Mausoleum Halicarnasense

About

Queen Artemisia II built this towering tomb for her husband and brother Mausolus around 350 BCE, stacking a colonnaded temple and stepped pyramid roof atop a massive podium roughly 45 meters tall. Ancient writers counted it among the Seven Wonders of the World, and its scale gave the world the word mausoleum. The monument still stood largely intact under Roman rule in 117 CE; only earthquakes centuries later, between the 11th and 15th centuries, brought it down. Crusader knights then quarried its stones to build a nearby castle.

What happened here

The tomb is built where the traffic is: on the road out of town, facing the carriageway, close enough to read at walking pace. That is the design brief. Inside there may be a single chamber for one family or niches for dozens, with cremation urns or, increasingly, bodies laid out. Outside there is a portrait, an inscription giving the dead their offices and their years, and often a bench, because visitors come back. The family returns on the anniversary and at the February festival of the dead, brings wine and food, and eats a meal at the graveside. Endowments are left to keep it up and lawsuits follow when they are not honoured. A grand tomb is the last public building a family gets to commission.

In ancient writing

• Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.30–31

  Gives the tomb its measurements and the four sculptors who each took a side, and says the fourth was still working when the queen who commissioned it died.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_at_Halicarnassus