precision magnetometer show previously unknown buildings and infrastructure within the city walls, suggesting that the city indeed thrived beyond the palace.