Tomb of Absalom

Although traditionally ascribed to Absalom, the rebellious son of King David of Israel (c. 1000 BC), recent scholarship has dated it to the 1st century AD.

The lower section is a monolith, hewn out of the rocky slope of the Mount of Olives, while the upper part, rising higher than the original bedrock, is built of neatly cut ashlars.

It is decorated from the outside on each side by pairs of Ionic half-columns, flanked in the corners by quarter-columns and pillars (a so-called distyle in antis arrangement).

The upper, ashlar-built part of the monument consists of three differently-shaped segments: a square base set on top of the Egyptian cornice of the lower part, followed by a round drum crowned by a rope-shaped decoration, which sustains a conical roof with concave sides (the easily recognisable "hat"), topped by a half-closed lotus flower.

[3] Italian architect and engineer, Ermete Pierotti (19th-century), rendered a superb description of the site in his seminal work, Jerusalem Explored.

[6] The tomb's exterior design features a Doric frieze and Ionic columns, both being styles originating in ancient Greece and introduced into Judah during the Seleucid Empire, centuries after the death of Absalom.

This suggests that at the time, the monuments was considered to be the burial place of the Temple priest Zechariah, father of John the Baptist,[12][10] who lived 400 or so years earlier than the inscription date.

A second inscription of the same age discovered in 2003 says the monument is "the tomb of Simeon who was a very just man and a very devoted el(der) and (who was) waiting for the consolation of the people".

[13][14] The two inscriptions, discovered and deciphered by Joe Zias and Émile Puech, support the concept known from Byzantine period sources such as Theodosius (c. 530) that a tradition existed at the time, wrongly identifying the 1st-century monument as the tomb of James, the brother of Jesus; Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist; and Simeon, the old priest from the Gospel of Luke.

[citation needed] According to a local legend, Napoleon fired a mortar at the tomb, and removed the shape of a hand that topped the conical roof.