The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

Every mausoleum on Earth borrows its name from one man, Mausolus, ruler of Caria in what is now southwestern Turkey, who died in 353 BCE. His tomb at Halicarnassus, completed after his death under his widow and sister Artemisia II, rose in tiers of podium, colonnade and stepped pyramid to a marble four-horse chariot at the summit, about 45 meters above the town. Four of the leading Greek sculptors of the age each took one side, and ancient writers ranked the result among the seven wonders for its art as much as its size. It stood for more than 1,600 years before earthquakes and castle builders brought it down. Its finest sculptures now fill a gallery of the British Museum.

Halicarnassus is today Bodrum, a resort town of whitewashed houses curving around a bay on the Aegean coast, facing the Greek island of Kos. The tomb stood on a terrace above the harbor, its base roughly 38 by 32 meters in most reconstructions, ringed by 36 Ionic columns and crowned by a pyramid of 24 steps. Little remains above ground. Visitors to the open-air site find the rock-cut foundation pit, drainage channels, scattered column drums and fragments of the burial chamber, with models and drawings that show the building as it was. The Castle of St. Peter, across the harbor, holds the rest of the story: blocks and pieces of relief from the tomb are built into its walls.

Mausolus governed Caria as a satrap of the Achaemenid Persian Empire while acting largely as an independent king, and he moved his capital to Halicarnassus. Artemisia died two years after him, and according to Pliny the Elder the sculptors Scopas, Bryaxis, Leochares and Timotheus finished the work for their own glory. The tomb survived Alexander the Great's siege of the city in 334 BCE, but a series of earthquakes from the 12th century onward toppled the upper structure. The Knights of St. John, a crusading order, quarried what remained to strengthen their castle, finishing the job by 1522. The British archaeologist Charles Newton excavated the site in 1856 and 1857 and shipped statues and friezes to London, where they remain on display.

• The Colossus of Rhodes
  The bronze sun god that stood over a Greek harbor city for barely half a century another ancient wonder
• The Temple of Artemis
  The great marble temple of Ephesus, now a single column in a marshy field another ancient wonder
• The Achaemenid (Persian) Empire
  The first empire to rule from the Indus to the Aegean, held together by roads and satraps built under
• Anatolia
  Asia Minor, the peninsula that has always carried the traffic of continents located in
• Turkey
  A transcontinental bridge between Europe and Asia located in
• Aegean Sea
  The island-strewn sea where Greek civilization was born on the coast of