The mausoleum of Halicarnassus like the great pyramid of Giza was the burial place of an ancient king and qualified as one of the seven wonders because like the Temple of Artemis it had great beauty.
The building stood on a stepped podium
whose sides were decorated with statues and in the burial chamber was
surrounded by Ionic columns and the sarcophagus was of white alabaster
decorated with gold.
The colonnade supported a pyramid roof
which was in turn decorated with fine statues and the very top of the tomb was
adorned by a statue of a chariot pulled by four horses.
The mausoleum was built in the city of
Halicarnassus now called Bodrum in south western Turkey on the coast of the
Aegean Sea.
King Maussollos of Caria reigned over all
of western turkey as a governor or satrap for the Persian Empire from 377 to
353 BC.
Maussollos was a rather unremarkable ruler
and but for the beautiful tomb conceived by his wife and sister he would
probably have been completely forgotten.
It was three years after Maussollos death
around 350 BC that The Mausoleum was completed and For 16 centuries, it
remained in good condition until the roof and colonnade was damaged by an
earthquake.
When the Knights of St
John invaded the region in the early fifteenth century they built a
huge crusader castle and when it was fortified in 1494 it was stones from the
Mausoleum that they.
Over the next 30 years almost every block
of stone and marble had been used by the crusaders for construction.
The great crusader castle still stands in
Bodrum and the mausoleum’s polished stone and marble blocks are easy to see in
the walls of the structure.
At the site of the Mausoleum only the
foundations remain while some of the sculptures and parts of frieze are on
display at the British
Museum in London.
So the name of the unremarkable King Maussollos
lives on all around the world where in every city families continue to place
loved ones in tombs or more accurately mausoleums.
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