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Tomb of Esther and Mordechai
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Tomb of Esther and Mordechai
Type	Mausoleum
Location	Hamadan, Iran

The Tomb of Esther and Mordechai (Template:Lang-fa, Template:Lang-he-n) is located in Hamadan, Iran. Believed to house the remains of the biblical Queen Esther and her cousin Mordechai, it is the most important pilgrimage site for Jews in the country.

History

The tomb of Esther and Mordechai at Hamadan is first attested in the 11th century. Benjamin of Tudela visited the city, in which he reckoned there were 50,000 Jewish inhabitants, and described the tomb as in front of the synagogue. Shahin Shirazi, in his 14th century Ardashirnama, was the first known Persian Jew to give an account of the dreams of Esther and Mordechai and their journey to Hamadan, where they died in the synagogue and within an hour of each other. The narrative of Shirazi may derive from earlier Judaeo-Persian sources, now vanished.

In 1850 J. J. Benjamin visited the place, writing that some 500 Jewish families lived there, with three synagogues. The tombs he described as situated in a magnificent building just inside the city walls, which the local Jews visited monthly, and where on Purim the Book of Esther was read and the tombs were stuck with the faithful's palms. Ten years later, Yehiel Fischel Castelman also praised the tombs' magnificence, quoting the locals' tradition that it was built by one Cyrus, Esther's son; a date was inscribed on the dome, but he was unable to read it. Jakob Eduard Polak, in the same decade, described the shrine as the only place to which Persian Jews made pilgrimages and wrote of it as the centre of the Jewish quarter and their sole national holy place in Persia. He recorded inscriptions on the oaken coffins inside: the final sections of the Book of Esther, together with names of three donors who had contributed to refurbishment, and a date of 1309/10 CE. In a separate room, the date 1140 CE was inscribed. The current structure is thought to date to the Ilkhanate, however an inscription curiously dating the construction of the structure to 1857 was recorded by a traveler in 1910.

In 1891, the tomb was described as consisting of an outer and inner chamber surmounted by a dome about 50 feet (15 m) high. The dome had been covered with blue tiles, but most of them had fallen away. A few tombs of worthy Jewish individuals were located within the outer chamber. Menahem ha-Levi, a rabbi of Hamadan, wrote in 1932 that the building was 20 m high, that there was an inscription of Isaiah 26 on the doorway, that the first room had been built two centuries previous above the graves of a physician and a messenger from Hebron, and that a 19th century Hamadan chief rabbi was buried in the centre of the room. Between the main tombs he described an opening into a cave beneath, which could be accessed for maintenance. The archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld rejected the notion of Esther and Mordechai's burials there instead of at Susa, and argued instead it was the tomb of Shushandukht, daughter of the late antique Exilarch Huna bar Nathan, wife of Yazdegerd I, and mother of Bahram V. According to Stuart C. Brown, the site is indeed more probably the sepulchre of Shushandukht, Jewish consort of the Sasanian king Yazdegerd (AD 399–420).

However, the city of Hamadan in which the shrine is located, is the ancient Hagmatana/Ecbatana, the capital of the Median Empire which also served as one of the three, simultaneous capitals of the succeeding Achaemenid Empire. This is the dynasty to which the Bible assigns the story of Esther and Mordechai, the event that serves as the basis of the Jewish feast of Purim today.

The tomb was the target of an arson attack in mid-May 2020. Destruction was minimal and limited to smoke damage, the blaze itself reportedly resulted in no significant injury to the structure. Multiple Jewish organizations around the world condemned the incident and demanded a swift investigation, Iran's government did not respond to the report or the calls for arrests. Investigation by Hamadanian officials confirmed minor smoke damage and announced restoration work would commence the same week, but refrained from commenting on the cause of the fire. Images of the complex's entrance revealed a Star of David located in the entryway's transom had been partially destroyed and two small graffitos on either side of the doorpost — one a picture of Qasem Soleimani captioned "hard revenge" and the other a picture of Hassan Nasrallah captioned "the promise, fulfilled" — although the damage to the Star of David dated to 2017.

Alternative location

Another tradition first recorded during the Middle Ages places the graves of Esther and Mordechai in the Galilean archaeological site of Kfar Bar'am, close to the kibbutz of the same name, Bar'am, along Israel's northern border with Lebanon.

It is, however, unlikely that a queen of the Persian Empire would have been buried in such a remote and unimportant place as a village in the Galilee instead of the summer capital of the Achaemenid Empire, namely the city of Hamadan where the current tomb is located. Artistically, the tombs of Esther and Mordechai are clearly much older than the shrine structure that dates only to the 12th-13th century. They are marked by a pair of large stones similar to the types that sealed off graves in ancient Israel and later Judea. Copious inscriptions in Hebrew identify the two tombs as those of Esther and Mordecai.

Gallery

• Eugène Flandin (1840)
• Eugène Flandin (1840)
• Interior (2008)

References

1. "Bible Gateway passage: Esther 2:7, Esther 2:15 - New King James Version". Bible Gateway. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
2. ^ Netzer, Amnon (2012) . "Esther and Mordechai". Encyclopædia Iranica. Vol. III:6 (Online ed.). New York. pp. 657–658.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
3. Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and tr. A. Asher, New York, 1840, p 57.
4. W. Bacher, “Le Livre d’Ezra de Schahin Schirazi,” Revue des études juives 55, 1908a, pp. 280-313; Idem., Zwei jüdisch-persische Dichter Schahin und Imrani, Strasbourg, 1908b.
5. Israel Joseph Benjamin II, Cinq Années de Voyage en Orient 1846-1851, Paris 1856, pp. 153-56.
6. Y. F. Castelman, Masaʿot šaliyaḥ ẓefat be-arẓot ha-mizraḥ, Jerusalem, 1942, pp. 71-72.
7. J. E. Pollak, “Die Juden in Persien und Mordechais und Esthers Grambal,” Jahrbuch für Israeliten, Wien, 1856, pp. 142-52.
8. Ephemera Collection - The National Library of Israel
9. Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan: Including a Summer in the Upper Kabun Region and a Visit to the Nestorian Rayahs, Mrs Bishop, 1891. pg. 133-134.
10. M. ha-Levi, Mordechai ve-Ester be-šušan, Jerusalem, 1932.
11. E. E. Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, London, 1935, pp. 104-7.
12. Stuart Brown (1997). "Ecbatana". In Eric M. Meyers (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. pp. 186–187.
13. Holy Jewish site of Esther and Mordechai set ablaze in Iran - reports
14. Anti-Semitism and Hatred Organized in the Islamic Republic + Photo (Persian)
15. Michael Freund, Where is the Tomb of Mordechai and Esther?
16. Home and Family: Who is Buried in Queen Esther's Tomb?, Dei'ah veDibur, February 28, 2001.

v t e Mausoleums in Iran
Mausoleum of Attar of Nishapur Avicenna Mausoleum Baba Tahir Mausoleum, Hamadan Baba Tahir Mausoleum, Khorramabad Besh Qardash Chehel Dokhtaran mausoleum Fakhrigah Grave of Pir Quzhd Gur-e-Dokhtar Imamzadeh Hamzeh, Kashmar Khaje Taj od-Din mausoleum Kharraqan towers Mausoleum of Reza Shah Mausoleum of Ruhollah Khomeini Mausoleum of Mir Bozorg Mausoleum of Shah Abbas I Mausoleum of Omar Khayyám On ibn Ali's shrine Pir Bakran mausoleum Qadamgah Hazrat Ali Shah Cheragh Sheikh Ahmad-e Jami mausoleum complex Sheikh Safi al-Din Khānegāh and Shrine Ensemble Shrine of Abu Lu'lu'a Tomb of Sheikh Yusof Sarvestani Tomb of Abu al-Hassan Kharaqani Tomb of Abu Usman Al-Maghribi Tomb of Ahmad ibn Ishaq Tomb of Ali ibn Hamzah, Shiraz Tomb of Artaxerxes I of Persia Tomb of Baba Loghman Tomb of Bibi Dokhtaran Tomb of Boghrat Tomb of Cyrus Tomb of Daniel Tomb of Darius II Tomb of Esther and Mordechai Tomb of Ferdowsi Tomb of Hadi Sabzevari Tomb of Hassan Modarres Tomb of Haydar Amuli Tomb of Heydar Yaghma Tomb of Kamal-ol-molk Tomb of Khajeh Rabie Tomb of Mir Zobeyr Tomb of Nader Shah Tomb of Pir Palandouz Tomb of Rais al-Mojahedin Tomb of Shah Firooz Tomb of Shah Qalandar Tomb of Seyed Alaeddin Husayn Tomb of Shaykh Haydar Tomb of Sheikh Shahab ol-Din Ahari Tomb of Wais Tomb of Xerxes I Tomb of Ya'qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar

34°47′53″N 48°30′46″E / 34.79809°N 48.51290°E / 34.79809; 48.51290

• Esther
• Buildings and structures in Hamadan Province
• Jewish mausoleums
• Jewish pilgrimage sites
• Jews and Judaism in Persia and Iran
• Mausoleums in Iran
• Religious buildings and structures in Iran
• Tombs of biblical people
• Women and death
• Tourist attractions in Hamadan Province
• Hamadan