Pasargadae

The Greeks knew the place as Pasargadai, and it is under a form of that name that it enters the record. Herodotus gives Pasargadae not as a place but as the leading Persian tribe, "the most distinguished" of them, containing "the clan of the Achaemenidae from which sprung the Perseid kings"; he does not name it as a city, so whether the tribal name and the place-name are truly one has been argued back and forth.^[3] A firmer anchor came from the clay: shortly before finishing his edition of the Elamite Persepolis Fortification tablets, R. T. Hallock recognised that the toponym Batrakataš, which appears on seven of the tablets (dated 497–491 BCE) in connection with a royal treasury and royal stores, is very probably the Elamite form of the name of Cyrus's capital; his glossary entry keeps an editor's caution, "presumably Pasargadae".^[4] A long scholarly habit supposed the Iranian name had originally begun Parsa- and been transformed by metathesis; Stronach reports the objection of Martin Schwartz that the plainly recognisable Parsa would hardly have been garbled into something else, and that both the Elamite name and the weight of the classical testimony tell against the supposed change.^[2] The name that stuck is the Greek one.

One point of the name-history bears on the whole site. The belief that Cyrus's capital was first called Parsa founders, Stronach notes, on the record of Darius's own inscriptions: it was Darius who chose to stamp the explicitly Persian character on his patrimony, renaming the old highland (formerly Anshan) as Pārsa and, above all, giving that same name to his new capital, Persepolis.^[2] The 'Persian-ness' that later flowed through Persepolis was Darius's programme, laid over a foundation Cyrus had built under other names.

The ceremonial heart of Pasargadae lies about a kilometre north of the tomb, in a broad flat tract that the excavations have shown to have been laid out as a series of contiguous gardens. The three principal buildings (Gate R, Palace P and Palace S) each stand at least two hundred metres from its neighbours, and older scholarship read that dispersal as the mark of a nomad ruler's first settlement, a fixed version of a royal camp. Stronach's excavation and the survey that followed have overturned that picture: the wide spacing was deliberate, the intervals filled by the watered park that both beautified the precinct and bound its uniformly oriented structures into one planned composition.^[2] Waters puts the point plainly, that the layout only looks like a scatter until the gardens are restored to it.^[5] The nomad-camp reading has not survived the ground.

The basic building unit was the columned hall, a form long known in western Persia; but its expression at Pasargadae was wholly new, and it drew on the superb stone-working (the finely jointed ashlar, the anathyrosis joints, the dovetailed iron-and-lead clamps) that had recently evolved in Lydia and Ionia, the very regions Cyrus had conquered in the 540s BCE. The debt is close enough that Carl Nylander could argue the masons themselves were Ionian and Lydian craftsmen brought east in the conqueror's train, working Persian designs in a western technique.^[4] From about 540 onward the finished stone platform, staircase, doorway and column became the hallmark of Achaemenid architecture, and they begin here; the column-shaft designs at Palace P, Waters notes, closely anticipate those of the Persepolis Treasury, one of many threads that tie Cyrus's capital to the terrace Darius would raise a generation later.^[2][5]

Gate R, at the eastern edge of the precinct, is the earliest known free-standing gatehouse (propylaeum) in the world, and it may well have been the model for the famous Gate of Xerxes at Persepolis.^[2] Its great doorways were flanked by colossal winged bulls copied from the lamassu that had guarded Assyrian palace gates; those are gone but for fragments of carved hair and a piece of a crown. What survives, almost miraculously, is a carved winged figure three metres high on one jamb of a side doorway, a man's figure with four wings, wearing a composite dress that gathers up the conquered world: a Syro-Phoenician Egyptianising ḥmḥm crown, an Elamite robe with an Ionian rosette border, worked within the Assyrian tradition of the winged genius. Stronach reads it not as a copy of any one model but as a deliberate fusion of the visual languages of the newly conquered lands, made to embody the protective force of the young empire.^[2] Margaret Cool Root, treating the figure within the whole programme of Achaemenid royal art, added two cautions that have stuck: the inscription once set above it need not label the carving (it may simply mark the building as Cyrus's work), and, unlike the Assyrian guardians who confront the visitor, this being faces into the building, so a simple protective function was probably not the intent; she read it as a mythical vision relating directly to kingship.^[6] (For the wider argument over what such a winged ensign signifies, see the winged symbol.) Waters presses the reading further: because the figure's crown belongs to a repertoire Cyrus never ruled (Egypt was not conquered until Cambyses), the relief was very probably finished under Cambyses or Darius, and its placement at the gate, together with its more-than-human scale, makes a case for a 'mythologized Cyrus' (Root's phrase), a founder edging into the divine sphere rather than a mere guardian.^[5] The dating governs the meaning, and the dating is not secure.

The Gate's very concept, a monumental doorway divorced from any wall, was without precedent; by de-emphasising defence for ceremony, Stronach suggests, Cyrus may have meant the gate to show an empire strong enough to do without fixed defences, and a king who chose to receive the peoples of his realm rather than shut them out.^[2]

Palace S (Herzfeld's 'palace with the column', for the one shaft that long stood there) was the principal public hall, a central columned room with porticoes 'in antis' (each ended by a stone pier, another Ionian borrowing) opening to the gardens; its black-stone animal capitals took the form of lions, bulls and a unique horse, the sculptors still experimenting with a motif that would become an Achaemenid leitmotif.^[7] Palace P, more intimate, with a low roof over many columns, held the reliefs most bound up with the dynasty's memory of itself: a king in a long pleated robe inlaid with gold, an attendant behind him, and on the oblique folds of the robe a trilingual label, CMc, naming the figure 'Cyrus the Great King, an Achaemenid'. Only the Elamite and part of the Akkadian survive on the stone; an Old Persian version is assumed to have run above them but is no longer extant, a small fact with a large bearing on the dating argument below.^[5] But the cut of the pleats belongs to Darius's reign, later than Cyrus's own, and every current sign, Stronach argues, is that Palace P (begun under Cyrus, halted at his sudden death) was completed by Darius, who enriched these reliefs with gold and inscribed Cyrus's name here as part of a deliberate effort to knit himself to the founder's heritage.^[2] Briant records the same drift of scholarship: the dating of Palace P "remains debated, the tendency being to attribute it to the reign of Darius", while the gatehouse "without doubt goes back to Cyrus".^[8]

Before the main façade of Palace P ran a garden, and enough of it survives in stone to make Pasargadae a place of the first importance in the history of gardens. A series of carved stone water-channels and basins marked out two adjoining rectangles in front of the palace.^[9] The palace's paved throne-portico, a king's retreat, carried a centrally placed throne-base, sited so that an unbroken vista ran down the middle of the planted ground; from it the king could hold court while looking out over the green expanse of his estate. That central opening divided the garden into four quarters, and here Stronach makes his celebrated, carefully hedged claim: if the reconstruction is right, the Pasargadae garden documents 'the first known occurrence of the čahārbāgh or fourfold garden', the form that would shape Persian and later Islamic garden layout for centuries, in Iran and well beyond it.^[9]

Two cautions attach. First, the fourfold reading is built out from the central axis: the channels themselves define only two adjoining rectangles, and the quadripartite division follows from the central throne-vista and, perhaps, from Cyrus's Mesopotamian-derived title 'king of the four quarters', a suggestive fit, not a proof. The magnetic survey of 1999–2002 found the stone channels preserved on only three sides of the quadrilateral, judged Stronach's axial restitution highly plausible while recording nothing new along the axis itself, and suggested the watered layout was in fact looser and larger than his plan.^[10] Second, the fully formalised čahārbāgh as a named and canonical type is a later development (Sasanian and Islamic); Cyrus's designers made the thing, or its beginning, long before the name existed. With those cautions, the wonder holds: the walled watered pleasure-park (in Old Iranian a pairidaēza, 'a walled place', the word the Greeks took as parádeisos and Europe took as paradise) is a Persian invention, and its earliest surviving example is the ground Cyrus watered here. The pairidaēza as an institution, named in three languages and spread across the empire (see the paradise garden), is a wider subject; what Pasargadae supplies is the one Achaemenid instance that has actually been dug. Xenophon, a century and more later, still caught the ideal exactly:

Nowhere among the various countries which he inhabits or visits does he fail to make it his first care that there shall be orchards and gardens, parks and "paradises," as they are called, full of all fair and noble products which the earth brings forth; and within these chiefly he spends his days, when the season of the year permits.

Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4, trans. Dakyns^[11]

He made the ownership personal: shown his own paradise at Sardis, the younger Cyrus told his Spartan guest, "It is I who measured and arranged it all; some of the trees I planted with my own hands."^[12] The watered garden was a thing a Persian ruler was proud to have made grow, and the throne-portico at Pasargadae, sited to command the length of the planted ground, is that pride built in stone. That the Pasargadae garden was tended down the whole life of the empire is shown by a small human detail: a cache of exquisite jewellery and worked precious metal, concealed in a water-jar set by one of the garden pavilions as the empire fell, was found in the excavations: someone's treasure, buried in the paradise as the Macedonians came.^[2]

At the northern edge of the site stand two stone plinths, some nine metres apart, over two metres high, of white limestone rising from black borders. The southern of the two, reached by a monolithic flight of eight steps, has been read since Stronach's excavation as a stand from which the king could pray before an elevated fire-altar raised on its fellow, exactly the tableau carved a generation later over Darius's tomb, where the king stands raised on a stepped plinth, hand lifted before the flames (see Naqsh-e Rostam).^[13] Fragments of two or three portable stone fire-holders, each with a three-stepped top and matching base linked by a slender shaft, have been found elsewhere on the site; Mary Boyce reconstructed from them a fire raised "a little above waist-height", before which a king could pray with dignity.^[14] Boyce kept a caution about the plinths themselves: they are "unique structures" whose purpose "cannot be precisely determined", though royal rites in the open remain the natural reading; and Pierre Amiet has proposed that the two cubes are not altars at all but the bases of unfinished towers.^[14][13] The close correspondence between the Pasargadae plinths and the fire-rite shown at Naqsh-e Rostam is, Stronach notes, one of the few hard archaeological signs that open-air worship carried over unbroken from Cyrus's reign into Darius's, the same rite at height that the outside sources describe for the Persians.^[2]

Not far north of the palaces stands a fourteen-metre stone tower, known locally as the Zendān-e Soleymān, 'the Prison of Solomon', still boasting an almost intact entrance face. Built of finely cut white limestone broken by three rows of blind windows in dark stone, it held a single small chamber raised above nearly eight metres of solid masonry, reached only by a monumental external stair to a high doorway.^[7] Its shallow patterned recesses are otherwise found only on one other building in the world, the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt at Naqsh-e Rostam, which is an almost exact copy of it. What the twin towers were for has been argued for a century: fire-temples, tombs, treasuries, or investiture towers are all in play. Boyce, weighing the tower's striking likeness to the tomb of Cyrus (the same plain raised chamber with restricted access, the same triple divisions, the same costly stonework), held that its purpose could hardly have been other than funerary, one version making it the otherwise unknown tomb of Cambyses; the standing objection is that Darius's near-exact copy at Naqsh-e Rostam would then have had no king left to hold.^[14] Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg proposed to reconcile the readings by making the towers the setting for the critical initiation rites at the opening of each reign, so that, in a ritual sense, they might have served all of these functions at once.^[15] The question stays honestly open, as it does for the tower's twin at Naqsh-e Rostam; Briant's flat summary stands, that "its precise purpose has not been determined".^[8]

A kilometre south of the palaces, alone on the plain, stands the one monument of Pasargadae that the ancient world itself described: the tomb of Cyrus. It is built in massive ashlar in two clean elements: a stepped plinth of six receding tiers (the lower three tall, the upper three lower) and, upon it, a small gabled tomb-chamber with a steeply pitched stone roof, the whole once reaching almost eleven metres.^[7] Its lines are austere and its upward thrust deliberate; the few decorative details, at the doorway and the pediment, are Lydo-Ionian in origin (the splayed lintel, the double-curved cyma reversa moulding), so that the ornament looks west even as the total design looks like nothing else on earth. The gabled chamber descends from western Anatolian tomb-houses, but those were buried under mounds; the free-standing plinth has no good funerary parallel but the uncertain 'pyramid tomb' at Sardis, and may owe something in concept to the Mesopotamian ziggurat. No single source explains it. Whatever its parts, Stronach writes, the monument 'continues to convey a compelling sense of integrity and sanctity.'^[2] In antiquity it did not stand bare: Aristobulus, in Arrian's report, found it "in the royal park; a grove had been planted round it with all sorts of trees and irrigated, and deep grass had grown in the meadow".^[16]

The Greeks who came with Alexander read and reported the tomb's epitaph, and two versions reached us. The shorter, from Onesicritus, is terse to the point of bleakness: "Here I lie, Cyrus, king of kings."^[17] The fuller version, from Aristobulus, who was charged by Alexander with the tomb's care, is the one that has echoed down the centuries, the founder of the world's empire asking a stranger only not to begrudge him his grave:

O man, I am Cyrus, son of Cambyses, who founded the empire of the Persians, and was king of Asia. Do not therefore grudge me this monument.

the tomb of Cyrus, reported by Arrian, Anabasis 6.29, trans. Chinnock^[18]

The epitaph is not above suspicion. No trace of any inscription, Old Persian or other, has been recovered from the tomb in modern times, and the title 'king of Asia' has no Near Eastern parallel and reads, Waters observes, as a Greek formulation laid over whatever the Persians actually carved.^[5] The Greek reports also preserve the tomb's living cult, though only at the remove Waters is careful to mark: Aristobulus describes a body laid in a golden sarcophagus among Median and Babylonian finery, and a small building beside the ascent for the magi who guarded the grave, an office passing from father to son and paid a daily allowance of a sheep, flour and wine with a horse each month to sacrifice. Provisions of just the sort recorded in the Persepolis Fortification tablets, issued for royal cult and its attendants, make such a maintained, endowed monument entirely credible, even though the tablets nowhere name the tomb of Cyrus itself.^[5]

Alexander is the tomb's second protagonist. When he came to Pasargadae late in his eastern campaign he found the grave had been broken into and plundered (the golden coffin and its furnishings gone, the body disturbed), and he ordered Aristobulus to make it good and to punish the guardians, though nothing was got from them.^[16] Aristobulus's charge, as Arrian records it, was minute: to gather up what remained of the body, restore the couch and its coverings item by item, block the forced entry, and seal the new clay with the royal signet.^[5] The great stone platform of the Tall-e Takht nearby held the storehouse of Pasargadae that had been surrendered to Alexander intact in 330, and the site kept a treasury under Greek control for decades after.^[16] The gesture belonged to Alexander's wider claim on the Achaemenid inheritance, the conqueror repairing the founder's grave as an act of succession as much as of piety.

The tomb long outlived the memory of the man. To the people of Fars from the Middle Ages onward it was the tomb of the Mother of Solomon (qabr-e mādar-e Soleymān), a shrine and an object of women's devotion, visited, seventeenth-century travellers report, in all weathers by women praying for children; it is under that name that the Venetian Giosafat Barbaro described it in 1474 and generations of European travellers drew it.^[2][5] The Solomonic attribution was not confined to the tomb: the Zendān became Solomon's prison and the Tall-e Takht his mother's throne, a whole Islamic-era re-reading of the site laid over its forgotten Achaemenid meaning. Only in the nineteenth century (James Morier first floating the idea, Robert Ker Porter pressing it after Grotefend read the name of Cyrus in the site's inscriptions) was the 'Mother of Solomon' recognised as Cyrus, and the identity of Pasargadae itself established beyond reasonable doubt by 1908.^[19] The tomb names no one, so the identification rests on fit rather than label; Bruno Jacobs has restated the formal case for caution, noting that Strabo's Onesicritus notice could suit the Zendān better, while allowing that Arrian's description, down to the conspicuously low entrance, fits the gabled monument exactly.^[20]

Three short trilingual texts (Old Persian, Elamite, Akkadian) are attached to the monuments, known by the sigla CMa, CMb, CMc; and their dating has been one of the sharper arguments in Achaemenid studies. The CMa text, once repeated at key points in Gate R, Palace S and Palace P, reads with a stark brevity: "I am Cyrus the King, an Achaemenian."^[19]

For most of a century this was read as Cyrus's own laconic foundation inscription. Stronach's own case, built through the 1970s and 80s, is that it is not. The decisive turn was the recognition that the Old Persian cuneiform script was itself an invention of the early reign of Darius, most probably around 519 BCE: the Elamite version of the Behistun inscription has Darius state that he made his text "in Aryan, as previously was not", and the order in which the Behistun texts were cut confirms it.^[21] If Old Persian did not exist before Darius, an Old Persian CMa could not have been carved by Cyrus. The internal evidence agrees: the bare title 'king' (with neither patronymic nor the grand Mesopotamian titulary Cyrus used at Babylon), and the very word 'Achaemenid' (an affiliation to a ruling Achaemenid line that appears nowhere in Cyrus's genuine long inscription from Babylon but is the founding claim of Darius's Behistun) both point to Darius's hand.^[2] The name of Darius has in fact been detected in the fragmentary CMb, a reading owed to Borger and Hinz; and Cyrus, Stronach argues, would have broken standard Achaemenid practice by cutting CMa on the unfinished fabric of Palace P at all.^[4]

Waters sets out the case for Darius's authorship as three independent strands that point the same way. First, chronology: Pasargadae was unfinished at Cyrus's death and was not completed until well into Darius's reign, so that the reliefs and their inscriptions belong among the last touches, cut in the 510s. Second, the script: Darius himself claimed to have created Old Persian cuneiform, a claim contested in detail but accepted on the weight of the evidence, and if the script did not exist before him the Old Persian CMa cannot be Cyrus's. Third, the genealogy: the one inscription Cyrus certainly commissioned, the Babylon cylinder, traces his line only to Teispes and never names Achaemenes, so the 'Achaemenid' affiliation stamped on the Pasargadae texts is Darius's founding claim, not the founder's.^[5] For CMc the script argument rests entirely on an assumed Old Persian text: the version that would have to be Cyrus's, if any were, never survived on the stone at all, and the Elamite and Akkadian versions that do survive cannot be dated by script.^[5]

The weight of the field has followed Stronach: Darius, not Cyrus, is the author of the Pasargadae inscriptions, cut a decade or more after the founder's death, at his predecessor's unfinished capital, precisely where smooth un-inscribed stone lay ready, to reinforce the new idea (first advanced at Behistun) of a single Achaemenid line to which both Cyrus and Darius belonged. Kuhrt's source-book simply relabels the texts, CMa = DMa, "written in the name of Cyrus but put up by Darius I"; Briant judges their authenticity "now widely contested, not without excellent reasons", the texts deriving from Darius, "taking the role of forger that is attributed to him".^[22][8] The same point recurs at Naqsh-e Rostam and in the winged symbol: the Old Persian monumental record that reads as the voice of the early kings is very largely Darius's making. This remains a scholarly reconstruction, argued from the script's date and the texts' idiom, and it falls short of a settled certainty. Its keystone, Darius's authorship of the Old Persian script, is itself an interpretation of DB §70 that Kuhrt calls 'widely, albeit not universally, accepted', and were that early date to fall the whole chronological argument would loosen; Herzfeld's original ascription to Cyrus is set aside on the balance of argument, without being refuted outright. What would close the question is what Pasargadae has never yielded, an inscribed context that fixes the cutting of the texts to one reign or the other.^[22]

The ruins were never lost (they sit on the old road from Shiraz north), but they were long mis-identified, and their excavation is a twentieth-century story. Ernst Herzfeld made minor soundings in 1923 and a fuller four-week season in 1928, producing the first real site-plan and clearing much of the stone of Gate R and Palaces S and P. Aurel Stein mapped the southern plain in 1933; Ali Sami dug and conserved for six years from 1949, the Archaeological Institute of Persepolis clearing the palace sites down to their original foundations.^[23] The decisive campaign was David Stronach's for the British Institute of Persian Studies, 1961–63, which set the chronology of the monuments, established the character of early Achaemenid stone architecture, brought out the central role of the garden, and recovered the buried jewellery-cache; Stronach's Pasargadae (1978) is the report on which all later work rests.^[2] Since 1999 the Franco-Iranian surface and geomagnetic survey led by Rémy Boucharlat has shown that far more of the plain than the standing ruins was laid out along the same master axis as the royal garden: the palace park was one part of a much larger designed landscape, and the old picture of a nomads' camp-capital is gone.^[10]

In July 2004 Pasargadae was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, both for the tomb and palaces and for its place at the head of the Achaemenid architectural and garden traditions that Persepolis and Susa would carry on.^[2] It stands today much as the travellers drew it: the lone gabled tomb on its stepped plinth, the single winged genius on his doorway, the paved throne-portico, and the shallow stone channels of the first paradise, dry now, running out across the Murghab plain.