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Persepolis - Unfinished tomb
Unless otherwise indicated, pictures on this page © Marco Prins and Jona Lendering. Photos can be downloaded and used for non-commercial purposes, but you have to acknowledge Livius.
The Unfinished tomb at Persepolis. An old photo of the "Unfinished tomb" at Persepolis. The relief was meant to be identical to all other Achaemenid royal tombs (like those at Naqš-i Rustam and the Tomb of Artaxerxes II and the Tomb of Artaxerxes III in Persepolis), but was never completed. Here you can see it from outer space.
(Chicago Oriental Institute,
©!!!)
When we visited the site (in 2005), we found it in scaffolds, as if people had decided to finally finish the tomb. This enabled us to make a close-up of the relief of the king.

It is not known who was meant to be buried here, although it is of course tempting to think of Artaxerxes IV Arses (338-336) or Darius III Codomannus (336-330).

One may fantasize that the monument remained incomplete because Alexander the Great's invasion of Iran made it impossible to complete the finish the job. However, the tomb is much lower than the other two funeral monuments in Persepolis, and the rock has strange layers that appear to be difficult to work upon. It is more likely that the tomb was left unfinished because the rock was not suited.
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