Libyco-Punic Mausoleum

The Libyco-Punic Mausoleum sits at the lower end of the Dougga site, set slightly apart from the Roman city above. It is a three-tiered funerary tower about 21 metres high, with engaged Ionic columns, a pyramidal roof, and a sculpted lion on one corner. The form is Hellenistic but the detailing is Numidian, and the building predates the Roman conquest by about a century.

It was probably built for Ateban, a Numidian prince or notable; the bilingual Libyco-Punic inscription that named him was removed by a British consul in 1842 (it still sits in the British Museum). Most of what stands today is reconstruction, but the lower courses and overall proportions are original, and the monument remains the single most important piece of Numidian funerary architecture to survive.

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In 1842 the British consul in Tunis, Thomas Reade, had the mausoleum partly dismantled in order to remove its bilingual inscription — written in Punic and Libyan — and ship it to the British Museum, where it remains. The act effectively destroyed the upper structure, which had to be reconstructed by French archaeologists in the 1910s. The inscription proved to be the key to deciphering the ancient Berber Libyan script.

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