Persepolis

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A traveler who climbs the great double stairway today walks up steps cut so broad and so shallow that a horse could mount them without breaking stride — the gradient of ceremony, not of haste. At the top the ground opens onto a platform the size of a small town, and the first thing that meets the eye is a gateway flanked by colossal bulls, their human-bearded faces worn but unmistakable, and above the doorway an inscription that says, in three languages at once, that a king called Xerxes built this and that the great god Ahura Mazda gave him the strength to do it. Everything on the terrace was arranged so that a man arriving as a subject would feel the weight of the arrangement. The Greeks called the place Persepolis, the city of the Persians. Its builders called it Parsa. Long after both names were forgotten the local people called the ruins Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of the mythical king Jamshid, as if no merely human dynasty could account for so much stone.

The terrace and the king who began it

Persepolis stands in the highland heart of the Achaemenid realm, in the province of Fars in southwestern Iran — Persis to the Greeks, the homeland from which the ruling house took its name. The site sits against the western slope of a low limestone ridge the Persians called Kuh-e Rahmat, the Mountain of Mercy, and the first and largest act of construction was the platform itself: an artificial terrace of roughly 125,000 square meters, partly built up from the plain with cut stone and partly quarried out of the living mountain, raised some twelve to eighteen meters above the surrounding ground. On this enormous deck the palaces would rise.

The terrace was the work of Darius I, who seized the throne in 522 BCE and began Persepolis around 518. He did not live to finish it; almost nothing at Persepolis was finished by a single reign. His son Xerxes I and his grandson Artaxerxes I carried the program forward, and building continued in fits across the better part of two centuries, until the empire that commissioned it fell. The result was not a fortress and not, in any ordinary sense, a city to live in. The Achaemenids already had working capitals — Susa down in the old Elamite lowland, Ecbatana in the Median hills, Babylon inherited with its kingdom. Persepolis was something else: a stage built for the periodic gathering of the empire, a place the king came to in order to be seen receiving it.

The administration that ran in its shadow left its own deep archive. Tens of thousands of clay tablets — the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury tablets, written mostly in Elamite and recovered by excavators in the twentieth century — record the rations, the travel authorizations, the payments to workers and priests who kept the place running. They are the dry ledger beneath the monumental façade, and they show that the carved king of the reliefs sat atop a bureaucracy that counted out barley and wine to the laborers who carved him.

The audience of the nations

The building that gives Persepolis its meaning is the Apadana, the great audience hall begun by Darius and completed by Xerxes. It was a square hall some sixty meters on a side, its roof once carried on seventy-two slender stone columns, each about twenty-four meters tall and crowned with capitals in the form of paired bulls or lions; a handful still stand against the sky, and the fallen drums of the rest lie about the platform like sections of felled trees. Foundation deposits buried beneath its corners held gold and silver plaques inscribed in the three royal languages, declaring the reach of the empire whose center this was.

What makes the Apadana extraordinary is not its scale but its skin. The two monumental stairways that climb to it — the northern and the eastern — are faced along their full length with carved reliefs, and the program of those reliefs is a single sustained image of empire. On the one hand march the immortal guards and the Persian and Median nobles of the court, file upon file, each figure nearly identical to the next, the very repetition a statement of order. On the other comes the procession that the whole terrace exists to frame: the delegations of the subject nations, twenty-three of them, each led by an usher who takes the foremost figure by the hand, each rendered in the dress and bearing of its own land, each bringing the particular wealth of its country to the king. The Lydians bring vessels and a chariot; the Bactrians a camel; the Armenians a horse; the Indians gold dust and an ass; the Nubians an elephant tusk and an antelope; the Arabs a dromedary; the Ionians bundles of cloth and bowls. A scholar can stand on the step and name the peoples of the empire from their gifts alone.

Delegations of the subject nations bring their gifts to the king, Apadana stairway, Persepolis. — Photo by Pentocelo, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The reliefs were carved in the last years of the sixth century and the first of the fifth, and the marks of foreign hands are on them: the fall of the drapery, the modeling of muscle, the touches that betray craftsmen trained in the Greek manner working to a Persian program. This was itself part of the message. The empire that gathered the tribute of the world gathered also its artisans, and set them to carving the very procession in which their own peoples appeared.

The sign above the throne

Persepolis was a religious building as much as a political one, though the two categories did not come apart for the people who raised it. Above the doorways of the palaces, and above the figure of the enthroned king on the reliefs of the Throne Hall and the tombs, floats a winged figure — a disc with outspread feathers, often with the upper body of a man rising from it, one hand lifted. The image is ancient and borrowed; the winged sun had flown over Egyptian and Assyrian kings for a thousand years before it reached Fars. At Persepolis it became the sign under which the Achaemenid king ruled.

What exactly it represented is a question the carvers did not trouble to answer in writing, and the scholarship has never fully settled it. The older and still common reading takes the winged figure for Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord of the royal inscriptions, the god to whom Darius and Xerxes ascribe their kingship and their victories; on this account the king on the relief stands literally beneath his god. A second line of interpretation, argued by scholars who note that no inscription ever labels the figure, takes it instead for the khvarenah — the royal glory or farr, the divine radiance that descends on the rightful king and departs from the usurper — or for the fravashi, the guarding spirit. The dispute is real and has divided serious students of the material, Mary Boyce among those who doubted the simple equation with the god. What is not in dispute is the grammar of the image: the king does not stand alone. Above him is the sign of a power that legitimates him, and the whole terrace below — the climbing nations, the bearers of gifts — is arranged as the visible base of a throne that the god upholds.

The Gate of All Nations, raised by Xerxes I as the formal entrance to the terrace; its inscription names the king and the god together. — Alborzagros, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

That power had its servants. The hereditary Iranian priesthood, the magi, tended the fires and performed the libations of the royal cult; on the nearby cliff at Naqsh-e Rostam, where Darius and his successors cut their tombs into the rock, the king is shown standing on a stepped platform before a blazing fire-altar, hand raised in worship beneath the same winged sign, the platform itself borne up on the arms of the nations of the empire. The fire and the altar place the Achaemenid cult within the broad world of Iranian Mazda-worship from which the later religion of Zoroaster and the Avesta would grow — though how much of that developed system the sixth-century kings already held is a matter the inscriptions leave open, and prudence keeps the projection backward in check.

Many who have studied the site have argued that Persepolis was built for a season. The tribute procession, the gathering of the nations, the great open courts — these suit a festival rather than a year-round residence, and the leading candidate is the spring celebration the later Iranian world would know as Nowruz, the new year of the equinox, when the cold yields to the warmth and the world is renewed. Some have read the recurring relief of a lion sinking its claws into a bull as an emblem of exactly that turning: the solar lion overcoming the bull of winter, the victory of light that Nowruz marks. The festival reading is attractive and old, and it is also contested — there are scholars who hold that the link between these particular reliefs and the new year is a later interpretation laid over them. The caution is worth keeping. But the basic shape stands: a terrace built to gather the empire at the renewal of the year, under the sign of the god, around the person of the king.

The fire of 330

In the winter of 330 BCE the Macedonian army of Alexander reached the terrace. The Achaemenid empire was already broken in the field; Darius III was a fugitive, soon to be murdered by his own. Alexander took Persepolis, gave its treasury — the accumulated bullion of two centuries of tribute — to be carried off, and then the palaces burned. The fire was thorough: the cedar roofing and the wooden fittings went up, the great halls collapsed, and the stone that survived was scorched and blackened, in places still bearing the marks of the heat.

Why he burned it the ancient sources do not agree, and the disagreement is itself old. One tradition, found in Arrian and resting on the sober memoirs of Ptolemy, holds that Alexander destroyed Persepolis deliberately and with forethought, as retribution for the Persian burning of the Athenian Acropolis in 480 BCE under Xerxes — fire answering fire across a century and a half, the symbolic closing of the long war between Greece and Persia. A second and more lurid tradition, preserved by Diodorus, Curtius, and Plutarch, sets the burning at a drunken victory banquet, where an Athenian courtesan named Thaïs proposed that the women of the company avenge their homeland with their own hands, and Alexander, garlanded and far gone in wine, led the way with a torch. The two stories — cold policy and hot impulse — have been argued ever since, and excavation has not silenced the debate so much as sharpened one side of it: the burning shows every sign of having been systematic, the fire set across the ceremonial buildings in a way that reads as coordinated rather than accidental, which tells against the purest version of the drunken-accident tale without deciding the question of motive. Whatever moved him, the effect was the same. The terrace that had gathered the nations for the king was unroofed in a night, and the Achaemenid empire, already lost as a state, ended as a fire.

The southern stairway of the Tachara, the palace of Darius I, on the terrace at Persepolis. — Photo by Asana Mashouf, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).

The long afterlife of a ruin

Persepolis did not vanish. The platform was too vast to bury and too far from later roads to quarry away wholesale, and so the columns stood, broken, through the centuries that followed — through the Seleucid and Parthian ages, through the Sasanian revival of Persian kingship that cut its own triumphal reliefs on the cliffs nearby, through the long Islamic millennium. The stones were given a new name and a new lineage: Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of Jamshid, the primeval king of Iranian legend, an attribution that quietly conceded the forgotten grandeur of the place by assigning it to myth. The trilingual inscriptions, carved in a script no one could any longer read, were copied by the curious and puzzled over without yield.

The breaking of that silence is one of the founding episodes of modern philology. European travelers had been drawing the ruins and the strange wedge-shaped writing since the seventeenth century; in the 1760s the Danish surveyor Carsten Niebuhr made copies of the Persepolis inscriptions accurate enough to work from, and noticed that they ran in three distinct systems of signs. Around 1802 a young German schoolteacher, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, took two of the shorter Persepolis texts and reasoned that they must be royal proclamations naming a king, his father, and his grandfather; matching that pattern against the known Achaemenid line, he guessed at the values of a handful of signs and read, correctly, the names of Darius, Hystaspes, and Xerxes. His work, dismissed by the learned societies of the day, was the first thread. Others — Burnouf, Lassen, and above all Henry Rawlinson, who copied the great trilingual cliff inscription of Darius at Bisitun at considerable risk to his neck — pulled it the rest of the way, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the Old Persian was readable. Because that script stood beside the Elamite and the Babylonian on the same monuments, the recovery of Old Persian became the lever that pried open Mesopotamian cuneiform as a whole, and with it the written record of Babylonia and Mesopotamia reaching back two and a half millennia before the Achaemenids. The stones the king of kings had raised to be admired by his subjects became, in their ruin, the key to languages older than his own.

The carved procession along the Apadana stairway — guards, nobles, and the delegations of the subject nations. — Photo by Ivan Mlinaric, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Systematic excavation came in the 1930s, when an expedition cleared the terrace, recovered the fortification tablets, and gave the modern world its first full view of the ground plan. The relief program that the diggers uncovered has since become a set text of the art-historical study of empire, read closely for the way its procession of twenty-three nations stages royal power; the fire of 330, likewise, has its own historiography, the ancient accounts of revenge and of the drunken torch weighed against the archaeology of the burned halls. In 1971 the place served as the backdrop for an imperial spectacle when the last Shah staged an enormous celebration there of two and a half millennia of Persian monarchy — a piece of modern theater mounted on the ancient stage, and one that did the dynasty staging it no good. In 1979 the ruins were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, recognized as the surviving record of a vanished idea of empire. And every spring, at the equinox, Iranians still come to the terrace to mark the new year, climbing the shallow ceremonial steps toward the broken columns — keeping, perhaps without naming it, the season for which the place may first have been built. The king who gathered the nations is twenty-three centuries dead and the roof he sat under burned in a night, but the calendar he kept turns over the same stones, and the spring still finds them.

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