Halicarnassus Mausoleum

Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one gave its name to an entire category of building. The tomb raised at Halicarnassus for the Carian ruler Mausolus was so admired for its proportions and its sculpture that Roman writers began applying the ruler's name to any grand above-ground tomb, and the word has stayed in use ever since. The monument itself is long gone, shaken apart by earthquakes and then carried away stone by stone, but its foundations still sit in the middle of modern Bodrum, and a surprising amount of its sculpture survives.

Mausolus, Artemisia and the Making of a Capital

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was built between 353 and 351 BC as a tomb for the Carian ruler Mausolus and his sister-wife Artemisia II, on the site of what is now central Bodrum. Mausolus ruled Caria from roughly 377 to 353 BC as a satrap of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, inheriting the position from his father Hecatomnus, but he governed with a great deal of independence and an obvious taste for Greek culture.

His most consequential decision was to move the Carian capital from inland Mylasa to the coastal city of Halicarnassus. Workmen deepened the harbour, threw up new fortifications and added a theatre and a temple of Ares, turning a modest Dorian foundation into a properly defended maritime capital. The city already had a claim on posterity: the historian Herodotus was born there around 484 BC, and a generation before him its queen Artemisia I had commanded ships for the Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. Mausolus died in 353 BC and Artemisia survived him by about two years. Ancient tradition holds that the craftsmen carried on and finished the tomb after her death anyway, understanding that the building had become as much a monument to their own art as to the couple buried inside it.

The Building Itself

Standing some 45 meters tall and decorated with sculpture by four of the leading Greek sculptors of the age, it was admired enough for its design and ornament that ancient writers counted it among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the origin of the word "mausoleum" itself. The design is credited to the architects Satyros and Pythius of Priene, a pairing confirmed by the Roman writer Vitruvius, while Pliny the Elder left the description that most reconstructions still lean on.

The scheme stacked three ideas on top of one another. A high rectangular podium carried a colonnade of 36 Ionic columns, and above that rose a stepped pyramid of 24 steps crowned by a marble quadriga, a four-horse chariot bearing statues of the royal couple. Roughly 400 freestanding sculptures populated the podium and terraces, alongside relief friezes showing an Amazonomachy, the battle of Greeks and Amazons, and combats between centaurs and Lapiths. The four sculptors named in the ancient sources, Scopas, Bryaxis, Timotheus and Leochares, are each said to have taken responsibility for one side of the building. Scholars have long connected the tomb's temple-on-a-podium form to earlier dynastic monuments on the same coast, above all the Nereid Monument at Xanthos in Lycia.

Earthquakes, Crusaders and a Convenient Quarry

A series of earthquakes between the 12th and 15th centuries gradually brought the structure down, and by the early 1400s the Knights Hospitaller were quarrying its remaining blocks to help fortify nearby Bodrum Castle. The knights had arrived on the peninsula around 1402 and began work on their Castle of St Peter almost immediately; a collapsed wonder standing a few hundred metres uphill was simply the most convenient supply of dressed marble on the coast. The sources point to a major campaign of stone-robbing in 1494 and another in 1522, when the garrison hurried to strengthen the castle against an expected Ottoman attack. The attack came the following year, the knights withdrew to Malta, and by then the tomb had effectively ceased to exist above ground. Blocks recognisably cut for the Mausoleum can still be picked out in the castle walls today.

Newton's Excavation and the British Museum

Today only the foundations remain on site, together with a small museum, while many of the surviving sculpted reliefs and figures, including scenes from the battle between the Greeks and the Amazons, are held in the British Museum in London. Frieze slabs reused in the castle walls had already been recovered in 1846 through the British ambassador Stratford Canning, but the decisive work came when Charles Thomas Newton traced and excavated the site itself, shipping his finds out in October 1857. What he recovered is displayed in Room 21: two colossal draped figures long identified as Mausolus and Artemisia, the male statue reassembled from upwards of fifty fragments, part of one of the chariot horses, lions from the terrace and long sections of the Amazon frieze. A later Danish campaign led by Kristian Jeppesen between 1966 and 1977 re-excavated the foundations and produced the detailed studies that most modern reconstructions rely on.

Visiting the Site Today

The site sits in the Tepecik quarter of Bodrum, a short walk uphill from the marina and the castle, and is run as a small open-air archaeological museum. There is not a great deal standing: the cut foundations and the rock-cut burial chamber, column drums and blocks laid out across the grounds, a stretch of the ancient precinct wall, and a covered hall with fragments, casts and models showing how the tomb is thought to have looked. It rewards a slow visit and some reading rather than a quick photograph, and a scale reconstruction is also displayed in the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology inside the castle, which makes the two an obvious pairing on the same day. Because the site sits close to Bodrum's harbor, many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter from Bodrum to see the rest of the peninsula from the water. The Mausoleum's afterlife, meanwhile, is easier to see abroad than in Bodrum: its stepped, colonnaded silhouette was borrowed for buildings as far apart as Grant's Tomb in New York, the Civil Courts Building in St Louis, the House of the Temple in Washington DC and the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.