Mount Nemrut is a summit of 2,150 metres in Adıyaman province, in southeastern Türkiye, ringed by statues of gods eight metres tall whose heads now sit on the ground at their feet, on terraces built around a mound of crushed stone that covers the undiscovered tomb of a king, and it is climbed in the dark for the sunrise from the east terrace, with the crowd facing the same empty horizon in head torches. The tomb-sanctuary was raised by Antiochus I of Commagene, a small kingdom between Rome and Persia, in the first century BC, and he set himself among the gods, Zeus, Apollo, Heracles and the goddess of Commagene, in a row of seated colossi on each terrace with his own statue among them, flanked by an eagle and a lion; the heads were not simply dropped off but toppled, by earthquakes or by iconoclasts, and they sit along both terraces lifted off the bodies and staring past the visitors, Greek faces with Persian caps. Nobody outside the region knew they were there until 1881, when a German engineer surveying transport routes for the Ottoman army was told about strange figures on the mountain.
The tumulus is a cone fifty metres high of fist-sized stones piled by hand, circled on a path with the panorama of the Adıyaman mountains and the Euphrates valley below, and every attempt to tunnel into it has failed, since the loose stone collapses, so the king is still inside. Rows of carved plaques stand along the terraces, the king shaking hands with each god and a gallery of his ancestors, made to be read, and on the west terrace a carved lion wears the night sky on its body, nineteen stars across its flank, three planets above its back and a crescent at its throat, a horoscope dated to 62 BC. At sunrise the crowd crosses to the west terrace for the light on the faces, and at sunset the order reverses. Nemrut is a mountain a king built himself into, and the gods he sat with have lost their heads.