Tower of Elahbel
About
Four Palmyrene brothers, Elahbel, Shagai, Mogimo, and Maani, finished building this four-story sandstone tower tomb in 103 CE, an exact date recorded in its dedicatory inscription. Corinthian pilasters and painted coffered ceilings decorated burial chambers that together held more than 300 bodies across the tower's levels. It stood as one of the tallest and best-preserved tower tombs in the Valley of the Tombs for nearly two thousand years. ISIL destroyed it with explosives in August 2015.
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
- Elahbel and his brothers, Dedicatory inscription, Tower of Elahbel Greek and Palmyrene text, Seleucid Era 414 (103 CE)
The tower's own foundation inscription records that Marcus Ulpius Elahbel and his brothers, sons of Wahballat, built it as a family tomb in 103 CE — fourteen years before this map's snapshot.
Sources
Nearby
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