"The Nameless City," while not a great story, is a key breakthrough for HPL with respect to "archaeological horror." From some of the story's allusions to his literary idol Lord Dunsany, I think it's likely that HPL realized that Dunsany had utilized tropes involving big, imposing buildings, and even though Dunsany wasn't dominantly writing horror, HPL probably made some connection between Dunsany's fantasy-use of the trope and its use in the domain of Gothic fiction, as per THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO.
The story's structure feels like a reworking of "The Statement of Randolph Carter," but one in which a single character, this time unnamed, makes a descent into a forbidding underground domain. The narrator is an archaeologist investigating an isolated "nameless city" that seems outside the bounds of human history. He eventually finds evidence of alien beings who may have built the city, and then he narrowly escapes some barely seen horror within the darkness. In fact, the ending is a little vague about whether the narrator does survive.
Not only does Dunsany have one of his works quoted in the text, the narrator also speaks of a domain from one of HPL's Dunsanian tales, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," as if Sarnath is a real place in human history. "City" also includes HPL's first mentions of Abdul Alhazred and the famous "strange aeons" quote that will appear again in "Call of Cthulhu," though not until his next published story does HPL mention the book Abdul authored.
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