The Tomb of Absalom (), also called Absalom's Pillar, is an ancient monumental rock-cut tomb with a conical roof located in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem, a few metres from the Tomb of Zechariah and the Tomb of Benei Hezir. Although traditionally ascribed to Absalom, the rebellious son of King David of Israel (circa 1000 BC), recent scholarship has dated it to the 1st century AD. The tomb is not only a burial structure in its own right, with its upper part serving as a nefesh (funeral monument) for the tomb in its lower part, but it was probably also meant as a nefesh for the adjacent burial cave system known as the Cave or Tomb of Jehoshaphat, with which it forms one entity, built at the same time and following a single plan. The freestanding monument contains a burial chamber with three burial sites. The chamber is carved out of the solid lower section of the monument, but can only be accessed from the upper section via a built entrance and a staircase. It has been compared to Petra, given the rock-cut nature of the bottom segment and the style of the finial. Description Absalom's Pillar is approximately in height. The monument proper stands on a square base and consists of two distinct parts. 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. The lower half is thus a solid, almost perfectly cubical monolithic block, about square by high, surrounded on three sides by passageways which separate it from the vertically cut rock of the Mount of Olives. 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 four square facades are crowned by a Doric frieze of triglyphs and metopes and an Egyptian cornice. 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. The upper part of the monument corresponds to the outline of a classical tholos and is not