'Mausoleum of Queen Tinhanan') is a monumental tomb located at Abalessa in the Sahara, in the Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria.
Tin Hinan is the name given by the Tuareg to a 3rd- or 4th-century woman of prestige whose skeleton was found in a pre-Islamic tomb in the Ahaggar Mountains.
[8] The French explorer Henri Lhote argued that the Tin Hinan sepulcher is different from the surrounding tombs in southern Algeria, and is more typical of the architecture used by the Roman legionaries to create their fortifications in desert areas.
He believed that the tomb was therefore likely built on top of an earlier Roman castrum, which was originally erected around 19 BC, when consul Lucius Cornelius Balbus conquered the Garamantian territories and sent a small expeditionary force to reach the Niger river.
[10][11][12] The tomb was opened by Byron Khun de Prorok with support from the French army in 1925, and other archaeologists made a more thorough investigation in 1933.