Bodrum Hotels

7 WONDERS OF THE WORLD

THE MAUSOLEUM AT HALICARNASSOS

I have lying, over me in Halicarnassus, a gigantic monument such as no other dead person has, adorned in the finest way with statues of horses and men carved most realistically from the best quality marble.

King Maussollos
in Lucian's "Dialogues of the Dead"

The town of Halicarnassos (modern day Bodrum in Turkey) was once considered a part of Caria, a portion of the Persian Empire. From 377 to 353 BC, Caria's ruler was King Mausolus.

As with many rulers of history, Mausolus contemplated his own death and wanted to build a memorial to himself while he was still alive to insure it would be a fitting tribute to his greatness. So he planned and soon after  started the construction of a great tower that would be his tomb and forever remind the people of the land of his greatness.

Caria was a port of trade and Egyptian and Greek ships frequented the harbor. Indeed Caria almost seemed to be a melting pot of the three cultures (Carian, Egyptian, Greek) so Mausolus chose for his tomb design a structure that respected the three cultures. The stepped base was Carian, the column level was Greek (with Ionic columns), and the roof was a stepped pyramid suggestive of the Egyptian pyramids.

The structure towered over everything else in the city, but King Mausolus never saw it finished. He died during its construction and his Queen Artemesia supervised the completion of it. It stood for eighteen hundred years, before being toppled by an earthquake in the 1400's AD.

The tomb of Mausolus came to be called the Mausoleum, and even today the word "mausoleum" indicates a large, stately tomb of an important person.

The size and structure are reasonably well documented. Several of the lion statues that circled the roof are now in museum collections. The four horses that pull the chariot on the rooftop are also well documented and parts of the horses are also in museum collections.

The structure was rectangular in plan, with base dimensions of about 40 m (120 ft) by 30 m (100 ft). Overlying the foundation was a stepped podium which sides were decorated with statues.

The burial chamber and the sarcophagus of white alabaster decorated with gold were located on the podium and surrounded by Ionic columns.

The colonnade supported a pyramid roof, which was in turn decorated with statues. A statue of a chariot pulled by four horses adorned the top of the tomb.

The total height of the Mausoleum was 45 m (140 ft). This is broken down into 20 m (60 ft) for the stepped podium, 12 m (38 ft) for the colonnade, 7 m (22 ft) for the pyramid, and 6 m (20 ft) for the chariot statue at the top.

The beauty of the Mausoleum is not only in the structure itself, but also in the decorations and statues that adorned the outside at different levels on the podium and the roof. These were tens of life-size as well as under and over life-size freestanding statues of people, lions, horses, and other animals. The statues were carved by four Greek sculptors: Bryaxis, Leochares, Scopas, and Timotheus, each responsible for one side. Because the statues were of people and animals, the Mausoleum holds a special place in history, as it was not dedicated to the gods of Ancient Greece.

Since the nineteenth century, archeological excavations have been undertaken at the Mausoleum site. These excavations together with detailed descriptions by ancient historians give us a fairly good idea about the shape and appearance of the Mausoleum. A modern reconstruction of the shorter side of the Mausoleum illustrates the lavish nature of the art and architecture of the building... a building for a King whose name is celebrated in all large tombs today -- mausoleums.

At his death Mausolus was cremated in a huge fire  and, after some gifts were left in the burial chamber, the tomb was closed with huge rock. On the staircases of the monument there were bones of animals sacrificed as part of the ceremonies to mark his farewell.

For 16 centuries, the Mausoleum remained in good condition until an earthquake caused some damage to the roof and colonnade. In the early fifteenth century, the Knights of St John of Malta invaded the region and built a massive crusader castle. When they decided to fortify it in 1494, they used the stones of the Mausoleum. By 1522, almost every block of the Mausoleum had been disassembled and used for construction.

Today, the massive castle still stands in Bodrum, and the polished stone and marble blocks of the Mausoleum can be spotted within the walls of the structure. Some of the sculptures survived and are today on display at the British Museum in London. These include fragment of statues and many slabs of the frieze showing the battle between the Greeks and the Amazons. At the site of the Mausoleum itself, only the foundation remains of the once magnificent Wonder.

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