Persepolis

Persepolis was one of the royal centres of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the first empire to unite most of the Middle East, Egypt, Anatolia and Central Asia under one dynasty. Its Old Persian name was Pārsa, the same as the name of the region and the people: Persia and the Persians. The Greek name Persepolis simply means “Persian city”. Later Iranians, who no longer knew who had built it, called it Takht-e Jamshid, “the Throne of Jamshid”, after a legendary king of Iranian tradition.

The site stands on a vast terrace built against a mountainside on the Marvdasht plain in Fars, the Persians’ homeland in southwestern Iran. On it rose a group of monumental buildings: audience halls, palaces, a treasury, gatehouses and storerooms. The empire had several capitals, including Susa, Babylon and Ecbatana, and the kings travelled between them. Persepolis was a place for royal display and ceremony in the dynasty’s home province, as well as an important administrative centre.

Today the ruins include standing columns, carved doorways, staircases covered in relief sculpture and the rock-cut tombs of kings. Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979, Persepolis is one of the most important archaeological sites of the ancient world and a powerful symbol of Iranian history.

A visitor, then as now, arrives at the northwest corner and climbs a wide double staircase with shallow steps, designed to be climbed with dignity, perhaps even on horseback. At the top stands the Gate of All Nations, built by Xerxes I. Huge stone bulls guard its western doorway and human-headed winged bulls its eastern one, following an Assyrian tradition of protective gate figures. An inscription in three languages, Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, names Xerxes as the builder.

To the south rises the Apadana, the great audience hall begun by Darius I and completed by Xerxes. Its central square hall, roughly 60 metres on each side, was filled with 36 columns, and three porches added more, for 72 columns in all. They stood around 20 metres high, topped by capitals carved as the front halves of two bulls, lions or griffins back to back, which held the cedar roof beams. Today only a handful of these columns remain standing.

Further south and east are Darius’s palace (the Tachara), the palace of Xerxes (the Hadish), a central building often called the Tripylon or Council Hall, and the Hall of a Hundred Columns, the largest roofed space on the terrace, begun by Xerxes and completed by Artaxerxes I. In the southeast corner lay the Treasury, where the wealth of the empire was stored. Above the terrace, cut into the mountain, are tombs usually attributed to Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III.

The buildings were made of local grey limestone for columns, doorframes, window frames and stairs, while the walls were thick mud brick, now mostly lost. Originally the carvings were painted in bright colours, and some metal fittings and inlays decorated them; scholars have found traces of pigment on the reliefs.

The most famous carvings at Persepolis decorate the northern and eastern staircases of the Apadana. On one side, rows of Persian and Median nobles and guards, recognizable by their different hats and clothes, walk and talk, some holding flowers. On the other side, 23 delegations from different lands of the empire approach, each led by an official who takes one member by the hand.

Each delegation wears its own clothing and brings typical gifts: horses, camels, humped bulls, rams, cloth, gold and silver vessels, weapons, jewellery, an okapi-like animal, an antelope or a lion cub. Scholars try to identify the peoples, such as Medes, Elamites, Armenians, Lydians, Ionian Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians, Bactrians, Indians, Arabians and Nubians, using the Old Persian royal lists of lands, but some identifications remain uncertain.

Between the scenes, carved again and again, a lion attacks a bull. This motif may symbolize the change of seasons, royal power or cosmic order; its exact meaning is debated. What is striking is what is missing: there are no battles, no captives being killed and no bleeding enemies, unlike the war scenes on earlier Assyrian palace walls. Persepolis shows the empire as a peaceful, orderly world gathered around the king.

Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire around 550 BCE and built his capital at Pasargadae, about 40 km to the north. Some scholars think Cyrus or his son Cambyses may already have chosen the Persepolis site, but the main construction began under Darius I (reigned 522–486 BCE), who came to power after a violent succession crisis described in his Behistun inscription. Building continued under Xerxes I (486–465) and Artaxerxes I (465–424); later kings added smaller works, and some parts were still unfinished when Alexander arrived.

In his foundation inscriptions, Darius emphasizes that the empire’s peoples worked together on his buildings. A charter from his palace at Susa lists materials brought from across the empire and workers from Ionia, Sardis, Egypt, Babylon and elsewhere. At Persepolis, gold and silver foundation tablets found in 1933 at the corners of the Apadana describe the extent of Darius’s realm from the Scythians beyond Sogdiana to Kush, and from India to Sardis.

The Persepolis Fortification tablets give an unusually detailed picture of the workforce. They record rations of grain, wine, beer, sheep and other goods paid to workers called kurtaš, who came from many peoples, including Egyptians, Ionians, Lydians, Babylonians, Thracians and others. Men and women received rations; some women were paid as much as men in the same job, and mothers received extra rations after giving birth, more for a boy than a girl. Whether these workers were free labourers, deportees or dependent workers is debated, but the tablets show an organized, state-run system of payment rather than a picture of chained slaves.

At its height under Darius I, the Achaemenid Empire extended from Libya and the Aegean to the Indus valley and Central Asia. It was divided into provinces called satrapies, connected by a royal road network with relay stations, and it collected taxes and gifts in silver and in kind. The Fortification tablets show travellers carrying sealed documents, receiving food rations at stations along the roads as they journeyed to and from places as far away as India, Egypt and Sardis.

The Achaemenids used several languages for administration. Old Persian cuneiform, probably created in Darius’s time, was used mostly for royal inscriptions. Everyday records at Persepolis were kept mainly in Elamite, an older language of southwestern Iran, and many in Aramaic, the common language of the empire. Babylonian (Akkadian) was used in royal inscriptions and in Mesopotamia.

Royal ideology, expressed in the inscriptions, presents the king as chosen by the god Ahuramazda to uphold truth and order against “the Lie”. The Apadana reliefs, with the peoples of the empire bringing gifts in harmony, turn this ideology into a visual programme. Many historians see the empire as notable for allowing local customs, languages and religions to continue under Persian rule, though it also suppressed revolts harshly when they occurred.

After defeating Darius III at Gaugamela in 331 BCE, Alexander of Macedon marched into Persia. He reached Persepolis in early 330 BCE; his troops were allowed to plunder the city, and the enormous treasure was carried away. A few months later, in spring 330 BCE, the palaces on the terrace were set on fire.

The ancient sources disagree about why. Arrian, relying on earlier accounts, presents the burning as a deliberate act of revenge for the Persian burning of Athens’s temples in 480 BCE, and says he himself did not think it wise. Diodorus, Plutarch and Curtius tell a more dramatic story: at a drunken feast, the Athenian courtesan Thaïs urged Alexander to burn the palace, and he threw the first torch. Modern historians debate whether the fire was a calculated political message to the Greeks, a signal to the Persians that their empire had ended, a drunken impulse, or a combination of these.

Archaeologists found thick layers of ash and charred cedar beams, and signs that many objects in the Treasury were smashed. The fire destroyed the roofs and mud-brick walls, but the stone elements survived, and the clay tablets of the Treasury were preserved. For Iranians, the burning has long been remembered as a cultural catastrophe; in Greek and Roman writing it was often told as a story of revenge and of Alexander’s character.

Persepolis was never rebuilt as a royal centre, but it was not forgotten. Nearby, the city of Istakhr became important under later Persian dynasties. Rulers of later ages left their own marks on the ruins: inscriptions in Middle Persian from the Sasanian period and Arabic inscriptions of the 10th-century Buyid ruler ‘Adud al-Dawla are carved in the Palace of Darius. In Persian tradition the ruins became associated with the legendary king Jamshid, known from the Shahnameh, hence the name Takht-e Jamshid, and sometimes with King Solomon.

European travellers visited from the 15th century onward and described and drew the ruins. The Danish-German traveller Carsten Niebuhr made careful copies of the inscriptions in 1765. Using these copies, the German scholar Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802 correctly identified several royal names in Old Persian cuneiform, a key early step in deciphering cuneiform writing.

Scientific excavation began in 1931 under Ernst Herzfeld for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and continued under Erich Schmidt from 1935 to 1939. They uncovered the Apadana staircases, the Treasury and the tablet archives, and reconstructed part of the so-called Harem of Xerxes as a working base and museum. Iranian archaeologists and, from the 1960s, an Italian team working on restoration carried out further work. In 1971 Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi held lavish celebrations of 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy at Persepolis, which drew criticism for their cost and politics.

In 1933 Herzfeld’s team found tens of thousands of clay tablets and fragments in the fortification wall at the northeast of the terrace. These Fortification tablets date from 509 to 493 BCE, in the reign of Darius I. Most are in Elamite; around a thousand are in Aramaic, and a few are in other languages, including one in Old Persian, one in Greek and one in Phrygian. They record the movement of food and animals from storehouses to workers, officials, travellers, the royal family and religious offerings. A second, smaller archive of Treasury tablets (492–457 BCE) records payments partly in silver.

The tablets were lent by Iran to the Oriental Institute in 1935 for study. Richard Hallock’s 1969 edition of 2,087 Elamite texts transformed the field, and since 2006 the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, led by Matthew Stolper, has worked to record and publish the remaining material. Several hundred tablets were returned to Iran over the decades. The archive also became the target of a lawsuit, Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran, by victims of a 1997 bombing who sought to seize the tablets to satisfy a judgment against Iran; in 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the artefacts could not be seized under that law.

The archives reveal a world absent from the Greek historians: the religious offerings the state paid for, including to Elamite and Iranian gods, travel along the royal roads, the role of royal women such as Irdabama and Irtašduna (Artystone) as owners of estates and workers, and the everyday functioning of an ancient empire. Thousands of seal impressions on the tablets are also a major source for Achaemenid art.

What was Persepolis for? An influential older view held that it was a ceremonial city used mainly for the New Year festival (Nowruz), when delegations came to present gifts, and some interpreted the Apadana reliefs as a record of that event. Many scholars now caution that there is no direct ancient evidence linking Persepolis to Nowruz, and the Fortification tablets show that the area was a busy regional administrative centre throughout the year. The terrace may best be understood as combining royal residence, ceremonial stage, treasury and administrative hub.

What do the reliefs show? Earlier scholars often described the delegations as bringing “tribute”. Others argue that the reliefs are an idealized picture of imperial order rather than a record of an actual event, and that the gifts were symbolic offerings rather than the empire’s regular taxes. The two central audience reliefs, showing an enthroned king and a crown prince receiving an official, were moved in antiquity from the Apadana staircases to the Treasury; which kings they depict is debated.

How should the empire be told? For centuries, Western images of Persia were shaped by Greek authors such as Herodotus, who wrote from the perspective of the Persians’ enemies, and by a later narrative of Persian “decadence” leading to Alexander’s victory. From the 1980s, the Achaemenid History workshops organized by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Amélie Kuhrt, and the work of historians such as Pierre Briant, pushed scholars to centre Persian, Elamite, Babylonian and Aramaic sources. Persepolis, with its inscriptions, reliefs and archives, is central to that shift. In Iran, meanwhile, the site carries strong national meaning that has been interpreted differently by the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic.

Much of what we know about Persepolis comes from the Chicago excavations of the 1930s, published above all in Erich Schmidt’s three-volume Persepolis (1953–1970). The excavators worked quickly by modern standards, and questions remain about stratigraphy, the sequence of construction and what was removed or reconstructed. Some reliefs and objects left the site through the antiquities trade or in earlier centuries and are now held in museums outside Iran.

Conservation faces continuing challenges: weathering of the limestone, the growth of lichens and other organisms on the reliefs, the effects of rain and temperature changes, and the pressure of tourism. Iranian conservators, sometimes working with international partners, monitor and treat the stones, and have debated how much restoration and protective roofing are appropriate.

Open research questions include the precise building chronology of each structure, the original colour scheme of the reliefs, the identities of the delegations, the relationship between Persepolis and nearby sites such as Pasargadae and Naqsh-e Rostam (where Darius I and three other kings are buried in rock-cut tombs), and how the terrace and the surrounding lower city worked together. New readings of the Fortification tablets continue to change the picture.