The seventh wonder of the ancient world was an incredibly massive tomb constructed on top of a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, in what was then the small kingdom of Asia Minor and now part of the beautiful country of modern Turkey.
The mausoleum of Halicarnassus as it soon became known, was constructed way back in 350BC as the burial place of King Mausolus, city king of Halicarnassus, which is now a thriving tourist resort, a very lively and scenic one, currently known as Bodrum on the north-west Turkish coast. Even today it has an extremely busy harbour that affords good protection from surprising strong Mediterranean storms.
King Mausolus came to the throne in 377BC after the death of Hecatomnus of Mylasa, who was his father. King Mausolus, as was the custom in Asia minor and some other countries during that long ago time, married his sister who became Queen Artemisia the younger, and they jointly ruled their kingdom for 24 years, a very long period of time in those ancient days when people did not live as long as they do now and when territorial warfare was the rule rather than the exception.
The loss of the king hit Queen Artemisia very hard and she decided to have built the most magnificent tomb the world had ever known and, accordingly, hired a whole bevy of famous architects, sculptors and artisans to turn her dream into a solid reality. These designers and craftsmen came from Greece, Egypt and Lycia, and included the well known historical figures of Satyros, Pythenos, Bryaxis, Timotheus and Scopas of Paros, the latter also directly responsible for the construction of another of the seven wonders of the ancient world — The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus just a little to the south of Halicarnassus.
Queen Artemisia selected a prominent hilltop site to make what was to be a massive edifice even more awe-inspiring than ever and, by today’s standards, the finished tomb would have resembled a very ornate and overdressed wedding cake!
It was constructed in a spacious courtyard set on a huge stone platform and accessed, according to legendary historian Pliny, by means of a staircase with a ranked series of stone lions guarding the way: The high wall around the courtyard was topped by statues of gods and goddesses of the time and at each corner, a stone warrior on a stone horse provided a guard of honour.
The tomb itself was largely constructed from marble and rose to the height of approximately 140 feet. Each of the four sides of this awesome tomb was decorated by an individual master sculptor with his own team of apprentices and workmen. One side had sculptures, in relief, telling the story of the battle of the Centaurs against the Lapiths and another one showed Greek warriors engaged in battle with the mystical warrior women of ancient legends known as Amazons. This incredible artwork covered around one third of the height of the structure and, on top of this, was the beautiful tomb itself.
The tomb structure continued upwards with 36 marble columns, a gloriously sculpted statue standing between each column and which, with the help of a massive block of stone, supported the huge roof. This roof was shaped just like a stepped pyramid and was made up of 24 different levels with, right on the very top, a humungous sculpture of four horses pulling an incredibly ornate chariot in which rode king Mausolus and his Queen Artemisia.
Soon after the death of King Mausolus and while the tomb was under construction, Queen Artemisia faced a rebellion by the inhabitants of the Island of Rhodes, which had been conquered by her brother some years before. She soon proved herself quite capable of handling the situation, thus preventing the war from continuing for any length of time. Sadly, this brave Queen died just two short years after her husband and well before the construction of his tomb was finished. The work could then have been abandoned as no one was left to pay for it but, amazingly, the craftspeople unanimously decided to continue it as an example of their own very fine work, plus, out of love and respect, they buried Queen Artemisia there along with her husband King Mausolus.
The mausoleum of Halicarnassus, watched over the city, even after it was ransacked and partially wrecked, first by Alexander the great in 334BC and later by pirates, for a full 1,700 years, but was very badly damaged by earthquakes in the 13th century and by 1404AD only the stone platform was identifiable.
The city of Halicarnassus was occupied by Crusaders from the 13th Century and they utilised a large percentage of fallen marble blocks from the tomb for their own constructions, including, in 1522, using them to reinforce their own castle in what had, by now, been renamed as the city of Bodrum and some of these polished marble blocks can still be seen in Bodrum Castle today.
The Crusaders were horrified by some of the beautiful statues and pieces of statue they found and, shockingly, ground them up into paste to use as mortar, a kind of cement, to hold their castle together but, surprisingly given the circumstances and the Crusader’s mindset, they did preserve some complete statues inside Bodrum Castle and these stayed there for a full 300 years until the British Ambassador to Turkey got hold of them and had them taken away to the British museum where they remain.
By 1846 no one was 100 per cent certain where the once magnificent tomb had actually stood and the British museum sent an archaeologist, Charles Thomas Newton, to see if he could find it. This clever man used his initiative and studied all historical references and records which mentioned the tomb and, after a difficult search finally narrowed the location down to a particular area and purchased land there so that he could begin to excavate. He was incredibly lucky and found evidence of the tomb not long after he had begun his excavations and, this is really incredible, he actually found the statues of King Mausolus and Queen Artemisia which had once ridden high in the stone chariot on the very top of the mausoleum of Halicarnassus.
It is astonishing that these statues survived. It appears that during one of the earthquakes in the 13th century, the statues had fallen to the ground and been covered with a deep layer of silt — this silt hid them from the eyes of the Crusaders and also helped to preserve them. These statues, historical works of art that they are, currently reside in the British museum, in a special room dedicated to the mausoleum of Halicarnassus and where they stand guard over the few broken remains of what was once one of the seven wonder of the ancient world.