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Ελληνικά02 · Pasargada · founder's memory
The stone house of Cyrus
Cyrus's mausoleum on the plain
A compact chamber on six steps survived when entire palaces became foundations.
Museum documentation · free public access, no account required.
Reconstruction · Declared visual hypothesis
AI-recreated portrait of Cyrus II. The clothing is based on the historical context of the entry; the face, the age represented, the colouring and the details not preserved are interpretive. It is not an authentic photograph nor a scientific facial reconstruction.
Tracekeepers
History and context
The limestone mausoleum rises on a stepped base and culminates in a chamber with a gabled roof. Its form combines monumentality and almost domestic scale, visible from afar on the Murghab plain.
Identification with Cyrus rests on ancient tradition and context, although the grave goods described by classical authors no longer exist. Its survival turned a royal tomb into a point of memory for later empires and communities.
The chamber is reached after six steps and has a door so low that it obliges the visitor to stoop before the funerary space. Its stone gabled roof turns a domestic form into a monument visible at a distance.
Authors who accompanied or narrated Alexander asserted that the tomb preserved a bed and gold objects before the looting. They are valuable testimonies for the history of reception, not an archaeological inventory still verifiable.
Evidence and interpretation
Documented fact: UNESCO includes Cyrus II's mausoleum as the central monument of Pasargada and notes that the chamber housed his sarcophagus. Interpretation and caution: details of the funeral and the looting depend on later Greek accounts and are not materially preserved. Expanded documentation: The mausoleum forms part of the Pasargadae complex and classical sources identified it as Cyrus's tomb. Expanded interpretation and caution: No remains of the sarcophagus nor grave goods have survived; the interior scene described by Greco-Roman authors must not be reproduced as certainty.
AI-recreated portrait of Cyrus II. The clothing is based on the historical context of the entry; the face, the age represented, the colouring and the details not preserved are interpretive. It is not an authentic photograph nor a scientific facial reconstruction.
Catalogue facts
- Narrative date
- Around 530 BCE
- Location
- Pasargadae, Fars, Iran
- Material
- Great limestone blocks joined without mortar
- Context
- Isolated royal mausoleum on the plain
- Curatorial reading
- The documented fact and its interpretation appear separately in the evidence block.
- Construction
- The limestone blocks were fitted without mortar and originally united with metal clamps.
- Form
- The stepped base supports a single chamber with a stone gabled roof.
- Memory
- The identification with Cyrus was maintained through ancient testimonies and historical tradition of the place.
- Documentary coverage
- 2 museum, heritage, primary corpus or research sources for this stop.
- Canonical ID
- ciro-ii
- Status on the books
- present in VOL_14_El_imperio_de_los_caminos_novela.md
A closer look
About 1 min to read · 1 section. Further reading and sources · free access. Editorial review recorded: .
The medieval period left material traces
The tomb was known as the sepulchre of the mother of Solomon and was incorporated into a mosque in the thirteenth century. A mihrab carved into the south-western wall of the chamber and an orientation mark on the plinth document this later religious use. These are not components of Cyrus’s funerary project. The building’s biography, therefore, does not consist solely of modern identification and conservation: it includes a medieval appropriation that modified its interior. Distinguishing these interventions allows recognition of several legitimate memories present in the same stone.
Reference images and provenance
No verifiable entrance photograph is preserved for this representation. You may consult its documentation, but we would not present its face as an exact reconstruction.
Additional visual documentation
A cited publication does not establish which image was used to create the character.
Location and territory
LOCATED SITE
Pasargadae · IranMarker of the capital and tomb of Cyrus.Sources and references
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