The History of the Mausoleum at Halakarnassas

Mausoleum at Halakarnassas was, you might say, the first mausoleum ever built because it coined the term in the first place. A series of earthquakes damaged and then finally destroyed the building by the end of the 15th century. The Knights of St. John of Rhodes used its ruined masonry to fortify one of their castles. In the 19th century, an archaeologist named Charles Thomas Newton tried to recover what remained of the mausoleums. He dug a series of secret tunnels out underneath the surrounding plots before he came across some buried ruins there.