Tomb of Absalom

Tomb of Absalom (Hebrew: יד אבשלום‎‎, Transl. Yad Avshalom; literally Absalom's Shrine), also called Absalom's Pillar, is an ancient monumental rock-cut tomb with a conical roof located in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem. Although traditionally ascribed to Absalom, the rebellious son of King David of Israel (circa 1000 BC), recent scholarship has attributed it to the 1st century AD.

Absalom's Pillar is approximately 20 metres (65 feet) in height. The monument proper stands on a square base and consists of two distinct parts. The lower section has been hewn out of the rocky slope of the Mount of Olives, while the upper part, rising higher than the original bedrock, is built of neatly cut ashlars.

The lower half is thus a solid, almost perfectly cubical monolithic block, about twenty feet square by twenty-one feet high, surrounded on three sides by passageways which separate it from the vertically-cut rock of the Mount of Olives. It is decorated from the outside on each side by pairs of Ionic half-columns, flanked in the corners by quarter-columns and pillars (a so-called distyle in antis arrangement). The four square facades are crowned by a Doric frieze of triglyphs and metopes and an Egyptian cornice.

The upper, ashlar-built part of the monument consists of three differently-shaped segments: a square base set on top of the Egyptian cornice of the lower part, followed by a round drum crowned by a rope-shaped decoration, which sustains a conical roof with concave sides (the easily recognisable "hat"), topped by a half-closed lotus flower. On the inside, the upper part of the monument is mostly hollow, with a small arched entrance on the south side set above the seam area (where the masonry part starts). Inside this entrance a short staircase leads down to a burial chamber carved out of the solid, lower section. The chamber is eight feet square, with arcosolium graves on two sides and a small burial niche. The tomb was found empty when first researched by archaeologists. The upper part of the monument corresponds to the outline of a classical tholos and is not unlike contemporary Nabatean structures from Petra.

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