The legendary tomb of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena

Lars Porsena was an Etruscan king known for his war against the city of Rome. He ruled over the city of Clusium. There are no established dates for his rule, but Roman sources often place the war at around 508 BC.

• Lars Porsena came into conflict with Rome after the revolution that overthrew the monarchy there in 509 BC, resulting in the exile of the semi-legendary last king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus.
• The deposed monarch, whose family was of Etruscan origin, tried and failed to retake the throne a number of times before appealing to Porsena for assistance, since at that time Clusium was said to be a very powerful Etruscan city.
• Lars Porsena

The tomb of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena is a legendary ancient building in what is now central Italy. Allegedly built around 500 BCE at Clusium (modern Chiusi, and was described as follows by the Roman writer Marcus Varro (116–27 BCE):

• Porsena was buried below the city of Clusium in the place where he had built a square monument of dressed stones.
• Each side was three hundred feet in length and fifty in height, and beneath the base there was an inextricable labyrinth, into which, if any-body entered without a clue of thread, he could never discover his way out.
• Above this square building there stand five pyramids, one at each corner and one in the centre, seventy-five feet [c. 22 meters] broad at the base and one hundred and fifty feet [c. 44 meters] high.
• These pyramids so taper in shape that upon the top of all of them together there is supported a brazen globe, and upon that again a petasus from which bells are suspended by chains.
• These make a tinkling sound when blown about by the wind, as was done in bygone times at Dodona.
• Upon this globe there are four more pyramids, each a hundred feet [c. 30 meters] in height, and above them is a platform on which are five more pyramids.

This structure, standing some 200 meters high, was supposedly destroyed along with Clusium itself in 89 BCE by the Roman general Cornelius Sulla.

• No trace of it has ever been found, and historians have generally regarded Varro’s account as a gross exaggeration at best, and downright fabrication at worst.
• In the 18th century Angelo Cortenovis proposed that the tomb of Lars Porsena was a machine for conducting lightning.
• Tomb of Lars Porsena

Intrigued by subterranean labyrinths, Jean-Jacques Lequeu here envisaged the legendary tomb of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena said to have been built around 500 BCE in Chiusi, Italy. Erected above an inescapable labyrinth, the massive structure boasted tiers of pyramids surmounted by a globe and adorned with bells that sounded in the wind. The scale of the monument is evident from the miniscule figures beneath the trees. At upper left is a rendering of a Roman coin struck in Spain; Lequeu interpreted its design as the mythical labyrinth of the Cretan king Minos. At right, Lequeu provided a compendium of ancient labyrinths based on descriptions from Herodotus and Pliny as well as contemporary travel literature.

• Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826)
• Etruscan Labyrinth, 1792
• Source

The tomb of Etruscan king Lars Porsena does not exist, though imaginations of it do. That is to say, the final resting place of Pars Porsena is not known; though many have written about what it looked like, or might have looked like. to say that they have done this without a shred of evidence is an understatement.

• 1646 attempt by George Badger

KD: Figured it was a cool no longer existing structure to share. Its depictions suggest that "the tomb" might have been loaded with tech.

• Why would some Angelo Cortenovis propose that the tomb of Lars Porsena was a machine for conducting lightning?​