Naqsh-e Rostam

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A few kilometers north of the ruins of Persepolis, a wall of grey limestone rises out of the plain. High up the face, well above the reach of any ladder, four great crosses have been cut into the living rock, each the width of a house, each opening at its center onto a black doorway. Below them, near the ground, the stone churns with horsemen and kneeling figures and a king on a charger. For centuries the people of Fars looked at this cliff and saw the deeds of a hero from their epic, and they called the place the picture of Rostam. The hero never set foot here. What the rock holds is older and stranger: the burial wall of an empire, and beneath it the boasts of the empire that claimed its inheritance seven hundred years later.

Panorama of the necropolis: the four royal tombs in the cliff and the Cube of Zoroaster on the left. — Diego Delso, delso.photo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The dynastic wall

The site sits in the Marvdasht plain of Fars Province, some six kilometers northwest of Persepolis — the distance is reported variously, the necropolis lying a short ride beyond the palace terrace toward the mountain. The oldest mark on the cliff is not Persian at all. A worn relief, badly effaced and recut in later ages, preserves the faint outline of a figure in unusual headgear, taken to be Elamite and to predate the Persian kings by centuries. The Achaemenids, when they chose this rock for their dead, were carving into a face that already carried memory.

The four cross-shaped tombs belong to the line of kings who ruled the Achaemenid Empire at its height. Each facade is cut in the form of a Greek cross. The lower arm is blank; the central register imitates the columned portico of a palace, complete with engaged columns and bull-headed capitals, so that the dead king lies behind the image of his own audience hall; the upper arm shows the monarch standing on a stepped throne-platform borne aloft by the peoples of his empire, his hand raised before a fire altar beneath the winged symbol that hovers over Achaemenid kingship. Behind the doorway at the crossing point lies a small chamber and the rock-hewn troughs that held the royal sarcophagi.

Only one of the four can be named with certainty. The tomb second from the right carries a long trilingual inscription — Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian — in which the king names himself. He is Darius I, called the Great, who reigned from 522 to 486 BCE and built the terrace of Persepolis. The text, known to scholars as DNa, is one of the fullest statements of Achaemenid royal ideology to survive. Darius declares himself “a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan lineage,” catalogs the lands that obey him from the Indus to the edge of Europe, and credits his power to the great god who made earth and sky and set him as king upon the many. A companion text on the same facade, DNb, turns inward, setting out the king’s account of his own virtue — his self-command, his justice, the measure by which he holds anger in check — so that the wall of his tomb carries both the empire’s reach and the ruler’s idea of himself. Below the columned portico, a long file of small figures bears the throne-platform on raised hands, each labeled with the name of a subject people, from Mede and Elamite to Egyptian, Indian, and the dwellers at the empire’s far rims; the king above them is rendered many times their size, the difference in scale carrying the whole hierarchy of the realm in a glance.

The three remaining tombs carry no such self-naming and are assigned, on architectural and historical grounds, to his successors — Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II — the kings of the fifth century who held the empire through the long wars with Greece and the slow contraction that followed. The attributions are reasoned rather than proven; the cliff keeps its silence on three of its four occupants. A fifth tomb, of the same cross plan, was begun in the rock of the Persepolis terrace itself and left unfinished — assigned, with no certainty, to one of the last Achaemenids, Artaxerxes III or Darius III, who fell to Alexander and never lay in it. The dynasty’s burial program, in other words, was cut short with the empire; the four completed crosses at Naqsh-e Rostam are the closed roll of the kings who reigned long enough to be entombed as kings.

The cross-shaped facade of the tomb of Darius the Great. — Carole Raddato (Following Hadrian), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The cube, and the king before the god

Before the cliff, a short walk from the tombs, stands a structure that has resisted every attempt to settle what it was. The Ka’ba-ye Zartosht — the Cube of Zoroaster — is a tower of pale dressed limestone, blind on three sides, rising in clean courses some twelve meters from a stepped base, with a single doorway reached by a now-vanished stair and a chamber within. It has a near-twin at Pasargadae, the older Persian capital, where the matching tower is called the Prison of Solomon. Both names are medieval inventions, attaching the buildings to figures who had nothing to do with them. The structure is Achaemenid, of the sixth or fifth century BCE; what it housed is genuinely disputed and likely to remain so.

The proposals divide. Some read the tower as a fire temple, the false windows and the closed chamber sheltering the sacred flame; against this stands the difficulty that an enclosed, windowless room is a poor place to tend a fire that must breathe. Others take it for a royal tomb or repository for the bodies or bones of kings; others for an archive, a strongroom where the regalia, the dynastic records, or copies of sacred texts were kept against fire and theft. The single small chamber, hard to reach and easy to seal, fits a treasury or a reliquary as well as it fits anything. No inscription from the Achaemenid period explains it, and the building has yielded no decisive find. It is one of the few major monuments of the Persian heartland whose very function is an open argument.

What the cube did acquire, long after its builders were dust, was a second life as a stone page. When the Sasanians made this cliff their own, they carved onto the tower’s walls some of the most important inscriptions in all of Iranian history. The high priest Kartir set down, in nineteen lines of Middle Persian cut around 280 CE under Bahram II, an account of his own career and of his labor to establish the fires, endow the temples, and discipline the faith — a rare first-person voice from a churchman of the early Sasanian state. Above and around it runs the trilingual res gestae of Shapur I, the great king’s own record of his reign and his wars, the single richest narrative source for the first century of the dynasty. The Achaemenid tower, whatever it had been, became the wall on which the Sasanians wrote their world into being.

The Sasanian triumphs

When Ardashir I overthrew the last Parthian king around 224 CE and founded the Sasanian line, he reached back deliberately to the Achaemenid past, and his successors carved that claim into the rock beneath the old kings’ tombs. Seven Sasanian reliefs run along the base of the cliff, cut over-life-size, and they turn the dynastic necropolis into a gallery of Persian resurgence.

The most theologically charged is the investiture of Ardashir himself. Two horsemen face each other; the king receives, from the hand of a mounted figure, a ringed diadem — the cydaris, the band of sovereignty. The figure who confers it is no mortal. He is Ohrmazd, the supreme god whom the Avesta calls Ahura Mazda, lord of the Wise — Ahura Mazda, maker of the world. Beneath the hooves of the two horses lie two trampled enemies: under the king’s mount, the last Parthian sovereign; under the god’s, a figure read as the embodiment of the Lie, the cosmic adversary, the principle that Zoroastrian thought names Angra Mainyu. The relief states a whole doctrine of kingship in a single frozen exchange. The Sasanian king does not seize his crown; he receives it from the creator, in the same gesture by which the god subdues the destroyer. Earthly rule and the cosmic war against evil are shown as one act. This is the ideology the Magi of the Sasanian church served and the inscriptions of Kartir enforced — the throne held as a deputation of divine order.

The triumph of Shapur I over Rome, cut beneath the Achaemenid tombs. — Carole Raddato (Following Hadrian), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The most famous relief at Naqsh-e Rostam answers a different kind of king. Shapur I, son of Ardashir, sits motionless on a great horse, robed and crowned, and around him the rulers of Rome are reduced to suppliants. One Roman emperor kneels before the horse’s chest, hands raised in entreaty. A second stands, his wrist gripped in the king’s own hand, held like a prisoner taken in the field. A third lies dead beneath the horse’s hooves. The historical events behind the stone are firmly dated. In 260 CE, at Edessa in upper Mesopotamia, Shapur destroyed a Roman army and took its emperor, Valerian, alive — the only Roman emperor ever captured by a foreign enemy. The standing captive in the king’s grasp is read as Valerian. The kneeling figure is identified with Philip the Arab, who some years earlier had bought peace from Shapur with an enormous indemnity; the corpse underfoot, with Gordian III, the young emperor who died on the same eastern campaign. Three Roman defeats are compressed into one image, the chronology folded so that the whole humiliation of Rome stands in a single scene. To look at it is to see how the Sasanians wished to be seen: heirs of Darius, masters of the king of the West, holding their power as a gift from the Wise Lord and using it to break the empire that had once burned Persepolis.

The remaining reliefs carry the dynasty forward into the later third and early fourth centuries, and several use a device the necropolis seems to invite — the equestrian duel, in which the king unhorses his enemy in the same motion that the relief unhorses Rome’s pretensions. Bahram II appears more than once, in one panel facing his court, in another set among his family; Hormizd II is shown driving his lance into a falling foeman whose horse goes down beneath the blow, the joust standing in for the whole legitimacy of a contested succession. The relief of Narseh returns to the investiture theme but reworks it: the king receives the ringed diadem from a standing female figure most often read as Anahita, the goddess of the waters and of sovereignty, so that the conferring hand is divine again but of a different power than the Ohrmazd of Ardashir’s panel. The identification is not secure — some scholars take the woman not for the goddess but for the queen Shapurdokhtak, the wife through whom Narseh’s claim to the throne ran, noting that the king does not salute her with the reverence a worshipper would owe a deity. Goddess or queen, the meaning bends the same way: legitimacy handed to the king from a power he did not make. Across the seven carvings the grammar holds steady. A king receives rule from a god, or a king breaks an enemy in the field, and often the two are the same gesture — the throne shown not as a possession but as a charge, granted from above and proven below.

Rostam’s picture

The Persian who gave the cliff its name knew none of this. By the medieval centuries the cuneiform of Darius was unreadable and the Middle Persian of Shapur scarcely better; the trilingual inscriptions had gone dumb. What remained legible was the spectacle — colossal horsemen, a crowned king, conquered men beneath his horse — and the people of Fars matched it to the only frame that fit, the deeds of the strongest hero they knew. That hero was Rostam, the giant champion of the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings that Ferdowsi completed around 1010 CE out of the deep well of pre-Islamic legend. The mounted king became Rostam; the cliff became Naqsh-e Rostam, the picture of Rostam, and the nearby reliefs at Naqsh-e Rajab and the carved gorge of Naqsh-e Bahram drew the hero’s kin into the landscape with them. The misreading is not an error to be corrected away. It is itself a chapter of the site’s life — the moment when an empire’s records, gone silent, were absorbed back into the living epic of the people who had outlived the empire.

European travelers began arriving in numbers from the seventeenth century, copying the inscriptions they could not yet read, measuring the tombs, and arguing over what the cliff had been. They carried back drawings of the strange crosses and the kneeling Romans, and the cuneiform — which to a seventeenth-century eye looked like rows of nails or bird-tracks pressed into stone — became one of the puzzles that drove the long European effort to recover the lost scripts of the East. The short, formulaic royal inscriptions of this kind, and those of the terrace at Persepolis, gave the nineteenth-century decipherers of Old Persian their first foothold; but the modern recovery of Naqsh-e Rostam as a site came later, and owed as much to the spade and the camera as to the dictionary.

In the 1920s the German scholar Ernst Herzfeld took casts and photographs of the inscriptions, now preserved in the West. Between 1936 and 1939 an expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, under Erich Schmidt, surveyed and partly excavated the necropolis and the Cube, clearing the base of the tower and recording the reliefs in detail. The reading of Shapur’s res gestae and Kartir’s testament on the tower’s walls gave historians their firmest ground for the early Sasanian state and its church — the very texts that, carved on a building no one can fully explain, recovered a dynasty’s account of itself. The Persian church Kartir served is gone; the fire he tended for the kings burns now in the temples of the Parsis of India and the surviving Zoroastrians of Iran, carriers of the faith whose cosmology the Sasanian reliefs cut into the rock.

The site is today cataloged among the great monuments of ancient Iran, read as a single composition across a thousand years. So the cliff holds three ages at once. The Elamite ghost at the bottom of the rock; the Achaemenid kings sealed in their crosses with Darius alone willing to give his name; the Sasanian horsemen below them, claiming the old glory and writing it onto a tower whose purpose the builders never recorded. The hero of the epic presides over all of it in name only, which is fitting for a place where the documentary record and the stories people tell have always been carved into the same stone, a few feet apart, looking out over the same plain.

The Ka’ba-ye Zartosht, its function still argued, before the cliff of tombs. — Roozbeh Taassob, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

→ Related: Persepolis · Achaemenid Empire · Sasanian Iranian Wisdom Tradition · Zoroaster · Avesta · Ahura Mazda · Angra Mainyu · The Magi · Saoshyant · Zurvan · The Parsis · Ostanes · Harran · Petra · Chaldeans