Remnants of Ancient Iran

The ruins of Persepolis

There are archeological sites worldwide that are known to most of us from a young age. They feature in many stories, and photos of them saturate so many books that their fame proceeds them. A few examples are the Pyramids of Giza, the Colosseum of Rome, the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, and Stonehenge.

Then, there are equally important sites that don’t get the same recognition for one reason or another. In the case of the Achaemenid city of Persepolis, it may have to do with how few outsiders get there. My wife, daughter, and I visited it recently as part of a three-week tour of Iran. It is an easy day trip from the city of Shiraz.

Since the revolution of 1979, the pre-Islamic history of Iran has taken a distant back seat for political/religious reasons. Hence, this significant remnant of the ancient world has been left out in the cold, or more literally, out in the desert, to gather dust. Other equally significant archaeological sites in Iran have also suffered this fate.

To be fair to its founders, ‘Persepolis’ is only the foreign name given to this place by the ancient Greeks. It translates to “City of the Persians”. Locally, it is known as Takht-e Jamshid, though this name is an even later invention.

What remains of the city today was only the core — living quarters for the royal class, reception halls for diplomats, and the state treasury. Its location, at the base of a mountain already revered for centuries as a sacred home of the god Mithras, is not a coincidence.

The first construction was under King Darius the Great, who reigned from 522–486 BCE. His son and later king, Xerxes I, added grand structures, as did most of the Achaemenid kings after him. These kings gradually assimilated other empires until their lands stretched from the Danube River to Afghanistan and from the Caspian Sea to Egypt. I saw a statistic claiming that, at its greatest extent, the Achaemenids ruled over 46% of the world’s population.

Though several great civilizations predated them in this region, the Aechemenids are considered the founders of Iranian culture for two reasons. One, their empire was the first to geographically cover all of what is now considered Iran. Two, they laid the cultural, linguistic, and religious foundations that would identify this region and its people for millennia.

From what we understand today of the Achaemenid empire and its quick expansion, peaceful integration held equal is not greater value than conquest by force. Subject people were not excessively taxed or forced to obey Aechemenid traditions. Most groups (like the Medes) did not take up arms and resisted once it was clear that the Aechemenids did not intend to obliterate them. In this respect, the Achaemenids were the antithesis of the Assyrians, a foreign power that ruled over this region before them and who had a reputation for brutality and forced assimilation.

This relatively peaceful system held up for centuries, during which culture and art flourished. The fine craftsmanship of art at Persepolis demonstrates this.

The first Greek contact with Persepolis occurred when Alexander the Great marched in, looted the treasury, and burned the city (330 BCE). For this, in Iran, he has been given the name Alexander the Bastard.

After Alexander’s conquest, the Achaemenid empire ended, and Persepolis fell into ruin. Little attention was paid to the site until a few hundred years ago. Its history and significance had to be decoupled from the local myths about the ruins that had sprung up in the intervening millennia.

Fortunately, many of the black limestone wall carvings shown above had long since been buried in mud over the centuries from the occasional flood and were preserved. Had they remained exposed, Muslim invaders would likely have defaced or destroyed them. Most stone blocks had already been carted away to build other cities.

The Aechemenid kings were traditionally buried in rock tombs cut into cliff walls. The earlier tombs are about six kilometers away, but when space ran out, some were buried in the side of the mountain behind Persepolis.

The people of Iran have not forgotten the Achaemenids, despite how ancient history is treated by the current government. In the years before the Islamic revolution, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ordered the construction of tourist infrastructure to put Persepolis back on the map. Though that infrastructure is now falling into disrepair, the site still receives many visitors, most of them domestic.

To complete the picture of the Achaemenids, we also visited Naqst-e Rostam, about six kilometers across the valley. This is where many early Achaemenid kings were buried in tombs cut into a cliff wall.

Only the tomb of Darius I (the Great) is known because of a cuneiform inscription that identifies it as such. The kings honored by others (four in all) are inferred based on the evolution of artistic style over time.

Below each of the tombs are later carvings of battle scenes. These were emplaced by the Sassanians, a ruling dynasty that arrived 600 years later. Their many battles with the Roman Empire are epic, and they left evidence of their victories here, on ground already rendered sacrosanct by the Achaemenids.

There is an unusual building at Naqst-e Rostam that has no presently known function. There are several theories, of course, but at the end of the day no hard evidence.

It was constructed on the land surface as it existed in Achaemenid times, about five meters below where it is today. Hence, the area around it was excavated and fitted with a retaining wall so that it can be viewed in its entirety. When the base was cleared of rubble, writing was found on the blocks that turned out to be from the Sassanians many centuries later. The writings extol the victories of the Sassanid king Ardashir I but say nothing about the structure they are carved into.

There is much to be discovered about Persepolis and the Achemenids in general, and someday in Iran, insha’Allah, interest in this period of history will return at scale. I am thankful to have finally seen it.

This is essentially Part 3 of a series about my recent trip to Iran, preceded by:

and

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