Mount Nemrut is a 2,150-metre summit in southeastern Türkiye with a row of eight-metre gods sitting on it and their heads on the ground at their feet. A king put them there and put himself in the row. Antiochus I ruled Commagene, a small kingdom caught between Rome and Persia in the first century BC, and the terraces are his argument about it. The plaques you walk past show him shaking hands with each god in turn, as an equal, and a gallery of ancestors traces his descent from Persian kings on one side and Macedonian Greeks on the other. The claim is that Commagene belonged to both worlds at once.
You climb it in the dark. On the east terrace everyone stands with torches off facing an empty horizon, and when the sun clears the Anti-Taurus it reaches the seated bodies first and the fallen heads last. Afterwards you cross to the west terrace, where the heads are better preserved. A carved lion there wears the night sky on its body: nineteen stars along the flank, three larger ones over its back, a crescent at the throat. It is read as one of the oldest horoscopes known, dated by one astronomer to a day in July, 62 BC. At eye level with you the faces show their damage, and the noses have gone in a way that looks like hands rather than weather. Not all of it is a mystery: the goddess Commagene still had her head in the 1960s, when lightning took it off. Nobody outside the region knew any of this was up here until 1881, when a German engineer surveying routes for the Ottoman army was told there were strange figures on the mountain. Behind the terraces stands a cone of crushed stone fifty metres high, millions of fist-sized pieces piled by hand over the king's tomb. The chamber has never been found; anything driven into loose stone like that fills in behind.