Download Halicarnassus: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Greek City and Home to One of the Seven Wonders of the World AudioBook Free
In 353 BCE, when Ruler Mausolus of Halicarnassus passed on, his sister and queen Artemisia was inconsolable, but she found a way to honor him through concluding a project that they had started along during his life: the engineering of the mausoleum that was so marvelous it would later be looked at one of the Seven Magic of the World. She directed messengers across the historical world to persuade the best sculptors and architects to come to southeast Anatolia to focus on the king's memorial, utilizing only the finest craftsmen and sparing no charge in making the final resting place of Mausolus the finest tomb the planet had ever before seen. They labored for years, creating marvelous statues of the king's dynasty. This great monumental tomb was completed in the center of the fourth century BCE so that the name of Mausolus would be famous forever, as indeed it's been ever since. Like one of the other miracles, the Temple of Artemis, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was huge for its kind of building, being about 150 ft tall and possessing 36 columns of marble on its four attributes, nine to a aspect. Also like the Temple of Artemis, the website of the Mausoleum includes ruins which have been excavated in modern times. Using this, a precise scale look-alike has been successfully created in Istanbul, Turkey, and pieces of the beautiful sculpture on the Mausoleum have been retrieved. Therefore, it is one of the few miracles that survived in some form and have directly influenced modern performers and architects. On top of it all, this is actually the only known major architectural Hellenistic work devoted to a secular theme (the burial of two mortals) alternatively than religious skill dedicated to the Greek pantheon. The styles of the carvings even included many mythical foes of the Greeks, including the Amazons and centaurs, and the structures was a marvel of engineering that was copied by neo-Classical properties. The ultimate destiny of the Mausoleum itself is unidentified, though it was recognized to have survived the city's conquest by Alexander the fantastic in 334 BCE intact. Pirates who occupied metropolis in the first century BCE also still left it unharmed, and even though some earthquakes possessed reduced it to foundations by the 15th century CE, it was still intact enough to certainly be a "wonder" by a Religious pilgrim, the Archbishop Eustathius of Thessalonica, in the 12th century. Unfortunately, the appearance of the Knights of St. John (the Hospitallers) in Rhodes and Bodrum spelled doom for the great framework. They used materials from it to bolster their castle at Bodrum when it was threatened by the Turks in 1522 and burned the marble for lime, though at least they performed retrieve and mount the best of the sculptures in their castle. The burial chamber of Mausolus and Artemisia, which had been underground, was also looted at some point over the generations, though couple were likely cremated in the Greek fashion and buried in urns. The famous marbles were also looted in the 19th century throughout a three-year expedition by British archeologist Sir Charles Thomas Newton and carted off to the British isles Museum.
