Takht-e Soleyman

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In the high country of Iranian Azerbaijan, on a plain ringed by extinct volcanic hills, the ground itself rises into a low oval mound, and at the crown of the mound sits a still lake of dark mineral-blue water. The water does not run off. It wells up from a spring far below and spills slowly over the rim, and over uncounted centuries the dissolved lime it carries has hardened into rock, so that the lake has built the very hill it rests on, course by course, the way a candle builds its own stand. Around the water stand the broken walls of a sanctuary. Here the kings of Sasanian Persia came to be confirmed in their kingship, and here burned one of the three holiest fires of the Zoroastrian world.

The Arabs who passed through after the conquest gave the place its surviving name — Takht-e Soleyman, the Throne of Solomon — and a deeper, drier crater a short walk to the south they called Zendan-e Soleyman, Solomon’s Prison. The names were a graft. What the names covered was the foremost royal shrine of the last great empire of pre-Islamic Iran, the fire-altar of Adur Gushnasp.

The fire of the stallion

The fire had a history older than its standing temple. Pahlavi tradition counted three Great Fires in the land, each the highest grade of sacred flame, an ātash bahrām, each tied to one of the three estates into which Zoroastrian society ordered itself. Adur Farnbag belonged to the priests. Adur Burzen-Mihr belonged to the farmers and herdsmen. And Adur Gushnasp belonged to the warriors — the arteshtārān, the estate of arms and horses and rule, the estate to which the Sasanian dynasty itself belonged. Of the three, as Mary Boyce notes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, it is the only one whose temple has been found and dug, the only one for which the seals, the texts, and the stones all agree.

The name is plain Middle Persian and faintly martial. Gushnasp compounds gushn, “male,” with asp, “horse” — the stallion, the war-horse, the animal of strength and the cavalry charge. Legend explained the name in the heroic register the Iranians loved. The fire was said to have blazed up of itself on the mane of a horse ridden by the ancient king Kay Khosrow, lighting his way through a storm to a mountain, and there he had founded its sanctuary. Such stories belong to the world of the Shahnameh and the priestly chronicles rather than to the excavator’s trench; they are how the tradition told itself where the fire came from, and they reached back past any king the historians can date.

The historical fire was carried to this site in Adurbadagan — the old Atropatene, the land that gives its name to Azerbaijan — in the late fourth or early fifth century of the common era, moved, the sources say, from the nearby regional capital. Around it the Sasanians raised the great enclosure whose ruins remain: an oval ring of stone wall, roughly twelve hundred meters around, studded with some thirty-eight towers, lifting the whole platform sixty meters above the plain. Inside the ring, on the north shore of the lake, stood the fire-temple itself, a square sanctuary with a domed chamber where the flame was kept, approached through halls and a great vaulted hall, an iwan. Beside it, archaeology has recovered the remains of a second temple — a temple of Anahita, the lady of the waters, the goddess of the rivers and of generation.

That pairing is the whole grammar of the place. Fire and water, the two pure elements of the Zoroastrian world, the two that must never be defiled, held together on a single platform: the perpetual flame of the warriors at the lip of an inexhaustible spring. The site does not choose between them. It sets them a few paces apart and lets them stand.

It helps to remember what a Great Fire was, in the reckoning of the priests, and how far above an ordinary household hearth it stood. A fire of the bahrām grade was not lit and let die; it was a being. To consecrate one, the Magi gathered embers from many lesser fires — by the strictest count, fire taken from sixteen different sources, including, the tradition held, fire kindled by lightning and fire from the hearths of the several estates — and purified each in turn through a long sequence of rites until the gathered flames were enthroned as a single living fire upon its altar. Once enthroned it was tended like a king: fed, screened from the breath and gaze of the impure, served by priests who approached it masked so that no exhalation should reach it. Adur Gushnasp was a fire of exactly this rank, the highest there was, and its three-cornered company — Farnbag for the priests, Burzen-Mihr for the herdsmen, Gushnasp for the warriors — mapped the whole of ordered society onto three undying flames set across the land. The site on the lake held the one that belonged to those who ruled.

The spring-fed lake at the center of the enclosure; its calcareous water slowly raised the platform it rests on. — Alen Ištoković, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Where the kings came on foot

To grasp why this remote upland mattered to an empire whose heart lay far to the south, one has to see what the fire did for the crown. The Sasanian throne was not a secular office laid over a religion. It was woven into the cult of Ahura Mazda and tended by the priesthood of the Magi; the king ruled by the divine glory, the khwarrah, and his legitimacy ran through the altar. Of the three Great Fires, the warriors’ fire was the king’s own. The throne and Adur Gushnasp belonged to the same estate, and the bond between them was made visible in ritual.

A new monarch, on his accession, was expected to come to the sanctuary — and to come the last stretch on foot. The king who governed the road from Ctesiphon to the Oxus would dismount and walk to the fire of the stallion, to pray before it and to lay down his gifts. The endowment was no token. Kings poured wealth into the shrine across the dynasty’s long life. The chronicles remember Bahram V, who reigned in the early fifth century, as among the first to bestow rich gifts there. They remember Khosrow I, the great sixth-century king, visiting the fire before a campaign and afterward giving it a share of the tribute wrung from the Byzantines. The pattern is consistent: the warrior-king honors the warriors’ fire at the hinge moments of his reign, accession and war, and the fire returns him legitimacy and the promise of victory.

The lake earned its place in this scheme. Anahita — Aredvi Sura Anahita, “the moist, the strong, the undefiled” — was the lady of the cosmic waters, the source from which all the rivers of the world flowed down, and a giver of victory besought by warriors and kings. A temple to her on the same platform as the warriors’ fire was no accident of crowding. It set the patroness of the waters beside the patron flame of the arms-bearing estate, water and fire each in its purity, each indispensable, neither permitted to touch and stain the other. The deep spring that fed the lake made the abstraction concrete: here, visibly, was an undying source rising out of the dark, water that could not be exhausted, mirroring in the ground the inexhaustible fire on the altar above it.

So the sanctuary became a knot in which several strands of kingship were tied at once. The mountain lifted it toward heaven. The fire carried the prayers and burned without ever going out, the visible sign of the truth, asha, that the king was sworn to uphold. The lake, unfathomable and self-renewing, gave the place the character of a source — a spot where the ordered world seemed to issue from the ground. To stand crowned in that company was to be set, for a moment, at the center of the cosmos as the tradition mapped it: fire above, water below, the king between, the great enemy held off beyond the wall. The whole landscape was a diagram of kingship, and the king walked into it on his own feet.

Panorama of the oval enclosure: the lake at center, Sasanian and Ilkhanid ruins along the shore. — Elaheabed, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The fire quenched

The end, when it came, came as the mirror-image of a triumph. In the long war between Persia and Byzantium that ran from 602 to 628, the Sasanian king Khosrow II had carried his armies to extraordinary depths — into Anatolia, into Egypt, and in 614 into Jerusalem, which his general took and sacked. From the holy city the Persians bore away the most precious relic of Christendom, the wood of the True Cross, and the chronicles report that it was carried back into Adurbadagan and kept at the regional capital near the great fire. For the Christian empire the loss was a wound at the root of its faith.

The Byzantine emperor Heraclius answered it in person. Rather than wait behind the walls of Constantinople, he marched his army eastward, through Armenia, and in 624 drove straight into the Persian homeland and into Adurbadagan itself. He met and scattered a Sasanian force, and then he turned on the sanctuary. He burned the fire-temple. The fire of the warriors, the fire of the kings, the flame that was never to die — Heraclius put it out. The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes records the emperor reaching the place and setting the temple of fire alight, and the Persian tradition remembered worse: that the conqueror fouled the sacred lake itself, the pure water beside the pure flame, by casting in the bodies of the slain. The revenge was exact and theological. The seizure of the Cross from Jerusalem was repaid by the quenching of the holiest fire in Iran.

It was a blow at the symbolic heart of the empire, and within a few years that empire fell — first into the chaos of Khosrow II’s murder and the dynastic wars that followed, then, in the 630s and 640s, to the Arab armies of Islam. The Persians had saved the sacred fire from the flames; it was carried off and later restored, and the temple was rebuilt. But the wider world it had crowned was gone. The fire flickered on for some generations under the new order, tended ever more thinly, until by the late tenth or early eleventh century it had at last gone dark for good.

Solomon’s throne over the warriors’ fire

What happened to the name is its own small parable of how a sanctuary survives the loss of its gods. To the Muslims who inherited the land, the ruined enclosure on its blue lake, and the deep dry shaft to the south, called for an explanation, and the one that fastened on was scriptural. The Qur’an and its surrounding lore gave Solomon — Sulayman — dominion over the winds and the spirits, the jinn, whom he could bind and command. The drained crater nearby, plunging into the dark, became the pit where Solomon had imprisoned his rebellious demons: Zendan-e Soleyman, the Prison of Solomon. The walled platform with its still water became his seat, his Throne. A hill in view was named for Belqis, the Queen of Sheba of Islamic tradition. The Zoroastrian sanctuary, stripped of its fire and its kings, was reclothed in the prestige of a prophet.

The renaming was very likely a kind of protection, whether the people who made it knew it or not. A pagan fire-shrine of the toppled empire might have been left to be quarried away; a place bound to Solomon, a prophet honored in Islam, carried a borrowed sanctity that helped the stones survive. The graft held. The site has been Solomon’s Throne for far longer now than it was ever the fire of Gushnasp.

A surviving Sasanian-era vaulted passage within the sanctuary. — Shayan imani, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Six centuries after Heraclius, the ruins drew a second empire. The Mongol Ilkhans who ruled Iran after the conquests of Hulagu found the high oval plain and its lake a fit setting for a royal retreat, as the Sasanians had. Around 1271 the Ilkhan Abaqa Khan began raising a summer and hunting palace directly over the Zoroastrian remains, and his successors carried the work on. The new buildings spoke a mixed tongue — Mongol cardinal orientation, Chinese decorative motifs in the tilework, Iranian forms in the iwans and the courtyard plan — but they kept the old logic of the place, ranging a great hall on each side of the central water. A Buddhist or shamanist khan’s pleasure-palace now stood where the Persian kings had been crowned, on the same platform, around the same lake.

Then the long quiet. The Ilkhanate fell, the palace decayed, and the site slid out of the world’s notice into the memory of the herders of the district, a field of fallen stone around a famous pool. Travelers and antiquarians passed through and puzzled over it; the equation of the place with the Sasanian sanctuary of the texts — with the Shiz and Ganzak of the medieval geographers, with the seat of Adur Gushnasp — was not secured until modern scholarship went to work. Excavation, much of it by German and Iranian teams across the middle decades of the twentieth century, lifted the plan of the fire-temple and the Anahita temple back out of the ground, recovered seals naming the priestly establishment of the fire, and tied the name in the texts to the stones on the hill. What the spade confirmed was that the legend of Solomon had been laid, almost exactly, over a real and findable shrine. Scholars of architecture came to see in the four-iwan court around its central feature, and in the very idea of a domed fire-chamber, a Sasanian inheritance that flowed onward into the mosques and palaces of the Islamic centuries — so that the sanctuary’s forms outlived its faith. In 2003 the place was inscribed on the list of World Heritage, named for its fusion of cult and kingship and for the long architectural line it stands at the head of.

The lake is still there, dark and faintly blue, brimming and spilling its slow lime as it did when the war-horse fire burned on its shore. The water that the Sasanians held sacred and Heraclius defiled has long since cleared itself and gone on rising, indifferent to which king or prophet the stones around it are said to have belonged to, building its hill one thin layer at a time.

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