{"it":{"id":"LEV-005","kind":"site","sub":"Levant and Anatolia","name":"Mount Nemrut","place":"Turkey","lat":37.981,"lon":38.741,"date":"Mount Nemrut or Nemrud (Turkish: Nemrut Dağı; Kurdish: Çiyayê Nemrûdê; Armenian:…","nfacts":4,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"At 2,150 m up a mountain in southeastern Türkiye, giant stone heads of gods and a king lie scattered on terraces below a peak of loose rock 49 m tall and 152 m across. The king's tomb is believed to be inside. No one has found it.","why":"A mountain-top mausoleum where a king set himself among Greek and Persian gods.","src":[357],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Will the tomb ever be found?","rel":["LEV-002"],"hook":"At 2,150 m in Türkiye, stone gods' heads lie below a 50 m mound of rock. The king's tomb was never found."},"S":{"357":["Wikipedia: Mount Nemrut","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Nemrut"]},"rec":{"id":"LEV-005","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Nemrut or Nemrud Greek Όρος Νεμρούτ is a","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"2150","u":"m","o":"Mount Nemrut or Nemrud (; ; ; Greek: Όρος Νεμρούτ) is a 2,150 m mountain in southeastern Turkey, notable for the summit where a number of large statues are erected around what is assumed to be a royal tomb from the 1st century BC.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mount_Nemrut&oldid=1377823235","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1377823235 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1604"},{"f":"It is","a":"height","v":"2150","u":"m","o":"It is 2,150 m high.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mount_Nemrut&oldid=1377823235","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1377823235 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1605"},{"f":"on the tumulus at the site which is","a":"height","v":"49","u":"m","o":"The same statues and ancestors found throughout the site can also be found on the tumulus at the site, which is 49 m tall and 152 m in diameter.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mount_Nemrut&oldid=1377823235","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1377823235 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1606"},{"f":"the site which is 49 m tall and","a":"diameter","v":"152","u":"m","o":"The same statues and ancestors found throughout the site can also be found on the tumulus at the site, which is 49 m tall and 152 m in diameter.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mount_Nemrut&oldid=1377823235","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1377823235 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1607"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"File:Eagle and Lion (4962096376).jpg|West terrace: Sandstone eagle and lion bodies","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mount_Nemrut&oldid=1377823235"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"Mount Nemrut or Nemrud (Turkish: Nemrut Dağı; Kurdish: Çiyayê Nemrûdê; Armenian: Նեմրութ լեռ; Greek: Όρος Νεμρούτ) is a 2,150-metre-high (7,054 ft) mountain in southeastern Turkey, notable for the summit where a number of large statues are erected around what is assumed to be a royal tomb from the 1","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/448","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"37.98055556","lon":"38.74083333","src":"Wikidata P625 + UNESCO WHC list XML (agree ≤0.05°)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0002 deg (~0.02 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/75969654"},"src":[{"id":"S0346","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mount_Nemrut&oldid=1377823235"},{"id":"S0545","t":"Wikipedia: Mount Nemrut","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Nemrut"},{"id":"VLEV-005-3","t":"Nemrut Dağ - UNESCO World Heritage Centre","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/448/"},{"id":null,"t":"Bruno Jacobs, “Nemrud Dağı”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (2011, updated 2018).","u":"https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/nemrud-dagi/"},{"id":null,"t":"Inscriptions on the throne-backs, Nemrud Dağ (CIMRM 32), English translation from the International Nemrud Foundation, as presented by Roger Pearse’s Mithraism site.","u":"https://mithras.tertullian.org/display.php?page=cimrm32"},{"id":null,"t":"Stephan Heilen, “Zur Deutung und Datierung des ‚Löwenhoroskops‘ auf dem Nemrud Dağı”, Epigraphica Anatolica 38 (2005), 145–158. Offprint hosted by the Institut für Altertumskunde, University of Cologne.","u":"https://ifa.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/fileadmin/IfA/EpiAna_pdfs/038145_Heilen_Zur_Deutung_und_Datierung_des_Loewnhoroskops_auf_dem_Nemrut_Dagi.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Geo Widengren, “Antiochus of Commagene”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (1986, updated 2013).","u":"https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/antiochus-of-commagene/"},{"id":null,"t":"Current World Archaeology, “CWA travels to: Mount Nemrut”, issue 57 (25 January 2013).","u":"https://www.world-archaeology.com/travel/cwa-travels-to-mount-nemrut/"}],"sum":"The lion is walking. Carved in low relief on a slab of stone on a mountaintop in southeastern Türkiye, its body scattered with stars, and it carries a crescent moon. Above its back are three more stars, and beside each one, in Greek letters, a name: the planets that wander the night sky. The crescent sits beside Regulus, the bright royal star in the constellation of Leo. UNESCO calls the slab a \"lion horoscope,\" \"believed to be indicating the construction date of the cult area.\" Most scholars agree that it shows a gathering of planets in Leo on one particular night more than two thousand years ago. They do not agree which night.\n\nThat uncertainty is a fitting introduction to Nemrut Dağ, because almost everything about this place was designed to be precise, permanent and unmistakable, and two of the most basic facts about it remain unknown.\n\nThe mountain rises to 2,150 metres in the Anti-Taurus range. On its summit stands something that looks at first like a second peak: a cone of loose stone chips that UNESCO measures at about 50 metres high and 145 metres across, and another account at 49 metres and 152. That is a hill of hand-broken rock as tall as a fifteen-storey building, piled on top of a mountain. Around it, terraces open on the east, west and north. A German road-building engineer, Karl Sester, came upon it in 1881.\n\nThe man who ordered it was Antiochus I, king of Commagene, a small kingdom on the upper Euphrates. UNESCO gives his reign as 69 to 34 BC. His was not a great power. It sat between far greater powers, and its king had to make it matter.\n\nHis answer is on the terraces. On the east and west sides sat five giant seated limestone statues, which Wikipedia gives as 8 to 9 metres high, each identified by its inscription as a god, with a lion and an eagle at each end of the row. Over the centuries their heads have fallen to the level below. That is the image most visitors know: enormous calm faces resting on the ground, staring out across the mountains. Behind them stood rows of carved sandstone slabs. One row showed the king's Persian ancestors, the other his Macedonian ones. Others showed Antiochus shaking hands with the gods. UNESCO notes that some of the stone blocks weigh up to nine tons.\n\nThis is where a student of power would recognise a master at work. A minor king squeezed between empires made himself the meeting point of both worlds. UNESCO notes that he presented himself as a descendant of the Persian king Darius through his father and of Alexander the Great through his mother. His gods were paired to match. The Iranica scholar Bruno Jacobs lists them with double names: Zeus with Oromasdes, the Iranian Ahuramazda; Apollo with Mithras; Heracles with Artagnes. Greeks could see a Mount Olympus here, Jacobs suggests, and Iranians a mountain of Ahura Mazda. The priests spoke Greek but dressed in Persian clothes. The historian of religions Geo Widengren adds that Antiochus took the title Theos, \"signifying his divinity.\" He did not merely honour the gods. He sat among them, at their height, his statue in their row.\n\nHe also told the world where his body would lie. On the backs of the stone thrones he had it carved in Greek: \"this sacred tomb, which is to be indestructible by the ravages of time, in closest proximity to the heavenly throne.\" His body would \"rest through immeasurable time,\" while his soul rose to \"the heavenly thrones of Zeus Oromasdes.\" The mainstream reading, shared by UNESCO and by Jacobs, takes him at his word. The site is his mausoleum and cult place, the mound raised over his tomb, and UNESCO calls the whole one of the most ambitious constructions of the Hellenistic period.\n\nThe trouble is that no one has found him. Wikipedia calls the royal tomb under the mound \"assumed.\" No excavator has reached a burial chamber, and fifty metres of loose stone is not something anyone digs into lightly, because any attempt puts the monument itself at risk. In 2013 the magazine Current World Archaeology reported that radar work in 2012 had found what looked like a chamber about 15 metres below the top of the mound, with a box-like object inside, and could still only wonder \"whether they belong to the king.\" That is a scan, not an excavation, and it remains unconfirmed. He gave his tomb a mountain, a guard of gods and a written promise. He did not give anyone a door.\n\nThe second open question is the lion. In 1959 the historians of astronomy Otto Neugebauer and H. B. van Hoesen dated its sky to 6 or 7 July 62 BC, and Jacobs follows that date. Widengren, writing in the same encyclopedia in 1986, took the horoscope as the king's birth chart and gave 16 July 98 BC. In 2002 Maurice Crijns made the case for 14 July 109 BC, and with colleagues considered whether the king's father, Mithradates I Kallinikos, might have begun a first monument on the mountain then. Members of the International Nemrud Foundation even started their 2001 season \"on the 14th of July 2001, the same day as represented on the famous Lion horoscope.\"\n\nThe classicist Stephan Heilen answered in 2005 in Epigraphica Anatolica. Crijns' reading, he wrote, \"ist der Komplexität des Problems nicht gerecht geworden,\" it does not do justice to the complexity of the problem. He showed that a limit on the years searched, which Crijns attributed to Neugebauer, had actually been set by Humann and Puchstein in 1890; Neugebauer had tested the whole span from 119 to 35 BC. But Heilen's conclusion was not that 62 BC wins. It was that 62 and 109 BC are both plausible and that a firm decision is \"vorerst unmöglich,\" for now impossible. On the strict astronomy he found the night of 6 to 7 July 62 BC only \"minimal günstiger,\" very slightly better. He added that it is quite uncertain which astronomical details were actually checked before the relief was carved.\n\nSit with that for a moment. A king of the first century BC placed a precise configuration of planets at the heart of his sacred mountain, labelled each one, set it beside the royal star, and intended it to be read. Two thousand years later, with modern computation, the best scholars can narrow it to two nights forty-seven years apart. Whatever the lion was meant to record, a founding, a coronation or a birth, the people who carved it believed that the sky could fix a moment for eternity, and that a king's destiny was written there.\n\nAntiochus asked for a tomb that time could not destroy. He seems to have got one, perhaps too well. The heads lie where they fell, the lion keeps walking under its stars, and somewhere beneath the gravel, if the radar is right, something box-shaped waits in the dark. If the king who claimed a seat beside the heavenly throne ever is found, what will he have taken with him that the stones above never mention?","qs":["A king's tomb is assumed under 50 metres of loose rock and has never been found. How much risk to the monument is worth taking to find him?","Why would a small kingdom's king claim both Greek and Persian gods?","What brought the heads down?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Mount_Nemrut_-_East_Terrace_%284961323529%29.jpg/1280px-Mount_Nemrut_-_East_Terrace_%284961323529%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mount_Nemrut_-_East_Terrace_(4961323529).jpg","title":"Mount Nemrut - East Terrace (4961323529).jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"Klearchos Kapoutsis from Santorini, Greece","cap":"Mount Nemrut - East Terrace Nemrut Tümülüsü"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/APOLLON_NEMRUT_MOUNTAIN.jpg/1280px-APOLLON_NEMRUT_MOUNTAIN.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:APOLLON_NEMRUT_MOUNTAIN.jpg","title":"APOLLON NEMRUT MOUNTAIN.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Mkrc85","cap":"Some of the statues near the peak of Mount Nemrut (Turkey). West Terrace: head of Apollo and head of Goddess of Kommagene (Tyche). Scene in the sunset sun."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Eagle_and_Lion_%284962096376%29.jpg/1280px-Eagle_and_Lion_%284962096376%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_and_Lion_(4962096376).jpg","title":"Eagle and Lion (4962096376).jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"Klearchos Kapoutsis from Santorini, Greece","cap":"Mount Nemrut - West Terrace: Eagle and Lion from sand stones Nemrut Tümülüsü Gods of Commagene"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Goddess_of_Kommagene_%28Tyche%29_%284961562037%29.jpg/1280px-Goddess_of_Kommagene_%28Tyche%29_%284961562037%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goddess_of_Kommagene_(Tyche)_(4961562037).jpg","title":"Goddess of Kommagene (Tyche) (4961562037).jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"Klearchos Kapoutsis from Santorini, Greece","cap":"Mount Nemrut - West Terrace: Head of Goddess of Kommagene (Tyche, goddess of luck, fortune and prosperity) Nemrut Tümülüsü Gods of Commagene"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Heads_on_Mount_Nemrut.JPG/1280px-Heads_on_Mount_Nemrut.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heads_on_Mount_Nemrut.JPG","title":"Heads on Mount Nemrut.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Urszula Ka","cap":"Heads of statues at the top of the mountain"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/LEV-005.webp","w":1280,"h":852,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Mount_Nemrut_-_East_Terrace_%284961323529%29.jpg/1280px-Mount_Nemrut_-_East_Terrace_%284961323529%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}