The Libyco-Punic Mausoleum of Dougga (Mausoleum of Atban) is an ancient mausoleum located in Dougga, Tunisia. It is one of three examples of the royal architecture of Numidia, which is in a good state of preservation and dates to the second century BC. It was restored by the government of French Tunisia between 1908 and 1910.
As part of the site of Dougga, the mausoleum is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. On 17 January 2012, the Tunisian government proposed it be included in a future classification of the royal mausoleums of Numidia and Mauretania and other pre-Islamic funerary monuments.
The first Westerners to visit the site of Dougga arrived in the seventeenth century, becoming more frequent throughout the nineteenth century.[1] The mausoleum was described by several of these tourists and was the object of early architectural studies at the end of the period.
In 1842, Thomas Reade, the British consul in Tunis, seriously damaged the monument in the process of removing the royal inscription which decorated it. The current state of monument is the result of a reconstruction of the pieces strewn through the surrounding area, carried out with Tunisian support by the French archaeologist Louis Poinssot
between 1908 and 1910.[1][2]
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