The first known Persian Jewish writer to connect Esther and Mordechai to Hamadan was Shahin Shirazi, who wrote in his 14th-century Ardashir-namah of dreams the two had and a journey they made to the city. Shirazi claimed they died in the synagogue within an hour of each other. His narrative may draw on older Judaeo-Persian sources that have since vanished. The archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld offered a different reading: the cenotaphs belonged not to Esther but to Shushandukht, daughter of the late antique Exilarch Huna bar Nathan, wife of the Sasanian king Yazdegerd I, and mother of Bahram V. Scholar Stuart C. Brown agreed, dating the tomb's likely occupant to the reign of Yazdegerd, between 399 and 420 CE. The identity question has never been fully resolved. For believers, it does not need to be.

The tomb has accumulated centuries of layered history. According to the National Library of Israel, a French explorer at the start of the 20th century found jewels hidden in a niche in the mausoleum's ceiling and deposited them in the Louvre. Among the cache was a crown that Hamadan's Jewish community believed had belonged to Esther herself. Jakob Eduard Polak, visiting in the mid-19th century, described the shrine as the only pilgrimage site for Persian Jews and their sole national holy place in the country. He documented inscriptions on the oaken coffins: the final passages of the Book of Esther, the names of three donors who had funded restoration, and a date of 1309 or 1310 CE. In a separate room, the date 1140 CE was inscribed. The Iranian government dates the current structure to the Ilkhanate period.

In 1891, the British traveler Isabella Bird described the tomb as two chambers beneath a dome roughly 50 feet high, once covered in blue tiles, most of which had fallen away. Rabbi Menahem ha-Levi of Hamadan wrote in 1932 that the building stood 20 meters tall and bore an inscription from Isaiah 26 on its doorway. He described an opening between the two main coffins leading to a cave below, accessible for maintenance. Local legend holds that this pit opens into a passage running all the way to Jerusalem. The building has been patched and repaired by generations of the faithful, each layer of restoration adding its own inscriptions and dates to the record.

The tomb's significance has made it a target in times of political tension. In October 2023, the site was desecrated in the aftermath of the Gaza war. On April 3, 2024, following the Israeli bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, attackers struck the shrine with Molotov cocktails. The governor of Hamadan reported minor damage; video surveillance captured the perpetrators. A Star of David in the entryway's transom had been partially destroyed, though that damage dated to 2017. Graffiti appeared on either side of the doorpost. Yet the shrine persists. On March 14, 2025, the Iranian Chief Rabbi read the Book of Esther at the tomb, continuing a tradition that has survived every disruption.

An alternative tradition, first recorded during the Middle Ages, places the graves of Esther and Mordechai at the archaeological site of Kfar Bar'am in the Galilee, near Israel's northern border with Lebanon. The competing claims have never been reconciled. In Hamadan, the question matters less than the continuity. Iranian Jews, Iranian Christians, and visitors from around the world still come to the old Jewish quarter, pass through the doorway with its inscription from Isaiah, and stand before the oaken coffins in their darkened chamber. Whether the bones below belong to a biblical queen or a Sasanian princess, the devotion layered over them across a millennium is genuine. The pit between the tombs may not lead to Jerusalem. But the prayers offered above it have always faced in that direction.