Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania

Listen first. Up here on the hilltop, the wind comes in from the Mediterranean and moves through the pines and dry grass. Underfoot, the ground is pale and stony. And in front of you rises a great rounded mass of cut stone, grey and gold in the sunlight, shaped like a giant beehive. It does not look like a building you can walk into. It looks like something that grew out of the hill. This is the Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania, and it has watched over this coastline for roughly two thousand years.

First, some bearings. You are standing on a ridge between the town of Tipaza and the city of Algiers. On one side, the land drops toward the sea. On the other, the wide, flat Mitidja plain spreads inland toward the mountains. A ruler who wanted to be remembered could hardly choose a better place. Sailors passing along the coast could see this tomb from far out at sea. Farmers working the plain could see it too. In this way, the monument acted as a landmark as well as a grave.

Now, the shape. The tomb sits on a square platform. Above that rises a round drum of stone, about sixty metres across. Around the drum, sixty engaged Ionic columns stand half-sunk into the wall. Ionic is the Greek style with the curled, scroll-like tops, a little like the ends of a rolled parchment. Above the columns, the stone climbs in a series of steps toward a flattened summit. Today the monument stands around thirty metres high. It was taller once, before centuries of weather and stone robbers took their share.

So who was buried here? The traditional answer points to Juba the Second, king of Mauretania, and his wife, Cleopatra Selene. Their story is remarkable. Juba was the son of a North African king who lost his throne to Julius Caesar. He grew up in Rome as a royal hostage and became a scholar who wrote books in Greek. Rome later placed him on the throne of Mauretania, a kingdom across much of what is now Algeria and Morocco. He ruled from around the end of the first century before Christ into the early first century.

His queen had an even more famous family. Cleopatra Selene was the daughter of Cleopatra the Seventh of Egypt and the Roman general Mark Antony. After her parents died, she too was raised in Rome. Then she came here, to this African coast, as a queen. Here is the first surprise for many visitors. The bloodline of the last pharaoh of Egypt may end in a stone tomb on an Algerian hill, far from the Nile. But keep one caution in mind. Scholars still debate the attribution, and no inscription has confirmed it.

Now look at the architecture again with that story in mind. The round tomb follows an old North African tradition. Numidian kings, the earlier rulers of this region, built similar circular tombs. One of the best known is the Medracen, further east in Algeria. At the same time, the Greek columns and the careful masonry point toward the Mediterranean world of Rome and Alexandria. In a sense, the building carries the two halves of Juba's own life. It is African in shape and Greek and Roman in its details.

Walk slowly around the base and you will meet the strangest feature. At the four points of the compass, the wall holds four tall doors. They look grand. They are fake. None of them opens. Each one is carved into the solid stone. The frames divide the panels in a pattern that, to later eyes, looked like a Christian cross. That pattern gave the monument its popular name. In French it became the Tomb of the Christian Woman. In Arabic, people have long called it Kbour er-Roumia, with a similar meaning.

Here is the second surprise. The name is almost certainly wrong. The tomb was built before Christianity reached this part of Africa. The cross shapes are simply the way the door panels were arranged. Still, the name stuck for centuries. It is a good reminder that monuments collect stories over time. People who no longer knew who built a place gave it a meaning that made sense to them.

The real entrance was hidden. It lies low on the eastern side, beneath one of the false doors. Inside, a narrow passage runs in a long spiral through the heart of the stone. It circles inward, step by step, toward a central burial chamber. Explorers working in the 1860s, under orders from the French emperor Napoleon the Third, cleared this passage. When they reached the centre, they found the chamber empty. Robbers had arrived many centuries earlier. The king and queen, if they rested here, left almost nothing behind.

An empty tomb on a lonely hill attracts legends, and this one has many. Locals tell stories of buried gold and of treasure hunters who never found it. According to one popular tale, an Ottoman-era ruler of Algiers ordered cannons fired at the monument to break it open. Legend has it that clouds of wasps or hornets poured out of the stone and drove the attackers away. Nobody can prove this. But if you look closely at the walls, you can see places where the masonry is broken and gaps run deep.

Today the mausoleum belongs to the Tipasa World Heritage site, listed by UNESCO alongside the Phoenician, Roman and early Christian ruins of the town below. Those ruins sit right on the shore. They include a theatre, temples, villas and basilicas among the rocks and the sea spray. Together, the two places tell a long story. Traders, kings, Roman citizens and Christian communities all passed through this coast, and each left something in stone.

Before you leave, take a few minutes simply to stand still. Notice how the light changes the colour of the blocks. In the early morning they look cool and grey. In the late afternoon they turn honey and amber. Notice the lizards on the warm stone and the lichen in the joints between the blocks. Notice how quiet it is. Even on busy days, the size of the place seems to swallow conversation.

As you walk away, turn back once more. Look at the stepped dome against the sky and the sea beyond it. A scholar-king raised in Rome may lie here with the daughter of Egypt's last queen, or perhaps not. Either way, someone wanted to be remembered at the edge of this plain, in sight of the water. Two thousand years later, you came up the hill to see it. In a quiet way, the plan worked.