Reconstruction drawing, Wikimedia Commons

Nereid Monument

Monumentum Nereidum

TombLycia et Pamphylia · Xanthos, TurkeyBuilt 385 BCE

About

Lycian ruler Arbinas built himself a Greek temple in miniature atop an 8-meter podium at Xanthos around 390-380 BCE, its columns framing statues of sea nymphs that gave the monument its modern name. Two carved friezes wrapped the podium with scenes of sieges and battles, part biography and part legend. The design later influenced the far larger Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Only stone blocks of the podium remain in place today, the sculpted superstructure having been removed to the British Museum in the 19th century.

What happened here

Roman burial is a family matter conducted in public. The dead are carried out of town, cremated or laid in the ground, and mourned with formal noise; the funeral of anyone important is a procession with masks of the ancestors carried by hired men. The tomb that follows is designed to be read by strangers on the road: name, age, offices, sometimes a trade shown in relief, often a line addressed directly to the passer-by. Ordinary people appear here as they nowhere else — a baker with his ovens carved on the front, a freedman naming the woman he could finally marry, a child's age given in days. Anniversaries bring the family back with food and wine.

In ancient writing

Anonymous, Statue-base inscription, Nereid Monument, Xanthos Greek text SEG 28.1245, Lycian text N 311
A bilingual Greek-and-Lycian text on the monument's statue base survives in fragments, invoking Artemis the huntress alongside what scholars read as a record of the dynast Arbinas's campaigns.