Ecbatana

The Old Persian form of the name is Hagmatāna, which appears several times in Darius's Bisitun inscription, always in the locative Hagmatanaiy, 'at Ecbatana', in the account of the Median revolt.^[1] It is generally understood as 'the place of gathering' or 'of assembly', from the root gam- 'to come together', a sense that suits a road-junction and a seat of Median kingship.^[2] The Greeks rendered it Agbatana (the form Herodotus preferred, as nearer the native word) or, more commonly, Ekbatana; Latin gave Ecbatana. The Babylonians wrote Agamtanu, and it is under that spelling that the city makes its first sure entrance into the historical record, in the chronicle of Cyrus's victory over the Medes.^[3] The Book of Ezra preserves the Aramaic form Achmetha as the place where a decree of Cyrus was later found in the royal archive.^[4]

Herodotus made Ecbatana the creation of a single man. In his account the Medes, living scattered and lawless, raised a certain Deioces to be their king for the justice of his judgements; and Deioces, once secure, required them to build him a capital and a guarded palace. The Medes built the new city, Agbatana, its walls rising in circles one within the other, each out-topping the next by its battlements, and the description of it is among the most famous in the Histories:

The nature of the ground, which is a gentle hill, favours this arrangement in some degree, but it was mainly effected by art. The number of the circles is seven, the royal palace and the treasuries standing within the last. The circuit of the outer wall is very nearly the same with that of Athens.

Herodotus, Histories 1.98 (trans. Rawlinson)^[2]

The battlements of the seven walls, Herodotus goes on, were coloured in ascending order, white, black, scarlet, blue and orange, the two innermost plated with silver and gold. Within them stood the king unseen, screened by the ceremonial Deioces was said to have devised:

He allowed no one to have direct access to the person of the king, but made all communication pass through the hands of messengers, and forbade the king to be seen by his subjects. He also made it an offence for any one whatsoever to laugh or spit in the royal presence.

Herodotus, Histories 1.99 (trans. Rawlinson)^[2]

The seven walls in the colours of the planets, the king withdrawn behind his screen of etiquette, the founding of a city as the founding of a state: these are the elements of a Greek meditation on how kingship and despotism arise, closer in spirit to the idealised education of Cyrus in Xenophon than to a builder's report. No trace of seven concentric coloured walls has ever been found, and the topography of Hamadan does not fit the description. What the account does register, faithfully enough, is that Ecbatana was remembered as the seat from which the Median kings ruled and as a place of accumulated treasure, the palace and the treasuries standing together within the last wall.

The form of the description is Mesopotamian, not Median. The standard commentary on Herodotus, that of Asheri, Lloyd and Corcella, reads his seven-storey citadel as an imaginary structure modelled on the Babylonian ziggurat, the stepped temple-tower whose ascending stages the Greek has turned into concentric walls. The seven colours belong to the same borrowed scheme: seven was a sacred number, and the coloured stages of Mesopotamian sacred buildings were held to correspond to the seven planetary gods of Chaldaean astrology, golden-yellow to the sun, scarlet to Mars, and so on, though the correspondence is not exact and Herodotus shows no sign of understanding it.^[5] The detail tells against the passage as topography twice over: it is a literary composite, and it does not even agree with the other ancient accounts of the citadel, since the descriptions in Polybius, Diodorus, Josephus and the Book of Judith share none of Herodotus's seven walls.^[5] What the tradition transmits is a Greek idea of an oriental royal fastness, dressed in Babylonian symbolism, and attached to a city none of these authors had measured.

The hard archaeology of Media tells a more sober story. The excavated Median centres are the fortified sites of Tepe Nush-i Jan and Godin Tepe, which flourish in the seventh century and decline in the early sixth, at just the period when the texts make the Medes most powerful. Ecbatana itself, at modern Hamadan, has so far yielded no material of the Median period at all.^[3] Whether there was ever a centralised Median 'empire' of the kind the Greek sources imply has become one of the open questions of the field (see the Medes); what is clear is that Ecbatana was its remembered capital, and that the memory outlived any evidence of the thing itself.

The first firm date in the city's history is its capture. The Nabonidus Chronicle, a Babylonian record of the reign of Cyrus's contemporary Nabonidus, reports that the Median king Astyages marched against Cyrus of Anshan, that his own troops rebelled and delivered him up to the enemy, and that Cyrus then took his capital:

Cyrus marched to Ecbatana (Akk. Agamtanu), the royal city ... which he carried off as booty (from) Ecbatana he took to Anshan.

the Nabonidus Chronicle ii.1-4 (trans. Kuhrt)^[6]

This is the earliest mention of Ecbatana yet found in any surviving text.^[3] It is also a corrective to the Greek tradition on a point of some weight. Herodotus presents the campaign as Cyrus's own initiative, the rising of the subject Persian against his Median overlord; the chronicle has Astyages attack first and lose his throne to a mutiny. The two accounts agree only that Astyages fell and that his treasure went south to Anshan; Cyrus would later raise his own capital at Pasargadae. The looting of the Median royal hoard, as Briant observes, gave Cyrus for the first time the inexhaustible resources a career of conquest needed.^[4]

Cyrus did not raze the place. He conducted himself, in the tradition that reached Ctesias and Xenophon, as the successor of Astyages rather than his destroyer, sparing the old king and taking on the Median royal role. Ecbatana passed intact into the new order and kept its standing, becoming a working seat of imperial government that held both a treasury and an archive (discussed below).^[4]

The taking of Ecbatana was a hinge in the wider history of the Near East, and not only because it delivered a hoard. By presenting himself as the heir of Astyages, Cyrus took on the Median king's territorial ambitions along with his throne, a continuity that committed the new power sooner or later to a reckoning with the two great states on its flanks, Lydia and the Neo-Babylonian kingdom.^[4] Media itself kept a special standing among the conquered lands, whether from the old political and cultural ties between Medes and Persians or from the prestige of the former ruling people; Medes such as the general Datis held commands of the first rank into the fifth century, and the Greeks would long call the whole imperial venture 'the Mede'.^[4] Ecbatana, as the seat from which that inheritance was claimed, was too important to be reduced to a provincial town.

Under the Achaemenids, Ecbatana was one of the four working residences of the empire, with Babylon, Susa and Persepolis, among which the King and his court moved with the seasons; Pasargadae, the old dynastic seat, counted as a ceremonial fifth rather than a working capital. The Greek sources make this migration a defining habit of Persian kingship. Xenophon gives the climatic rationale:

Cyrus himself made his home in the centre of his domain, and in the winter season he spent seven months in Babylon, for there the climate is warm; in the spring he spent three months in Susa, and in the height of summer two months in Ecbatana.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.6.22 (in Briant's rendering)^[7]

Athenaeus, drawing on the same tradition, turned the custom into an emblem of Persian luxury, the Persians being in his account the first men to become notorious for such living:

whose kings wintered in Susa and summered in Ecbatana ... In Persepolis they spent the autumn, and in Babylon the remaining portion of the year.

Athenaeus 12.513f (in Briant's rendering)^[8]

The schematic neatness of these accounts is deceptive; what tells is the divergence among the Greek sources. Tuplin, in the fullest study of the evidence, finds no single agreed itinerary: Athenaeus and Aelian give a four-season, four-residence scheme, Xenophon and Plutarch a three-stage one (winter in Babylon, spring in Susa, summer in Ecbatana), and other authors two stops only, so that the tidy calendar is a literary construction rather than a recorded royal timetable. The Persepolis Fortification tablets, which do register the movements of the court, yield by themselves no more than a schematic pattern and cannot confirm any of the Greek schemes.^[9] What every variant agrees on is the one fixed element, the summer at Ecbatana, and that constant is what carries weight. Ecbatana, at some 1,800 metres, offered relief from the summer heat of the Susiana plain, which the same authors describe as fierce enough to kill. Strabo notes that lizards and snakes could not cross the streets of Susa at noon without being scorched, and a report from the age of the Successors has an army marching through the Iranian lowlands 'into a furnace'.^[4] The high Median city was the natural summer seat.

The itinerant court is now taken as a defining feature of Achaemenid kingship rather than a Greek fancy about oriental restlessness. The empire had no single fixed capital; the King and his household moved among Persepolis, Susa, Babylon and Ecbatana, and the residences themselves were built up and partly dismantled across the reigns of the first three kings.^[10] As Briant argues, the Achaemenids could not have made Susa and Babylon their working capitals without periodically returning to their Iranian heartland, and Ecbatana anchored their hold on Media and on the roads east.^[4] The city stood on the royal road system and functioned within the satrapal administration as both the capital of Media and a full royal residence, with its palaces, its treasury and its archive.

What made Ecbatana a working capital, and not merely a summer retreat, was that it held two of the instruments of imperial government: a treasury and an archive. The two were features of every royal residence, but at Ecbatana they are unusually well attested, because the accidents of survival that hide the palaces have preserved traces of the administration. The Babylonian banking house of Egibi was doing business in the city within a decade of its capture, when the court of Cyrus resided there for part of the year, evidence that Ecbatana was drawn at once into the financial machinery of the new empire.^[4] The treasure that Cyrus had carried off from Astyages did not exhaust the city's wealth; it opened Ecbatana's long service as a store of it, a royal gaza, in the Persian term the Greeks borrowed, that later kings continued to fill.

The archive is documented from an unexpected quarter. The Book of Ezra reports that when officials under Darius searched for the authority behind the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem, the memorandum of Cyrus's original decree was found not at Babylon, where the decree had been issued, but in the records at Ecbatana, under the Aramaic name Achmetha.^[11] The document they are said to have recovered is a terse administrative note, not a proclamation:

In the first year of Cyrus the king, King Cyrus decreed: Temple of God in Jerusalem ... Its height is to be sixty cubits, its width sixty cubits ... The expense is to be met by the king's household.

the memorandum of Cyrus, quoted at Ezra 6:2-5 (in Briant's rendering)^[11]

Whether the text as preserved is authentic in every clause is disputed, but the administrative setting it assumes is exactly right: a royal order, filed as a dated memorandum in the treasury-archive of a residence, retrievable years later when a legal question turned on it.^[4] The detail confirms, from a source with no interest in flattering the Persians, that Ecbatana functioned as a place of record for the central government, and that its archive outlasted the reign that filled it.

The city's Achaemenid history is not all splendour. When the empire convulsed at the accession of Darius in 522-521 BCE, Media rose under a pretender named Fravartiš, who claimed descent from the old Median royal line of Cyaxares. Darius defeated him, hunted him down, and mutilated him, cutting off his nose, ears and tongue and putting out an eye, before holding him in fetters at the palace gate for all to see. The end of the punishment was set, in Darius's own words, at the heart of Median kingship:

After that, I impaled him at Ecbatana; and the men who were his foremost followers, those I hanged at Ecbatana in the fortress.

Darius I, Bisitun inscription §32 (trans. Kuhrt)^[12]

That the execution was staged at Ecbatana, in the fortress, carried its own meaning. The pretender to Median kingship was destroyed at the Median royal seat, before the people who would have been his subjects. The passage also confirms, from a contemporary Persian source rather than a Greek one, that Ecbatana held a citadel serving as a place of custody and display, exactly the strong 'artificial citadel' that Polybius would later describe. The Old Persian of Behistun places the execution at Ecbatana, within the fortress (dida), the same fortress that the Book of Ezra names as the repository of the royal archive.^[4]

The genuine Achaemenid royal presence at Ecbatana is attested, above all, by the two rock inscriptions cut a few kilometres south-west of the modern city, on the flank of Mount Alvand at the place called Ganjnameh. One is in the name of Darius, the other of his son Xerxes; both open with praise of Ahura Mazda and the king's titulary, and both are still in place on the living rock, which is why they carry a weight of certainty that the city's portable inscriptions do not.^[13]

The fullest ancient description of Ecbatana's palace is also the latest and the least trustworthy: a passage of Polybius, written in the second century BCE and set in his account of a campaign of the Seleucid king Antiochus III through the region in 210. By then the city was some three centuries past its Achaemenid prime, and the palace had already been plundered. Polybius nonetheless preserves an impression of its former magnificence:

From of old it had been the royal residence of the Medes and seems to have greatly exceeded all the other cities in wealth and the splendour of its buildings ... For the woodwork was all of cedar and cypress, but no part of it had been left plain: the rafters, the coffers of the ceiling, and the columns in the porticoes and colonnades were sheathed in either silver or gold, and all the tiles were silver.

Polybius, Histories 10.27 (trans. Kuhrt)^[14]

The city, he adds, had no wall of its own but relied on a strong citadel, beneath which the palace stood, some seven stades in circuit.^[14] The columned halls sheathed in precious metal, and above all the silver roof-tiles, are the detail that fixed Ecbatana in the classical imagination as a place of fabulous wealth. Yet the description resists being used as evidence for any single period. Polybius wrote long after the fact, and it is impossible to say, as Briant notes, how much of what he reports goes back to the Median city, how much to Achaemenid rebuilding, and how much to still later Hellenistic work.^[4] What the passage certainly records is that the palace's precious fittings were a real store of wealth, and that they were there to be stripped.

The city's water was carried to it, Polybius says elsewhere, by underground channels, the qanāts that Media and the plateau depended on; and he assigns Achaemenid activity to this system. Briant tentatively connects the Ecbatana qanāts with one of the Persian kings, perhaps Darius, while stressing that this is no more than a guess.^[4]

Because modern Hamadan sits directly on the ancient site, systematic excavation of the royal city has never been possible, and the Achaemenid remains that can be studied are correspondingly few. Several dozen incomplete stone column bases, together with fragments of column drums and stone capitals, attest to the former existence of several hypostyle (columned) halls at Hamadan, the architectural signature of an Achaemenid palace. Most of these pieces come from the mound of Tepe Hegmataneh, in the north-east of the modern centre, long taken to be the heart of ancient Ecbatana. The large excavations conducted there, however, have revealed no level of the Achaemenid period, which means the palaces must be sought elsewhere in the city, perhaps under the neighbouring hill of Tepe Mosalla.^[13]

The inscribed material from Hamadan is a cautionary dossier. Apart from the in-situ Alvand inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, most of the inscribed objects said to come from Ecbatana were 'found' without recorded context, or bought on the market in the 1920s, and their authenticity is variously doubted. Two gold plaques bearing the names of Ariaramnes and Arsames, ancestors of Cyrus who ruled before the Old Persian script existed, are not accepted as genuine inscriptions of those kings; they are held to be either modern forgeries or ancient fabrications of the later Achaemenid period. The pair of foundation tablets in Darius's name, one of gold and one of silver carrying the same text, is reported from Hamadan and belongs to the same doubtful category, and in any case does not name the building it was meant to commemorate. Only the fragmentary inscriptions of Artaxerxes II on column bases, two of which contain the word apadana (a columned audience hall) and specify columns of stone, offer relatively secure confirmation that a real Achaemenid palace stood at Ecbatana, and even these rest on the assumption that the stones did come from Hamadan.^[13] The silver-tiled palace of Polybius, in short, has left the ground almost bare.

Ecbatana kept its role as a treasure-city to the very end of the empire and beyond it. When Darius III fled east before Alexander in 330 BCE, he made for Ecbatana; and when Alexander took the city he turned it into the depository of the accumulated wealth of Persis. Arrian records that he instructed Parmenion to deposit the money being carried up from Persia in the citadel at Ecbatana, under the charge of Harpalus with a guard of several thousand Macedonians.^[15] It was at Ecbatana, some years later, that Alexander's companion Hephaestion died.

The silver and gold that Polybius describes were carried off in stages: first by Alexander, then by Antigonus and Seleucus in the wars of the Successors. Enough remained, even so, that when Antiochus III reached the city around 210 BCE he was able to strip what was left of the precious-metal fittings and mint from them a very large sum, on the order of four thousand talents.^[14] The city's hold on the classical imagination rested as much on its region as on its walls. Polybius, who knew Media through Seleucid campaigns, thought the country so rich that it 'might rank as a kingdom', the most notable principality in Asia for the extent of its territory and the quality of its men and horses.^[4] The famous Nisaean stud farms, which in the time of the Great Kings were said to have pastured more than a hundred thousand horses, lay some six days' march from Ecbatana; the city commanded the horse-country that supplied the imperial cavalry, and that alone made it worth holding.^[4]

Under the Seleucids and then the Parthians the city remained a regional capital; the Parthian kings, Strabo says, summered at Ecbatana as the Achaemenids had done. The seasonal logic of the place, cool and high on the road between the lowlands and the plateau, outlasted every dynasty that used it. Beneath Hamadan it lies still, the one Achaemenid royal seat still buried under a living city.