The word mausoleum, in every modern European language, derives from the personal name of Mausolus — the Persian-appointed satrap (provincial governor) of Caria in southwestern Anatolia, who ruled from 377 BC until his death in 353 BC. Mausolus’s tomb in his capital city of Halicarnassus, built between 353 and approximately 350 BC by his widow (and sister) Artemisia II as a monumental burial for her dead husband-brother, was so spectacularly larger and more ornate than any previous Greek tomb that the building itself became the standard reference for all subsequent ostentatious burial structures across the Mediterranean world. By the Roman period, mausoleum had passed into Latin as a generic term for any large free-standing tomb. From Latin it passed into every European language. It has held the same meaning, in essentially every European tongue, for approximately two thousand three hundred years.
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was, by the fourth century BC’s reckoning, the most important new building in the eastern Mediterranean. It was approximately forty-five meters tall — about the height of a modern fifteen-story building — and contained at its base a massive rectangular podium, on which sat a Greek temple-style colonnade of thirty-six columns, on which sat a stepped pyramid of twenty-four marble courses, on which sat a colossal marble chariot driven by a sculpted figure of Mausolus himself with Artemisia beside him. The chariot was the work of the sculptor Pythius of Priene, who was also the building’s chief architect. The four sides of the podium were carved with substantial relief friezes, executed by four of the most famous Greek sculptors of the mid-fourth century BC (Scopas of Paros, Bryaxis, Leochares, and Timotheus, one per side). The total assembled weight of marble was several thousand tons.
It is now almost entirely gone.
What stood, what fell
The Mausoleum stood at full height for approximately one thousand five hundred years. The longest-surviving major Wonder of the Ancient World after the pyramids, it was almost certainly the most ornate. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s AD — over four hundred years after its construction — describes it as still substantially intact, with the sculpted chariot still visible at the top. Pausanias, in the second century AD, describes it similarly. The early Byzantine traveler accounts of the fifth and sixth centuries AD continue to describe it as one of the major architectural features of the eastern Mediterranean coast.
The damage began in the late medieval period. A series of substantial earthquakes affected southwestern Anatolia between approximately 1150 and 1350. The Mausoleum, which had been engineered for the relatively low seismic activity of the original construction site, was not designed for the more intense earthquake regime that characterized the broader region. The colonnade above the podium began to collapse during the late twelfth century. The stepped pyramid above the colonnade had largely fallen by the mid-thirteenth. The chariot at the top — by then over fifteen centuries old — was gone before 1200.
By the early fifteenth century, what remained at the Halicarnassus site was the podium and the partially-buried ruins of the upper structures, scattered across what had become an agricultural area at the edge of a small Turkish village. The site was no longer recognizable to most visitors as one of the seven Wonders. It was a field of carved marble blocks.
What the Knights of Rhodes did to it
The Knights Hospitaller — the medieval military religious order that controlled Rhodes and the surrounding islands from 1309 to 1522 — established a fortified outpost at the Halicarnassus site in 1402. The location was strategically useful: it commanded the Anatolian coast facing Rhodes and was the obvious place to fortify against an eventual Ottoman attack on the Hospitaller territories. The Hospitaller fortress, built in stages between 1402 and the early sixteenth century, was eventually completed as the Castle of St. Peter — known in Turkish as Bodrum Castle, after the modern Turkish name for the town.
The Hospitallers built the castle out of the Mausoleum.
Specifically: from approximately 1494 through the final Hospitaller departure in 1522, the surviving marble blocks of the Mausoleum were systematically quarried, broken down, and incorporated into the castle’s walls, towers, and gun platforms. The friezes were cut into building stones. The columns were broken and used as fill. The remaining sculpted figures were either incorporated as decorative elements in the castle (a few visible heads can still be identified in the castle’s western walls) or were broken up for building material.
The process was, by every later assessment, deliberate. The Hospitallers had a chronicle tradition that recorded the demolition. The Hospitaller chronicler Sabba de Castiglione, writing in 1517, describes the quarrying matter-of-factly: the marble was high quality, the original structures were already in ruins, the Knights had a fortress to build. The destruction of one of the Seven Wonders was a practical decision about local building material.
By the time the Ottomans took Bodrum from the Hospitallers in 1522, the Mausoleum no longer existed as an above-ground structure. The site was a paved street and a few visible foundation walls.
What the British Museum found
The site was rediscovered as an archaeological prospect in the early nineteenth century. Charles Newton, a British classicist working as the British vice-consul at Mytilene, persuaded the British Museum to fund an excavation of the Mausoleum site in 1856. The excavation ran from 1856 through 1859 and was — by mid-nineteenth-century standards — substantial. Newton uncovered the original foundation, identified the surviving relief friezes embedded in the castle walls (the Ottoman administration of the period allowed the British to remove the relevant blocks), and recovered several of the major surviving sculpted figures.
The recovered material — including substantial portions of the frieze panels, the head and torso of one of the colossal Mausolus statues, and several other sculptural fragments — was shipped to London between 1858 and 1860. It now constitutes the Mausoleum room at the British Museum (Room 21). The display includes the colossal Mausolus statue (with substantial reconstruction), the matching colossal Artemisia statue, the surviving frieze panels by Scopas’s school, and a small architectural reconstruction.
The British Museum’s claim to the material was based on an Ottoman firman (imperial permit) of 1846 that had authorized the British removal. The legality and ethics of the removal have been debated by Turkish authorities, by Greek archaeologists, and by international museum-restitution scholars for the past seventy years. The Turkish government has periodically requested the return of the material to Bodrum. The British Museum has consistently declined. The dispute is ongoing.
What is left at Bodrum
The Mausoleum site is now a small archaeological park in modern Bodrum, at the corner of Turgut Reis Caddesi and Hamam Sokağı. The visible remains are the original foundation walls, the staircase leading down to Mausolus’s burial chamber, a small museum building (constructed in 1979), and several reproduction sculpture fragments installed as references. The actual burial chamber was robbed in antiquity — probably in the late Hellenistic period — and contained, when excavated by Newton in 1858, only fragments of the original Mausolus sarcophagus and a small carved relief that had been left behind by the original tomb robbers.
The walls of Bodrum Castle, half a kilometer south of the Mausoleum site, contain — visible to the trained eye — approximately three hundred identifiable Mausoleum blocks. Some of them still bear traces of original carving. The relief fragments that the British Museum did not remove are still in the castle walls. They can be seen by visitors walking the castle ramparts. There is a small interpretive sign at one of the more visible relief blocks, explaining its origin.
A reading of the major contemporary Mausoleum scholarship — Jeppesen 1981-2002, Waywell 1978, the recent work of Anne Marie Carstens — suggests that perhaps one-third of the original Mausoleum’s sculpted material is still extant in some form. About a third is in the British Museum. About a third is still in the walls of Bodrum Castle. The remaining third was lost permanently — broken up, used as construction fill, transported to other Hospitaller building projects, or buried beyond recovery. The tomb is gone. The word for tomb is everywhere.