Commagenean archaeology and the quest for the burial place of Antiochos I. Was Nemrut Daği a cenotaph?

Abstract

From Karl Sester’s discovery of the monument of Nemrut Dağı at the end of the nineteenth century onwards, many scholars working on the mountain and its hierothesion have looked for the burial place of king Antiochos I, who ruled Commagene from around 70 BCE until his death in 36 BCE (Fig. 1).1 So far, however, the quest to locate the tomb has been in vain and speculations about its whereabouts on the site and its characteristics have proliferated as a result. In this essay we will first provide a brief overview of the most important hypotheses to date, concluding that no communis opinio on the matter has arisen whatsoever. Nor, for that matter, has the burial place of Antiochos I been found or located with certainty. For that reason, we will, secondly, provide a different hypothesis that, we feel, is overlooked and should be made part of the discussion: the possibility that the body of Antiochos I was not buried at Nemrut Dağı at all. This essay will not conclude that such indeed is the case but rather argue that the idea that Nemrut Dağı was a cenotaph – a word that literally means ʽempty tomb’ in ancient Greek and that is used to indicate a monument, generally in the form of a vacant sepulcher, which is erected to honor a dead person whose remains are elsewhere – should be considered a serious hypothesis. Lastly, we will argue that the quest for the burial place of Antiochos I, central to the work of many of Nemrut Dağı’s explorers in the twentieth and twenty-first century, is, in fact, of relatively minor and subordinate meaning for Commagenean archaeology at large. It should therefore not (be allowed to) play a central role in future research: the (archaeological) investigation of Commagene has other priorities. Through his work in Doliche, the honorand of this volume, Professor Engelbert Winter, has, as one of the towering figures in Commagenean archaeology from the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century, already set the example, also in this respect.