Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Mausolus.
The gallery
Portrait statue of Mausolus
Unknown (Carian workshop; British Museum), c. 350 BC
Colossal marble from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (British Museum): the satrap-king whose tomb gave every later mausoleum its name. Hellenistic drapery and beard fix Mausolus as the mortal for whom Artemisia raised the Wonder of the World.
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
Ferdinand Knab, 1886
Knab’s reconstruction paints the stepped pyramid, chariot, and colonnade Pliny described — the tomb of Mausolus as nineteenth-century imagination still saw the Wonder. The king’s afterlife is architecture: his name outlived his city as a common noun for grand burial.
In play
Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
One of the Seven Wonders — built for Mausolus of Caria by Artemisia — the monument that made his name a synonym for any splendid tomb.
mausoleum
English and the Romance languages keep Mausolus inside the word for a monumental tomb — linguistic reception rarer and more durable than any portrait.