Mount Nemrut, Turkey: The Mountain Tomb Where a Forgotten King Built Giant Stone Heads of Himself and His Gods

Near the summit of a 7,000-foot mountain in southeastern Turkey, a collection of giant stone heads sits on the ground staring at the horizon. These heads once belonged to statues 26 to 33 feet tall. Earthquakes knocked them off over the centuries. Nobody has put them back. They have been lying there like that for about 2,000 years, which is somehow more unsettling than if they were intact.

Okay so the guy who built this. His name was Antiochus I. He ruled a tiny kingdom called Commagene in the first century BCE, sandwiched between the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire, and he considered himself essentially divine. He built this monument to prove it.

Who Antiochus Was

Commagene was a small buffer state that survived because Rome and Parthia, the two superpowers of the era, preferred a weak client kingdom between them to sharing a direct border. Antiochus played both sides shrewdly, signing treaties with each. This bought him stability, prosperity, and apparently a very inflated sense of his own cosmic importance.

In 62 BCE he ordered the construction of a tomb-sanctuary on Mount Nemrut’s summit. Workers hauled enormous quantities of crushed rock to the peak and piled it into a 160-foot artificial mound covering his burial chamber. On the east and west terraces flanking the mound, teams of sculptors carved colossal statues of five seated figures: Zeus, Apollo, Hercules, a local fertility goddess, and Antiochus himself, at the exact same scale.

This is the part I keep coming back to. He didn’t put himself in a subordinate position. He sat down at the same table, at the same size, in the same row. Instead of worshipping these gods, he joined them.

The Gods He Merged Himself With

Commagene sat at the intersection of Greek, Persian, and Armenian cultures, and Antiochus’s theology was a full mashup of all three. His Zeus doubled as the Persian deity Oromasdes. Apollo also went by Mithras. Hercules also answered to Artagnes. Inscriptions across the site describe Antiochus as descended from both Greek Seleucid kings and Persian Achaemenid kings simultaneously. He was claiming the entire region’s heritage as his own personal backstory.

Then in 38 BCE the Romans deposed him. By 72 CE Rome had absorbed Commagene entirely. The sanctuary closed. Earthquakes arrived over the centuries and did what earthquakes do to stone statues on a mountaintop.

What’s There Now

The bodies are still seated on their thrones. Just headless. On the east terrace you can see the row of decapitated figures with their massive stone heads scattered on the ground in front of them at slightly odd angles. Each head stands about 6 feet tall on its own. Up close the scale is genuinely hard to process.

The 160-foot tumulus of crushed rock still sits at the summit. Antiochus’s burial chamber is almost certainly inside it. Despite multiple investigations, however, nobody has found it. The loose rock may have been designed that way deliberately, making any excavation essentially impossible. The tomb remains undiscovered after 2,000 years.

A German engineer surveying roads for the Ottoman government rediscovered the site in 1881. Before that, it had been unknown to the outside world for roughly 1,800 years. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in 1987.