Female Head, Mausoleum of Halikarnassos 350 BCE

This colossal marble female head is only 48 cm (18.9 in) high, yet it once belonged to a statue that stood on one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The head turns slightly to the left. Across the forehead run three formal rows of spiral curls. The rest of the hair is hidden under a tight “sakkos”, a close-fitting cap that gives the face a old-fashioned, almost Archaic look. The eyes are large and deeply set; the lips are slightly parted. Even in its damaged state, the scale is unmistakable. This was not a private portrait. It was a face meant to be read from below, between the columns of a monument designed to outshine everything that had come before it.

A Royal Tomb in the Capital of Caria

The head was carved around 350 BC in Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum on the Turkish Aegean coast. There the satrap Mausolus and his sister-wife Artemisia II commissioned a tomb so ambitious that it later gave its name to every “mausoleum.” Mausolus died in 353 BC; Artemisia continued the project. The architects were Satyros and Pytheos. Ancient writers name Scopas, Bryaxis, Timotheus and Leochares as the sculptors of the four sides, and Pytheos as the maker of the four-horse chariot that crowned the stepped pyramid.

The building rose from a high podium, was surrounded by 36 Ionic columns, and reached, according to Pliny, about 140 feet in height. Between those columns there probably stood a series of colossal dynastic portraits. This head belongs to that series. It is on the same scale as the large female statue often called “Artemisia.” It most likely represents a woman of the Hecatomnid family, the Carian dynasty that ruled as Persian satraps but chose to be portrayed in Greek sculptural language. A close parallel is a similar head from the Temple of Athena at Priene, sometimes identified as Ada, Mausolus’s sister. A secure personal name for this particular head cannot be given.

The Day Newton Was “in Raptures”

Charles Thomas Newton excavated the site for the British Museum in 1856–1858. Houses and gardens covered the ruins. The head was found in 1857 in “Mahomet’s” or “Mehemet’s field,” just north of the north peribolus wall, near the northwest corner of the Mausoleum, only about two feet from the wall. Newton wrote that he was following a marble wall west of the Imam’s house when he came upon the head lying in the earth. An engineer on the ship packing the finds noted the same day that they had discovered “the colossal female head of a statue” and that “Newton [was] in raptures.” Newton compared it with the Venus of Arles and called it one of the most beautiful heads he had ever seen. The photographer B. L. Spackman recorded it in 1857. Two years later it appeared as Plate 2 in Newton’s A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus.

A Dynastic Face between Greek and Carian

The head shows how the Hecatomnids staged power. Greek sculptors worked in a high Classical style, but the women’s hairstyle is Archaizing: the formal snail-shell curls and the “sakkos” belong to an eastern, Carian court language. That choice was probably deliberate. An older Greek look could suggest deep ancestry and legitimacy.

The statue was public and monumental. It most likely stood in an intercolumniation of the “pteron”, visible to anyone approaching the tomb. It is neither a private memorial nor a conventional goddess, but one face in a line of ancestors and family members. The same curls and cap appear on other female heads from the Mausoleum and on the Priene head, pointing to a shared workshop circle around Pytheos and the Hecatomnid court.

Marble, Scale and Carving

The head is carved in marble, described in several sources as Parian. The British Museum gives these dimensions:

– height: 0.48 m (48 cm / 18.9 in)

– diameter: 0.43 m (43 cm / 16.9 in)

– width: 0.31 m (31 cm / 12.2 in)

The head is turned and inclined toward the left shoulder. The neck is broken; it was once set into a draped body. The curls are strictly symmetrical and end in conventional spirals. Behind them the hair is gathered under the hat. The modelling is large and simple, with few small details — a conscious choice for a figure meant to be seen from a distance. Smith compared that breadth of treatment with the manner of Scopas.

From a Garden in Bodrum to Room 21

After the Mausoleum collapsed — through an earthquake and later through the Knights of St John stripping it for Bodrum Castle — sculptures lay in the soil or were built into houses. Newton bought plots, dug under and around the buildings, and shipped the finds to England in 1857. It remains in the British Museum and is displayed in Room 21, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus gallery, with the so-called Mausolus and Artemisia statues, fragments of the chariot group, lions and slabs of the Amazon frieze.