Tomb of Cyrus the Great

The tomb of Cyrus the Great is located in Pasargadae, which was the first capital city of his Achaemenid Empire and is now an archaeological site in the Fars Province of Iran.
The mausoleum is a significant historical example of earthquake engineering as it is said to be the oldest base-isolated structure in the world, allowing it great resilience against seismic hazards. It is one of the key Iranian UNESCO World Heritage Sites, as part of the archaeological site of Pasargadae.

Identification

Prior to being identified with Cyrus the Great by the British diplomat James Justinian Morier in 1812, it was attributed to a certain "Mother of Solomon" in legendary accounts that had emerged at some point after the Muslim conquest of Iran; Morier's understanding, drawing upon the works of the German traveller Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo, was that it referred to Wallada bint al-Abbas ibn al-Jaz, who was the mother of Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik of the Umayyad Caliphate. Similar beliefs suggested to the Venetian explorer Giosafat Barbaro in the 15th century asserted that it was the resting place of Bathsheba, who was the mother of Solomon of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah. It was also later identified by Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo.
It was first identified as the Tomb of Cyrus in the early nineteenth century, first in 1812 by James Justinian Morier and then in 1821 by Robert Ker Porter.
Morier described the tomb as follows:

is a building of a form so extraordinary that the people of the country often call it the court of the deevis or devil. It rests upon a square base of large blocks of marble, which rise in seven layers pyramidically... On every part of the monument itself are carved inscriptions, which attest the reverence of its visitors; but there is no vestige of any of the characters of ancient Persia or even of the older Arabic. The key is kept by women, and none but females are permitted to enter. The people generally regard it as the monument of the mother of Solomon, and still connect some efficacy with the name; for they point out near the spot a certain water to which those who may have received the bite of a mad dog resort, and by which, if drank within thirty days, the evil effects of the wound are obviated. In eastern story almost every thing wonderful is attached to the Solomon of Scripture: the King however, to whose mother this tomb is said to be raised, is less incredibly,, Shah Soleiman, the fourteenth Caliph of the race of Ali. But though this supposition is more probable than that it is the monument of Bathsheba, it is not to my mind satisfactory, as it differs totally from all the tombs of Mahomedan saints which I have ever seen in Persia, Asia Minor, or Turkey.

Morier ultimately dismissed the tomb's contemporary associations as fallacious, noting that its architecture and atmosphere differed from the Muslim tombs throughout Iran and aligned instead with the descriptions found in the writings of the Greek historian Arrian. He noted the similarities as well as the differences, including the lack of the inscription noted by Arrian, the lack of a grove of trees, and the triangular roof against Arrian's "arched" description:

If the position of the place had corresponded with the site of Passagardae as well as the form of this structure accords with the description of the tomb of Cyrus near that city, I should have been tempted to assign to the present building so illustrious an origin. That tomb was raised in a grove; it was a small edifice covered with an arched roof of stone, and its entrance was so narrow that the slenderest man could scarcely pass through: it rested on a quadrangular base of a single stone, and contained the celebrated inscription, "mortals, I am Cyrus, son of Cambyses, founder of the Persian monarchy, and Sovereign of Asia, grudge me not therefore this monument". That the plain around Mesjed Madre Suleiman was the site of a great city, is proved by the ruins with which it is strewed; and that this city was of the same general antiquity as Persepolis may be inferred from the existence of a similar character in the inscriptions on the remains of both, though this particular edifice does not happen to display that internal evidence of a contemporaneous date. A grove would naturally have disappeared in modern Persia; the structures correspond in size; the triangular roof of that which I visited might be called arched in an age when the true semi-circular arch was probably unknown; the door was so narrow, that, if I had been allowed to make the attempt, I could scarcely have forced myself through it; and those who kept the key affirmed that the only object within was an immense stone, which might be "the base of a single piece" described by Arrian; but as he was repeating the account of another, the difference is of little consequence, if it exists. I suspect however, as many of the buildings at Persepolis are so put together that they might once have seemed one vast block, that the present structure might also at one time have possessed a similar appearance. The eternity of his monument indeed, which Cyrus contemplated by fixing it on one enormous stone, would be equally attained by the construction of this fabric, which seems destined to survive the revolutions of ages. And in the lapse of two thousand four hundred years, the absence of an inscription on Mesjed Madre Suleiman would not be a decisive evidence against its identity with the tomb of Cyrus.

The Scottish traveller Robert Ker Porter later came to the same conclusion in 1821.

Building specifications

The tomb of Cyrus is located in the southern corner of the site, which was once the royal park of Pasargadae and is built of yellowish-white limestone, probably from the Sivand mine. The tomb building has been resistant to natural and unnatural factors for 2,500 years and is still standing in Pasargad plain. Its main base or foundation is a stone platform whose design forms a rectangular square with a length of and a width of. This building consists of two completely separate parts: a six-step stone platform, and a room with a gabled roof over the sixth step.
The total height of the building is a little over. The first platform, which forms the first step, is high, but about of it was originally uncut and hidden; This means that like the second and third steps, it was exactly high. The fourth, fifth and sixth steps are high each. The width of the platforms is half a meter and the level of the sixth platform, which forms the base of the tomb room, is about by.
The tomb room is long, wide, and high. Its wall is up to thick and is made of four rows of well-cut stone. The first and second rows are taller than the third and fourth rows, and on the northwest side there was apparently a double door that opened slidingly, which is now gone. The current entrance is wide and high, and its threshold is deep. In each of the two corners of the small threshold, a recess is made for the heel of the door and horizontal grooves deep on one side and deep on the other side, so that the two lintels can be found and placed in them when opened.
At the front of the tomb room, in the upper triangle of the gate, there was a very ornate flower, of which only half, which is very weak, remains today. A European traveler named Johann Albrecht von Mandelslow saw the flower in 1638 and depicted it in a painting of the tomb of Cyrus, but it was long forgotten or otherwise interpreted, until David Stronach recovered, described, and interpreted it in 1964.
The roof of the tomb is smooth and simple on the inside, but on the outside it is gabled and its two-sided slope is in the shape of the number eight. The roof is made of two precious stones, on which is a pyramid stone with a base of meters by and a thickness of, and on it, there was a stone above the roof, which is not available now. It is believed that according to the Achaemenid tradition, in order to lighten and better move the precious stones, they dug inside the roof. Forsat al-Dawla Shirazi had noticed the empty space between the inner roof and the sloping roof outside and considered it a burial place for the dead:

Its roof is sloping on the outside but flat on the inside; Therefore, from the back of this flat roof inside to below the concave roof, it is hollow in the shape of a triangle, and there was a burial place of the dead, and in the past the roof was pierced and its stones were broken. Some of the people who went up from there saw the crypt, where it was mentioned that a coffin was made of stone and the dead man was in it. The corpse is now like scattered dust.

This middle part, mentioned by Shirazi, is a hollow long, which is about wide and deep. In order not to shake the endurance of this pit, the roof was made in two pieces. However, the idea that the empty space was the location of the coffin or even two coffins has been popular in the past.
The floor of the tomb room is made of two large stone slabs. According to George Curzon, the slate was larger than the large holes in which it was dug. Probably to find out what is under it.
The mausoleum was built without mortar, but the metal bundles of the mounds connected the stones, almost all of which had been dug up and removed, leaving unpleasant dimples that damaged the building's strength. A team led by Alireza Shapour Shahbazi repaired these ditches as much as possible with the pieces they had brought from the Sivand mine.
Those who visited the tomb in the nineteenth century and recorded their observations spoke of the distant pillars of the tomb of Cyrus. There is currently no trace of these columns and other structures around the tomb. For example, Franz Heinrich Weisbach, a German scholar and orientalist who visited Pasargadae in the late nineteenth century and wrote a description of the buildings in Pasargadae, describes the pillars around the tomb of Cyrus as follows:

The three sides of the tomb are surrounded by 22 columns. Traces can be seen from the double-walled wall that surrounds the columns. The length of each row of columns facing each other is and the length of the row of columns perpendicular to these two rows is. The length of the two opposite rows from the inner wall is and the length of the other part from the inner wall is. There is doubt that the outer wall existed from the beginning. The outer wall is a huge wall on which the remains of a gate rest.

Decades before Weisbach, Kerr Porter, who visited the tomb in 1818, expressed his views on the condition of the columns:

A large area, defined by a base of 24 round pillars, encloses the building like a square. The diameter of each column is. Each side of the square is completed by 6 columns, each of which is from the side column. The 17 pillars are still standing, but they are surrounded by rubbish, and are deliberately connected by a mud wall.

Different opinions have been expressed about the origin of the architectural style of the building. The range of these views is wide and includes the Greek origin of Asia Minor, the Mediterranean, the Egyptians, the Elamites, and the original Iranians. B. Faravash coverage Khrpshthay the tomb of Cyrus wrote that the graves Ryayyany the first silk are likewise covered, and this leads still the first king of the Achaemenid tombs along, according to tradition and so in areas Barankhyz north of Iran usual, made.