Mount Nemrut

In the 1950s an American archaeologist named Theresa Goell began digging into the top of a mountain in southeastern Turkey, looking for a burial chamber, and the mountain kept closing behind her. The mound up there is not packed earth. It is a cone of broken limestone, fist-sized pieces stacked loose, and every tunnel her crews drove into it slid shut on itself. She tried shafts, drilling, and the geophysical instruments of the day. She spent the better part of two decades on it and never found the chamber. Nobody has since.

A King Writing His Own Liturgy

The mound belongs to Antiochus I of Commagene, a small kingdom on the western side of the Euphrates, squeezed through the middle of the first century BC by Rome on one side and Parthia on the other. Antiochus could not out-fight either. What he had instead was a story about who he was, and he carved it into the highest ground he controlled.

He called the result a hierothesion in his own inscriptions: a tomb and a sanctuary at once. He picked the summit, piled a cone of crushed stone roughly fifty metres high onto it, and cut two broad terraces below, one east, one west.

On each terrace he set a row of enthroned figures eight to nine metres tall, with a lion at one end of the line and an eagle at the other, and his own statue seated among the gods. The bodies are still on their thrones. The heads are not. Earthquakes and the freeze-thaw of a very cold summit snapped them off over the centuries, and they sit on the ground in front of the bodies they belonged to, still facing the plain.

The backs of the thrones carry a long Greek inscription that reads less like a dedication than like an operating manual. It sets out two days to be celebrated every month, the king's birthday and the day of his accession. It says what the priests are to wear, in the Persian style. It covers incense at the altars, meat and wine shared with everyone who comes, and a rule that nobody may carry their portion away. A man arranged his own memorial service in writing, in detail, while he was alive to supervise it.

The gods on those thrones have double names: Zeus-Oromasdes, Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes, Artagnes-Herakles-Ares. Greek and Iranian deities fused into single figures, with neither tradition dropped. Commagene itself sits in the row as a goddess.

The reliefs make the same argument more directly. A scene called dexiosis turns up again and again: Antiochus standing, a god opposite him, the two shaking hands. Same height, same posture, no kneeling. Along the terraces, one gallery of ancestor reliefs traces his father's line to the Persian kings and another his mother's line to the Macedonian dynasty. Whichever embassy showed up, there was a wall ready for it.

After Him

The balance he built outlived him, but not by much. Commagene held on for a while and was absorbed into the Roman empire as a province in AD 72. When the ceremonies on the summit stopped is not recorded. For centuries afterward the site drew no outside attention at all, known to the villages below and nobody else.

In 1881 a German engineer named Karl Sester, surveying road routes in the region for the Ottoman government, heard people mention statues on a peak and went up to look. He got word to Europe. Otto Puchstein examined the site the next year and returned with Karl Humann, and the inscriptions were recorded properly for the first time.

The Lion With Nineteen Stars

The oddest thing on the mountain is on the west terrace. A relief shows a lion with nineteen stars scattered across its body, a crescent at its neck, and three larger stars above its back, each labelled in Greek with a planet's name. It is treated as one of the oldest surviving star charts, and it looks like a record of one particular night sky. Astronomers have tried to work out which. The most cited proposal lands on a July day in 62 BC, though the argument is not settled. Whichever day it is, Antiochus wanted the sky entered into the file along with everything else.

Now

The site has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1987, and it is one of the highest archaeological sites in Turkey. Most visitors climb before dawn, because low sunlight hits the fallen heads from the side and the faces briefly come back.

The real threat is weather. Water gets into the cracks, freezes overnight, expands, and prises the stone apart from the inside; surfaces flake off in sheets. Some of the reliefs are visibly fainter than they were fifty years ago. Conservators have argued for years about what to do: whether the heads should be lifted back onto the bodies, whether the reliefs need shelters, how close visitors should walk.

Antiochus instructed that the sanctuary and his name be kept safe for all time. His kingdom was erased from the map, his tomb has never been located, and his statues lost their heads. The mountain, meanwhile, is not named after him at all. It carries the name of a far older legendary king, and everyone who climbs it still stands in the space Antiochus laid out, facing the direction he chose.