The inscription Reade removed was far more valuable than he likely understood at the time. Written in both Punic and Libyan scripts, it provided the Rosetta Stone for Numidian: scholars used the known Punic text to decipher the Libyan characters, unlocking a language that had been unreadable for centuries. The text names Atban, son of Iepmatah, son of Palu -- though recent scholarship has complicated this reading. Researchers now believe these names belong not to the tomb's occupant but to its builders: the architect and head artisans who constructed the monument. A second inscription, irreparably damaged, once enumerated the titles of whoever actually rested within. Some scholars believe the mausoleum was built by the citizens of Dougga for a Numidian prince, perhaps as a tomb or cenotaph for King Massinissa himself.

The mausoleum rises three levels above a five-step pedestal, blending North African, Greek, and Near Eastern architectural traditions. On the north face of the podium, an opening covered by a stone slab leads to the funerary chamber. The other faces are decorated with false openings flanked by Aeolic pilasters at the corners -- a style that connects this North African monument to the architectural vocabulary of the eastern Mediterranean. The second level consists of an Ionic colonnade arranged as a shrine, or naiskos. The third and most ornate level combines corner pilasters with a crowning pyramid, griffins perched at the corners, and a quadriga carved on one face. The whole composition echoes funerary monuments from Asia Minor and the great necropolises of Alexandria from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.

Western visitors had been describing the mausoleum since the 17th century, and it was the subject of architectural studies by the 19th century. James Bruce, the Scottish explorer, sketched it during his travels. Then Reade's extraction work in 1842 left the upper portions in ruins. For decades, carved stones lay where they had fallen among the scrub and olive trees. Between 1908 and 1910, French archaeologist Louis Poinssot undertook the painstaking work of reconstruction, essentially reassembling the monument from the debris field. Scholars Jan-Willem Salomoson and Claude Poinssot later refined understanding of the mausoleum using papers from the Count Borgia, an earlier visitor whose notes had gone unstudied.

As part of the Dougga site, the mausoleum is now protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2012, the Tunisian government proposed it for inclusion in a broader classification of royal mausoleums of Numidia and Mauretania alongside other pre-Islamic funerary monuments. The tower stands today much as Poinssot left it -- reconstructed but authentic in its materials, its stones carrying the same chisel marks that Numidian masons cut more than 2,200 years ago. The inscription that unlocked their written language sits in a glass case in London. The monument that held it stands open to the Tunisian sky, its pyramid summit visible from across the valley of the Oued Khalled, marking the resting place of someone whose name we may never recover.