Persepolis

The Persians had one name for the place, and it was not Persepolis. In their own language it was Pārsa, the same word as the land of Persia and the people who lived there. It is written so in the one royal inscription that names it, Xerxes's text over the great gate, and it recurs in hundreds of the administrative tablets found on the terrace.^[1][2] Because the Greeks took Pársa for the name of a single city rather than of a whole country, and rendered it Persépolis, later usage stretched "Persia" to cover the whole of Iran, until in 1936 the Iranian government asked the world to use "Iran" instead.^[2]

The Greek form is an exonym; the classical writers also used the plainer Persai for the site, as Arrian does.^[1] A familiar modern gloss turns the Greek name into a pun, "city of the Persians" heard against "sacker of cities", but no such wordplay is attested in the ancient record, and it is best set aside. What the sources give is the plain equation: Old Persian Pārsa, the Persians and their royal seat; Greek Persai or Persépolis, the same place seen from outside. On the philology of the name itself Pierre Lecoq noted that Pārsa may be Median in origin rather than Persian.^[3]

After the fall of the empire the ancient name was lost. Already in the Sasanian period the ruined terrace was called sad-stūn, "hundred columns", a name that appears in a fourth-century royal inscription; in Firdausī's Shāhnāma the ruins are sad-sutun and taxt-i Jamshīd, "the throne of Jamshid", after the mythical king of the national epic.^[4] To European travellers they were Chehel Minār, "the Forty Columns" (later also hazār sutun, "a thousand columns"), and to a Muslim tradition that read the winged genii and colossi as the works of Solomon they were the "Mosque of Solomon".^[5][4] The old identification with the Persepolis of the Greek and Latin authors was made only in the seventeenth century (below).

Persepolis stands on the Marv Dasht plain of Fars, some fifty kilometres north-east of modern Shiraz, where a spur of the Kuh-e Rahmat, the "Mountain of Mercy", juts westward into the plain. Into that spur the builders cut and levelled an artificial platform, the terrace, filling the hollows with the quarried rubble and facing the whole with a wall of massive limestone blocks. Erich Schmidt, who directed the Oriental Institute of Chicago's excavations in the 1930s, reckoned that about 125,000 square metres of irregular rocky slope had to be shaped into the planned platform, the high parts cut down and the depressions packed with the spoil.^[6]

The result is an oblong of roughly 455 by 300 metres, its retaining wall rising between about eight and eighteen metres above the plain and standing highest where it faces west.^[6][7] The masonry is dry-laid, without mortar, the blocks fitted with what one modern survey calls "the minute precision of a jigsaw puzzle" and locked at the top by iron clamps set in lead, most of them long since prised out by metal-robbers.^[4][6] The whole complex is oriented on a fixed scheme that departs some nineteen to twenty-one degrees from the cardinal points, and a system of rock-cut drainage tunnels, cut into the bedrock and sloping gently from north to south, was driven beneath the platform to carry off the torrential winter rains that would otherwise have undermined the mud-brick walls.^[6] The skew from the cardinal points has been read as more than an engineering datum. In the late 1960s Wolfgang Lentz, working with the astronomer Wolfhard Schlosser, argued that the axes of the complex are aligned on the risings and settings of prominent celestial bodies at prominent dates of the year, making the terrace in part an instrument of observational astronomy; James George, investigating the orientation independently, agreed that it is solstitial, the lines to sunrise and sunset on the summer and winter solstices crossing to "form a sort of St. Andrew's Cross" in the main hall of the Tripylon.^[8] Lentz went further and rejected a spring assembly outright, since delegations gathering in March would have travelled "in the depths of winter", and held that Biruni's testimony puts the start of the old Persian year at the summer solstice, a claim that bears on the New Year question taken up below.^[8] The terrace was, in short, an engineered foundation as much as a stage, laced with hidden channels and buttressed against its own weight.

What is visible today is only the stone skeleton. The standing columns, doorframes, window-surrounds, stairways and reliefs are of the grey to black limestone of the Kuh-e Rahmat and of finer quarries further off; the walls between them were of sun-dried mud brick, in the Apadana some five metres thick, faced with glazed tiles and now almost wholly gone.^[7] Two architectural traditions meet in the buildings, one at home with mud brick, the other with wooden and stone columns, and the emphasis of the surviving record on the durable stone has tended to hide how much of Persepolis was brick and timber and colour.^[7]

That Darius I was the founder is not in doubt: his inscriptions are carved into the southern face of the terrace, and the gold and silver foundation tablets of the Apadana are his.^[6] Exactly when he began is less certain, and the scholarship gives a genuine spread. Schmidt thought work could have started around 520, once the great revolts of Darius's first years were behind him; Maria Brosius and others give about 518; Josef Wiesehöfer and the Forgotten Empire catalogue prefer about 515.^{[6][9][4][10]} A convention of about 518 is workable, provided it is read as the start of a very long process, not the raising of a finished city. The trilingual inscriptions on the southern terrace wall (DPd to DPg) carry their own dating spread: George Cameron placed them between 511 and 507, just after the European campaign, while Richard Hallock, noting that the omission of a people from such a list proves little, preferred about 515 to 505.^[8] Either way, as Mousavi observes, the foundation inscriptions attest that the platform, the citadel of Persepolis, was complete by the end of the sixth century, with the Apadana begun on it around 515.^[8]

Briant enters a caution against taking Darius's own foundation language too literally. In his terrace inscription DPf Darius claims to have built a fortress "where none had existed before", and as a statement about the terrace itself that is fair, since he did inaugurate the platform.^[11] But excavation on the surrounding plain has found remains over nearly two hundred hectares that were being urbanised well before Darius, and the tablets seem to call the district Matezziš (Old Persian Uvādaicaya); an organised royal economy of the Elamite type was already running in Persis before the first dated Fortification tablet of 509.^[12] Persepolis was a new dynastic centre, meant to supersede Cyrus's Pasargadae, but it rose in a landscape already worked and settled. Brosius reports the suggestion that the site itself may first have been chosen by Cambyses, and just north of the later terrace the recent excavation of a Babylonian-style glazed-brick gateway at Tol-e Ājorī, datable between Cyrus's conquest of Babylon in 539 and Darius's early reign, has shown that Darius did not incorporate a Cyrus-era monument into his design but had it pulled down.^[9][7]

Persepolis was the work of successive kings across nearly two centuries, and its unity is the retrospective effect of a shared plan rather than of a single campaign. Darius planned and began the terrace and its first structures: the Apadana, the building Schmidt called the Council Hall (the Tripylon), his own palace, and the original Treasury.^[6] Xerxes added the monumental western entrance and the Gate of All Nations, his own residence, the Harem, and altered the Treasury, and he began the Hall of a Hundred Columns, which his son Artaxerxes I completed.^[6][7] Artaxerxes III, in the mid-fourth century, was the last known builder, adding a stairway west of Darius's palace and reusing its gift-bearer reliefs.^[7]

The process was slow, and for most of its length the terrace was a building site of scaffolding, ramps and moving gangs. Roger Matthews and Hassan Fazeli Nashli judge that the "unified grandeur" a visitor now feels would have become dominant only about sixty years after building began, well into the reign of Artaxerxes I.^[13] Even then it was not finished. The Companion's contributors put it flatly: "Almost nothing was completed at the death of Darius in 486 BCE", and unfinished column drums and bases, some abandoned in transit between the quarries and the terrace, still lie about the site.^[7] The Unfinished Gate before the Hall of a Hundred Columns, its guardian bulls only roughed out, was still under construction late in the life of the empire.^[5]

The Treasury tablets give the same slow process in payroll form. In the second and third years of Xerxes more than five hundred Syrian, Egyptian and Ionian workers designated as "up-carriers" were engaged on the construction of columned halls; from his fourth year the texts name "wood-workers", sculptors, people "working on iron doors" and decorators making reliefs and working on "gold inlays"; and the peak comes late in the reign, in years 19 and 20, when some 1,300 "Treasury workers" were employed at the site, one tablet counting 1,149 "artisans working on the gateway to the columned hall".^[8] The numerals, Cameron judged, showed that a "large project was afoot", probably the Hall of a Hundred Columns, which squares with the two-reign attribution of its foundation slab.^[8] Then the record thins: by the seventh year of Artaxerxes I, 458, building activity at the site had come to a standstill for reasons that are unclear, and for almost two generations there is a gap in the textual history of construction before the last works of the fourth century.^[8]

The attributions are anchored in inscriptions and foundation records. Darius's authorship of the Apadana is fixed by its buried foundation tablets; the Hall of a Hundred Columns carries no building text on its walls, but a Babylonian foundation slab found in its debris assigns it to two reigns:

Of this palace, my father King Xerxes laid the foundations; with the protection of Ahuramazda, I, King Artaxerxes, built it and realized it.

Artaxerxes I, A¹Pb^[14]

Darius's terrace was first entered from the south. Around a decade after his death Xerxes shifted the approach to the north-west corner and built a grand double-reversed stairway, its two flights of shallow steps easy enough for mounted men to ride up, climbing to a top landing nearly twelve metres above the plain.^[6] At its head he raised the Gate of All Nations, a single square hall about 24.75 metres on a side, its roof once carried on four tall stone columns, its three doorways guarded by colossi: bulls at the western entrance, human-headed winged bulls at the eastern, modelled on the lamassu of Assyrian palaces, the gate of Sennacherib at Nineveh among them.^[6][4] Through it a visitor passed toward the court before the Apadana.

Four near-identical trilingual inscriptions of Xerxes, in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, are cut above the colossi. In them the king names the building and, with it, the whole terrace:

By the favour of Auramazda I have built this Gateway of All Lands. Much else (that is) good (was) built throughout this Persepolis, which I have built and which my father has built. But whatever work appears (to be) good, all that we have done by the favour of Auramazda.

Xerxes I, XPa §3, trans. Kuhrt^[15]

The "Gateway of All Lands" (Old Persian duvarthim visadahyum) is the gate's own name, and the only such text is Xerxes'; Darius left no "gate of all nations" inscription.^[1] The phrase states in words what the delegations of the Apadana state in stone: that all the lands of the empire pass through the king's door.

The Apadana is the largest and most imposing building of the terrace, and the one whose modern name (from a very similar hall at Susa) is a convenience rather than an attested designation; none of the inscriptions calls it apadāna.^[7] It is a great square hypostyle hall raised on a podium about 2.6 metres high, its central room measuring some 60 metres on a side, its roof carried on thirty-six stone columns arranged in six rows of six, with three columned porticoes on the north, east and west adding two rows of six each, for seventy-two columns in all.^[5][7] The columns rose to about nineteen metres, among the most slender stone supports of the ancient world, their bell-shaped bases carved to resemble inverted lotus flowers, their capitals crowned by the foreparts of paired bulls between which the cedar beams of the roof were laid.^[9][5] The hall could have held some ten thousand people; its thick mud-brick walls were faced with glazed tiles of green, blue and orange in patterns of rosettes and palms.^[7]

That Darius began it is proved by its foundation deposits. In the north-eastern and south-eastern corners of the hall, buried beneath the walls, Herzfeld's architect Friedrich Krefter found stone boxes each holding two inscribed metal plaques, one gold and one silver, and beneath each box a small hoard of coins: in one corner four gold Croesid staters of the lion-and-bull type, a silver griffin coin of Abdera and a silver turtle of Aegina.^[6][16] The plaques carry the same trilingual text, DPh, a statement of the reach of the realm:

This (is) the kingdom which I hold, from the Saca who are beyond Sogdiana, from there as far as Kush, from the Indus as far as Sardis, which Auramazda, the greatest of the gods, bestowed upon me.

Darius I, DPh, trans. Kuhrt^[17]

Because the text names no conquest later than about 513, Schmidt inferred that the substructure of the hall must already have been complete before Darius's Scythian campaign of that year; that is an inference from a geographic list rather than a fixed date, and it has a rival.^[6][8] As Ali Mousavi lays the problem out, "two datings have so far been proposed" for the foundation tablets, one from the text, "prior to the European expedition (between 513 and 511)", the other "after 500, because of the dates assigned to the coins found in the deposits".^[8] The find itself is less tidy than the published inventory suggests: Friedrich Krefter and Mohammad-Taqi Mostafavi both reported twelve coins from the pits, eight gold and four silver, against the account Schmidt printed.^[8] The most recent numismatic re-examination, however, finds the deposit coins "a mixed group as one would expect to find circulating in the Persian empire in the last decade of the sixth century", with even the problem Cypriot piece possibly struck before 500, so the low dating has lost most of its force; Margaret Root, for her part, holds firmly that the plaques were inscribed and buried before the Thracian expedition.^[8] A foundation deposit of this kind, as Cindy Nimchuk observes, implies a divine witness, yet its laying was not a hidden act: it was a public ceremony, weighted with meaning and watched by much of the court.^[16] And the dependence between the coins and the building runs both ways, for the deposit is itself an anchor of Greek numismatic chronology. "The earliest datable context for an Aeginetan coin", Colin Kraay wrote in the Cambridge Ancient History, "is the foundation deposit of the audience-hall of Darius I at Persepolis, which can be no earlier than c. 515", from which it follows that "the earliest Aeginetan coinage must have been minted at least several decades before this".^[18] The hall Darius sealed his coins beneath now helps to date the coinages of Greece.

The two great stairway façades of the Apadana carry the most studied sculpture of the empire, and the argument over what it means is the central debate of Achaemenid art. On the north and east façades alike, three registers of relief on one wing show a Persian and Median court, guards, dignitaries and horses, facing a central panel; three registers on the other wing show twenty-three delegations of the subject peoples, each led forward by an usher who takes the leading figure by the hand, each bringing the produce, animals, vessels, weapons and cloth of its land.^[19][1] In the central panel, originally, sat the king, the crown prince behind him, receiving an official who bows with his hand raised before his mouth. That the two "Treasury reliefs", found reused in the Treasury, were the original central panels of the two façades was suspected by Schmidt and demonstrated during the conservation work of Ann and Giuseppe Tilia, a discovery that fixed the composition's design in the reign of Darius even though the carving ran on under Xerxes.^[19][16]

The king in the panel is not a portrait. Brosius describes the seated figure in his crenellated crown, staff and lotus in hand, feet on a footstool, the heir at his shoulder "at equal height", the bowing noble, the two incense-burners between them; but who the king is, Darius receiving with Xerxes as heir, or Xerxes with his own heir, the sculpture itself does not say, and the identification turns on crown-typology and find-spot rather than on any individual feature.^[9]

Root read this reticence as the point. The Apadana relief, she argued, does not record one king receiving homage on one day; it conveys "the impression of an often repeated ritual", an image of the unity of empire "abstracted from time".^[19] The official who bows she took to be a court marshal announcing the delegations lined up on the other wing, so that the two planes of the façade, which fold visually into one when seen head-on, read as a single scene: the king receiving, the nations approaching.^[19] Others, following the Greek sources, have seen in the bowing man the chiliarch performing proskynesis, the ritual obeisance the classical authors describe.^[12]

Root's larger claim is that the whole programme was engineered to say something the older imperial arts did not. In Assyria and Egypt, processions of foreigners bringing goods proclaimed conquest and submission; the Achaemenid designers, she argued, took the same theme and inverted its message:

A theme which, in Assyria and Egypt, was used to describe the military subjugation of the tributaries, was transformed by the Achaemenids into a scene of pious reverence through a conscious sculptural allusion to age-old Mesopotamian and Egyptian motifs of the petitioner's introduction into the presence of an awe-inspiring divinity.

Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art^[19]

The delegates are dignified, unranked, and unbound; violence is nowhere in the scene. Explicit images of the king triumphant over enemies, Root noted, are "extremely rare in Achaemenid art", the Behistun relief being almost the only one.^[19] The image is one of "imperial harmony" rather than of an actual event.^[19] Modern writers have restated the reading in their own terms: Brosius sets the calm audience against the battle-and-hunt of Assyrian palace art and calls the message a pax persica:

the image of the enthroned king holding an audience aims to convey a very specific message: the empire of the Persian king is an empire at peace, an empire in which there is no need to fight wars but in which the king ensures the stability of the realm.

Brosius, A History of Ancient Persia^[9]

Briant does not deny the harmony; he insists it is ideology, and that the force it sublimates is still legible. Reading the throne-and-gift-bearers together with the inscriptions that caption such scenes, he holds that "the accent is placed more on political subjugation and imposition of tribute than on collaboration", the idealisation working precisely to make conquest serene.^[12] Yet even Briant grants the building texts their rhetoric of concord:

These documents eloquently attest to the royal desire to depict every country and every people of the Empire united in harmonious cooperation organized by and surrounding the king.

Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander^[12]

The two readings do not quite contradict. Root shows how the visual language was built, by selection and inversion of older models, to picture willing association; Briant reminds that a picture of willing association is what an empire of force most needs. No monograph in the field overturns Root's core thesis; it has been refined and qualified rather than displaced.

One refinement bears on the vocabulary. The scenes are habitually called "tribute processions", but Ann Gunter, restating Root and the earlier study of Gerold Walser, argues that the label is Assyrian-derived and misleading here:

Although collectively these scenes on the Apadana are often described as 'tribute processions,' this label properly applies primarily to certain representations of the theme in Neo-Assyrian art and does not accurately characterize the Persepolis reliefs.

Gunter, Revisiting the Imagery of Gift-Giving^[20]

The objects the delegates carry, vessels and weapons and clothing and animals, are close to the gifts the Greek sources say the king himself gave, not to an annual levy; Walser's foundational monograph accordingly titled the frieze the sogenannten Tributzug, the "so-called tribute procession", the doubt built into the name.^[20] Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg proposed a middle term, reading the frieze as a visualisation of bāji, "the king's share", the subjects' acknowledged duty to render what is due, neither plain tax nor free gift.^[21] Whether these are tribute-bearers or gift-bearers is, in the end, the harmony-of-empire debate compressed into a single word.

Behind the Apadana, on the eastern side of the terrace, stands the second of the great halls of state, the Hall of a Hundred Columns, which Schmidt preferred to call the Throne Hall. It is even larger in plan than the Apadana, about 68.5 metres square, its roof once carried on a hundred stone columns in ten rows, though these were shorter, around thirteen metres, so that the building was lower.^[6] Begun by Xerxes and finished by Artaxerxes I, it had no inscription on its walls; its date rests on the buried foundation slab quoted above.^[6] Its eight stone doorways carry reliefs of two kinds: the king enthroned and borne up on a platform by the peoples of the empire, and the king as hero in combat with a monster.

The throne-bearer, or atlas, motif is the sculptural counterpart of Root's harmony thesis, and the counterpart too of Briant's caution. On the doorjambs of the Hundred-Column Hall, and on the façades of the royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam, the king's platform is lifted by rows of small figures, each in the dress of his own people, arms raised to bear the throne aloft. Root read the figures as personifications of the lands, a "visual metaphor" of the way the king wished his relation to his subjects to be seen, cast deliberately in the age-old form of the cosmic helpers who effortlessly raise the divine on high, so that the empire appears upheld by its peoples "in graceful, effortless harmony".^[19] The old motif from which the design descends, she noted after Ann Farkas, was the register of bound captives beneath a conqueror; the Achaemenid version works "the substitution of throne bearers for prisoners", the same posture emptied of its chains.^[19]

Briant reads the very same figures the other way, and does so through their caption. On the tomb of Darius the king tells the viewer exactly how to read the throne-bearers, and the words are martial: look at the sculptures of those who bear the throne, and know that "the spear of a Persian man has gone forth far".^[22] Read with that text, Briant holds, the bearers accent subjugation, not consent.^[12] The image is identical; the inscription pulls it toward force. That tension, one relief and one caption yielding opposite emphases, is the debate itself, and it is unresolved because both readings are true to something in the monument.

The hall's other doorway theme, the royal hero plunging a dagger into a rampant lion or a horned monster, has been read as apotropaic, set to guard the interior, and as an image not simply of the king but of a generic "Persian Man", the collective force of Persian power, the combat always shown already won, the danger "already averted".^[19][23][9] Schmidt's excavation gave the hall a further, sober meaning: the discovery of the working Treasury led him to conclude that the Hundred-Column Hall was "actually the last extension of the royal storehouse, namely a treasure hall of palatial proportions", built to display the greatest treasures and to hold the tribute and booty still expected to flow in, though he was careful to add that this reading did not exclude its use for audience and ceremony.^[6]

South of the two great halls, on higher ground, lie the smaller residential buildings, and their names are again mostly modern conveniences.^[7]

The Palace of Darius, the tačara, is one of the few buildings the inscriptions name: Darius calls himself on its south doorway the king "who built this palace", tačara.^[24] It is a compact hypostyle hall with suites of smaller rooms and a columned portico, its Egyptianising cornices crowning the dark stone doorframes, and its plan, a central columned hall flanked by lesser rooms and guardrooms, became the model repeated in the later residences.^[6] The Palace of Xerxes, the hadiš (a word meaning "seat" or "dwelling"), stands nearby and larger; a doorjamb inscription of Darius in its north wall suggests the ground was taken while Darius still lived, though the building is Xerxes'.^[5]

Between the northern halls and the southern palaces sits the small building Herzfeld named the Tripylon for its three doorways, and Schmidt the Council Hall. It is a hinge of circulation between the two halves of the terrace, and on the evidence of its enthroned-king relief and its connected platform it is most likely Darius's, finished at the very end of his reign or the start of Xerxes'.^[6] Its builder, however, is not fixed by any inscription.^[7]

Whether these southern buildings were lived in is itself contested. Matthews and Fazeli Nashli state that none of the terrace buildings "were truly residential", and Shahrokh Razmjou argues that there were no residential quarters on the platform at all, the rooms serving guests for short periods only.^[13][25] On that reading the "palaces" are settings for the king's public and ceremonial life, not his household, and the living court was housed off the terrace.

In the south-eastern corner of the terrace lies the Treasury, a large, low, densely partitioned block, some 78 by 134 metres, of about 193 rooms, corridors, columned halls and two courtyards, its walls thick and windowless.^[5] Darius built it first, in stages, and Xerxes rebuilt part of it, demolishing its western end to raise the Harem over the ground.^[5] Schmidt identified the building by its contents as the royal storehouse and armoury: not a static vault but a working establishment of storerooms, workshops and offices, stocked with the treasures of the king and the ordinary essentials of the household and the guard, entered by a single guarded gate that connected it to the garrison quarters.^[6] Hundreds of bronze and iron arrowheads, spearheads and sword-blades in the adjoining rooms marked the soldiers who held it.^[6]

The Treasury was also, and this is why it matters far beyond its architecture, the find-spot of one of the two great clay archives of the terrace: several hundred Elamite tablets, most of them clustered in a single room, that record the silver payments to the workforce (below).^[6] And it was in the Treasury that the two original central panels of the Apadana were found. They had not merely been moved from the stairways but replaced, probably during the reign of Artaxerxes I, by orthostats showing Persian and Median guards, and the substitution mattered: the audience scene, as Mousavi puts it after Sancisi-Weerdenburg, "is essential in connecting the Apadana reliefs, and its removal indicates that the meaning of the decoration programme on the staircases of the Apadana was changed".^[19][8] Ghirshman suggested that the Treasury courtyard in which the reliefs were re-erected had itself served Darius as a provisional throne-room while the Apadana was still building.^[8] The building thus held at once the empire's stored wealth, its pay-records, and the displaced image of the king receiving his peoples.^[19]

The art of Persepolis is a made thing, and its makers said so. Darius's Susa foundation charter, DSf, of which copies were also deposited at the Persepolis Apadana, sets out how an Achaemenid palace was built, and it is a roll-call of the empire's peoples at work:

The stone columns which were worked here were brought from a village called Abiradu, in Elam. The stone-cutters who worked the stone were Ionians and Sardians. The goldsmiths who worked the gold were Medes and Egyptians.

DSf, the Susa foundation charter, trans. Brosius^[26]

The same idea speaks at Persepolis itself in the Babylonian terrace inscription DPg, where the lands "gathered here" to build, from Persia and Media to the peoples "from this side of the sea to that side of the sea".^[27] The building, made by all the nations, is the empire in little. The style that resulted is genuinely composite, drawing on Median, Elamite, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Ionian forms, yet the merging produced something distinctively Achaemenid; the choice of what to fuse, as John Boardman put it, was Persian, and the programme was commissioned in the service of kingship and designed by officials answerable to the king.^[9][28][19] Root reads the whole ensemble as a designed "imperial programme" projecting "a specific set of consistently imposed images of power and hierarchical order", and warns that the DSf charter is royal ideology, not a labour-ledger: for all its list of foreign craftsmen it names no Persian at the work, precisely because its point is the king's command over the whole.^[19]

The technical execution was multi-ethnic in fact as well as in ideology. The clamp-and-cramp masonry, the claw chisel and the fine joint-dressing (anathyrosis) of the best Persepolitan stonework are matched, on the evidence Carl Nylander gathered and Boardman reports, in Lydia and Ionia, and the masons worked in teams whose stints are marked off by masons' marks, a double diamond among them.^[28][10] Claims of Greek design or planning, by contrast, do not survive scrutiny; the hands were in part western, the conception Persian.^[10] A philological accident caught that arrangement in the act. Examining the first photographic corpus of the inscriptions in 1882, Theodor Nöldeke noticed that all four exemplars of one Xerxes building text agree completely, down to an anomalous spelling of "Achaemenid" with a long first vowel and a near-identical division of the lines, and concluded that the shared error could only be a slip in the written master-copy given to the stonecutters: the masons, who perhaps could not read the script at all, had copied a single original drawn up by a royal scribe, several times over, exactly in the required form.^[29] The hands were foreign; the text, down to its spelling mistakes, was dictated from above.

Above it all hovers the figure in the winged ring, the emblem long read as Ahura Mazdā and now variously interpreted (see the winged symbol); the safe statement is that it marks the king's rule as divinely sanctioned. And the stone was not grey. Analysis of surviving traces shows the reliefs, capitals and doorways were painted in black, red, green, blue, white and yellow, with Egyptian Blue, ochre and an opaque red glass among the pigments, red still clinging to the lips of the carved guards; recent work has even found many stone surfaces coated with a thin white finish of gypsum or of a bone-ash mineral, so that the terrace a visitor climbed was a place of bright colour, not the pale ruin it is now.^[30][13]

For a century two readings of the site have contended. The older, art-historical and religious reading, associated with Ernst Herzfeld, Arthur Upham Pope and Roman Ghirshman and still the default in A. T. Olmstead's history, took Persepolis for a ceremonial city, built for and animated by the spring New Year festival, its Apadana reliefs a frozen record of the annual procession of the subject peoples bringing gifts to the Great King. Olmstead's chapter on the terrace is called "New Year's Day at Persepolis", and reads the whole sculptural programme as "the procession of soldiers, courtiers, and subject peoples advancing to greet their lord at the New Year's feast".^[31] For Pope, as Soheil summarises him, Persepolis was built "to found a special and ritual city for the spring festivities of the New Year", a "spiritual center of the nation rather than an administrative center of the Empire".^[5]

That reading has been undermined from two directions. The art historians themselves detached the reliefs from any one ceremony: Root argued that the Apadana frieze is an abstract vision of imperial harmony, not the record of a datable festival, noting that there is "no contemporary Achaemenid description of any No Ruz ceremony" to reconstruct from.^[19] And the tablets recast the place. Briant's is the pivotal statement of the modern position:

the discovery of the Treasury and Fortification tablets has proved indubitably that Persepolis was also a permanent economic center and the seat of administrative bureaus.

Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander^[12]

Briant adds the season objection, that the classical sources put the court in Persia in the autumn, not the spring, and that no contemporary text mentions a New Year festival at all.^[12] Sancisi-Weerdenburg drew the balance that most scholars now keep:

It is clear that no Nowruz is attested for the Achaemenid period. This, however, is not proof that it did not exist at that time.

Sancisi-Weerdenburg, quoted in Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander^[12]

Wiesehöfer records that the New Year reading is "hardly any longer" held, and the Companion's contributors note that much of the festival speculation grew from two accidents of the record: that tombs appear at Persepolis only from the fourth century, prompting ideas of a change of function, and that the terrace carries an unusual quantity of procession relief.^[4][7] Neither, they argue, can settle the question, and Persepolis need not have differed in function from Susa.^[7]

Schmidt's excavation gives the "working" side its physical footing. The Treasury was a guarded storehouse and armoury; the Hall of a Hundred Columns, on his reading, a treasure-hall; the garrison held the terrace; the sealed archives lay where they had been used.^[6] The mature position is complementarity, not exclusion. Persepolis was a royal residence and ceremonial stage that was also, and provably, a working seat of administration, an economic hub and a centre of financed cult; the specific spring-festival capital is largely abandoned, while a royal presence tied to the cultic calendar, and perhaps an autumn festival (the Mithragan), is better supported.^[12][5] Brosius places the site first among the royal cities, "the utmost expression of royal kingship and of Persian rule".^[9]

One fact sharpens the whole question: the Greeks seem not to have known the place existed. "Whereas contemporary Greeks were better informed about such Achaemenid cities as Ecbatana and Susa, they apparently knew nothing of Persepolis", Mousavi observes; Herodotus "never refers to Persepolis", and even Ctesias, twenty years at the Achaemenid court, never visited it.^[8] The silence is of the sources, not of the stones, for Greek hands demonstrably worked here: five intact and thirty-four fragmentary Greek inscriptions of East Greek origin have been found in the quarries of the Kuh-e Rahmat, dated by Pugliese Carratelli on epigraphic evidence to the end of the sixth or early fifth century.^[8] The men came; the news did not travel.

Two further readings come from the excavation literature. Mousavi himself, taking seriously the word DPf uses for the site, a fortress, and the priority of the fortifications and the Treasury among the completed works, argues that Darius's first idea was a stronghold: construction may have begun "at a time when Darius had not yet overcome his enemies", who therefore "felt the need for an impregnable stronghold where he could retain his influence in his homeland". On this reading "the site probably never served its initial function"; as the empire consolidated it "was gradually transformed into a ceremonial or symbolic city" which, without being a place of worship, "acquired an aura of sanctity owing to its location in the homeland of the Achaemenids", and that sanctity, for Mousavi, is why the Greeks never heard of it, why it became the dynasty's cemetery, and why Alexander chose to burn it.^[8] And the site can be read against the deeper past of its own region: Persepolis stands in the territory of Anshan, the old highland capital of Elam, and "Persepolis replaced Anshan as the Achaemenid palace at Susa surpassed the ruins of the Elamite city"; the new king thereby fulfilled his great predecessor's ancient role as "king of Anshan and Susa".^[8]

The residence question is bound up with the Achaemenid habit of a moving court. The classical sources describe the Great King circulating among his capitals by season, and Persepolis is one stop on that circuit. Xenophon has Cyrus wintering seven months at Babylon, spending three months of spring at Susa and the height of summer at Ecbatana; Athenaeus fills in the fourth seat: "In Persepolis they spent the autumn, and in Babylon the remaining portion of the year."^[12] The "itinerant ruler", as the Companion calls him, was a defining feature of Achaemenid kingship, and Persepolis, Pasargadae and Susa were purpose-built royal cities of the Fars homeland, marked out by palaces, fortifications, administrative offices, open ground for tents, gardens and game parks.^[7]

That Persepolis sat in the autumn slot does not mean the king came only then. Briant points out that Darius died at Persepolis in November 486, which shows the king could be there outside any spring festival, and argues that the Great King in fact stayed there through much of the year, in step with the cultic calendar.^[12] Whatever the rhythm, the two Persian cities held a place the western capitals did not: with Susa and Babylon chosen for climate and administration, Pasargadae and Persepolis "remained the ideological apexes" of Achaemenid power, the roots to which the dynasty returned.^[12]

What turned Persepolis from a ceremonial monument into a documented institution was the discovery of two clay archives. In the north-eastern fortification wall Herzfeld's team found more than thirty thousand tablets and fragments, the Persepolis Fortification tablets, recording administrative transfers of food commodities in the years 509 to 494; the smaller Treasury group, of 492 to 458, records silver payments made in place of rations in kind.^[32][33] The moment of discovery is itself documented: Herzfeld's telegram announcing "business tablets" reached James Henry Breasted in Cairo on 4 March 1933, and four days later Breasted wrote of the prospect of royal archives under the terrace, "If so a new period in the history of the East has begun."^[34] The thirty thousand fragments are not thirty thousand documents, nor are they all Elamite. Matthew Stolper's breakdown distinguishes four main kinds of things: pieces with Elamite cuneiform texts, most bearing seal impressions, "remains of about 10–15,000 original documents"; pieces in Aramaic script and language, "remains of fewer than 1,000 original documents"; pieces carrying seal impressions but no text at all, the remains of some five to six thousand documents; and miscellaneous unique pieces, among them one tablet "in Phrygian letters and language", one in Greek, one in Babylonian, one in Old Persian, and tablets impressed with Persian or Athenian coins instead of seals.^[34] Richard Hallock, who edited the Fortification texts, and George Cameron, who edited the Treasury texts, showed that the two are halves of one accounting system covering the province of Fars, provisioning the king and royal family, officials, priests, herds and, above all, the working gangs.^[32][33] The archive, Amélie Kuhrt writes, has "revolutionised understanding of the nature of Achaemenid government and economic management".^[1] Its reach may be greater still. Henkelman has argued that the Persepolitan system was not merely the ledger of Fars but the empire's template:

I would venture the hypothesis that the Achaemenids were able to perceive the cloud of administrative networks, functional hierarchies, logistic protocols and bureaucratic conventions as a system that a) could be expanded and adapted according to the growth and development of empire, b) could be copied, and c) could be applied to manage, monitor and develop other regions of their empire, notably in its eastern half.

Henkelman, Imperial Signature and Imperial Paradigm^[35]

Where satrapal documentation survives to be compared, it reveals "parallel structures and protocols" strong enough, at least in some cases, "to assume a conscious, determined, and systematic planning on the basis of well-understood and well-tested precedent: this is what I call imperial paradigm".^[35] The tablets even brush against the cast of the Greek narratives: the Megabates who commands the Naxos expedition in Herodotus turns up in a Treasury tablet which, as Oswyn Murray notes, "attests him there sometime between 492 and 486 B.C., still described as 'admiral of the fleet'".^[36]

The workers are the kurtaš (Old Persian garda), and they built Persepolis: stonemasons, woodworkers, smiths, jewellers, sculptors, some four thousand engaged on the construction at once, drawn from the conquered peoples, Egyptians, Babylonians, Lydians, Ionians, Carians, Cappadocians, Bactrians and more.^[2] Across Fars the tablets count some sixteen thousand kurtaš quartered in more than a hundred settlements; the whole workforce of the Persepolis region has been estimated at ten to fifteen thousand at any time, in gangs classified by origin, with twenty-seven ethnic groups attested.^[2][37] They were rationed in grain, wine or beer and oil, the standard male ration about three bar of grain a month, graded by age and sex, and from 492 part of the wage was paid in silver, calculated to tiny fractions of a shekel, though as the accountants themselves note the silver was often only book-keeping, the payment made in sheep and wine at a fixed rate.^[33][1]

Were they slaves? The older assumption, fed by the Greek and biblical image of oriental despotism, was that Persepolis was built by slave labour, and the tablets are the rebuttal. Kuhrt poses the question and answers it: "Were they slaves? Serfs? Deportees?", and concludes that kurtaš means "workers in the widest sense", including skilled craftsmen and elite servants, people "who needed to be paid".^[1] Many were surely war-captives or deportees, but others were specialists drawn by the opportunities of the great projects; Hallock had already asked why, if they were slaves, they should be "conscripted".^[1][32] The honest picture keeps some tension: Muhammad Dandamaev, who treats the labour economy at length, holds that the kurtaš were legally heterogeneous, including alongside free workers some who were slaves or semi-free, the Aramaic glosses calling them simply "men".^[2] What the archive excludes is not unfreedom but the caricature of an unpaid slave city; the reality is a rationed, accounted, graded workforce, fed and paid by the crown.

The tablets also brought the women of Persepolis into view, and they are among the most striking data of the archive. Work gangs held an almost even number of men and women, with their children, which implies that the kurtaš lived as families rather than as a barracked labour force; the recorded total gives 8,183 men against 8,564 women.^[2] Women's rations were normally smaller than men's, but not always: in a whole class of the ration texts some women receive more than any man present, and the women at the top, called irsara (Old Persian maθišta, "chief"), drew the highest grain ration of all, evidently as supervisors of the female gangs.^[32][38] Olmstead had already noticed women earning "a shekel, the average wage of a male artisan", and doing much of the work.^[31]

Most humane of the archive's records are the rations for new mothers. Women who had given birth received a special allocation, and it was doubled for the mother of a boy over the mother of a girl; across the texts the births run to some 449, of which 247, about 55 per cent, were boys.^[38][32] Briant reads these as voluntary supplements that let the women recover from childbirth and nurse their infants, a small but real window onto how the administration treated the people who made the terrace.^[38]

The same archive documents worship, and here too it corrects the received picture. The Fortification tablets record state-funded offerings, and the deity most often named is not Ahura Mazdā but the Elamite Humban; the commonest sacrifice, the lan, is tied to no single god and is served by officiants of both Elamite (šatin) and Iranian (makuš, a magus) descent.^[39] Wouter Henkelman, whose study of this material is definitive, argues that the crown financed Elamite and Iranian cults together not out of "tolerance" but because it reckoned both as Persian: the gods of the heartland belonged to a mixed Elamite-Iranian population and were sponsored as its own.^[39] The Companion's contributors note the oddity from the inside: a cult financed and accounted by the state is exactly what an Indo-Iranian sensibility would not expect, yet at Persepolis the same royal hand that inscribed the exclusive worship of Ahura Mazdā subsidised the whole plural pantheon.^[40]

The cult was sited in the landscape as well as on the terrace. A Fortification text known as the "Religious Journal" records 118 sheep and goats sacrificed at the paradeisos, the walled garden, of Persepolis.^[1] The partetaš or paradise was itself an institution of the accounted economy: another tablet inventories 6,166 fruit trees, quince, pear, apple, date and mulberry, to be planted in three paradises near Persepolis, and the staff of these gardens managed them as timber reserves and stores of fruit and grain for redistribution.^[12][41][1] The paradise was at once a real estate, a store, a cult place, and an image of the empire's variety gathered in one enclosure.

The tablets carry a second, visual archive of religion: the seals impressed on them, the largest corpus of visual imagery to survive from the Achaemenid Persian period. Mark Garrison's study of the scenes long read as fire worship counts seventy-four seals preserving eighty-five examples of the structures traditionally termed "fire altars", and the caution in that term is deliberate: to read the stepped and towered structures on the seals automatically as Zoroastrian fire altars, Garrison argues, is to assume the very thing the evidence should be made to show.^[42] His conclusion is carefully bounded: "the tower structures in Persepolitan glyptic signal first and foremost a ritual landscape", one that "would appear to have been religious and/or funerary", and the Fortification texts document both phenomena, the religious in the lan, šip and daušiyam ceremonies, the funerary in offerings at the šumar, the tomb or memorial of deceased noble Persians, and at the bašur, an offering table at a funerary structure.^[42] A cult of the dead, largely invisible in the standing architecture, thus belongs to the documented religion of Persepolis.

The terrace's most charged religious text is the so-called daiva inscription of Xerxes, XPh, in which the king says that where false gods had been worshipped he destroyed "that sanctuary of the demons" and established the worship of Ahura Mazdā. Copies were found in 1935 in the garrison quarters at the south-eastern corner of Persepolis, so the text is a Persepolis find, but it names no place, and whether it records a real demolition (in Babylon, in Media, or nowhere in particular) or is a formula of royal ideology is unresolved.^[6][1]

After his victory at Gaugamela in 331 Alexander marched into Persis, and the garrison commander Tiridates surrendered the terrace and its treasures without a fight; Diodorus, whom the excavator George Cameron quotes, reckoned the hoard Alexander seized at 120,000 talents, and a tradition preserved by later writers held that it took ten thousand pairs of mules and five thousand camels to carry the treasure away.^[33][43] Diodorus also gives the fullest surviving picture of the city at its fall:

It was the wealthiest city under the sun, and the private houses had been filled with all kinds of luxury over many years. The Macedonians stormed it and slaughtered all the men whom they met, plundering the houses… From there a lot of silver was carried off and no small amount of gold, and many elaborate dresses, in sea purple or with gold embroidery, became the reward of the victors. The enormous palaces, known throughout the entire world, were turned to ruins through hybris and utter destruction.

Diodorus Siculus 17.70.6, in Brosius, A History of Ancient Persia^[44]

The palaces were burned. The date is divided in the older literature: Schmidt and Olmstead, following the excavation chronology, put the seizure and fire late in 331, while Briant places the burning in May 330.^[45][12] The site monograph's synthesis of the classical sources now gives the episode a firmer structure, and it favours the later date. From the ancient accounts, Mousavi concludes, five things follow: the city "was not captured by force"; the monuments were vandalised and the inhabitants ruthlessly massacred; the treasures of the Achaemenid kings were seized and carefully transported to finance the further campaign; "there was a gap of four months between the capture of the city and its destruction"; and the decision to burn was made "immediately before or during a revelry".^[8] On that chronology Alexander entered the royal city in January 330 and the palaces burned toward the end of his stay, in the late spring.^[8] The ancient accounts of how it happened fall into two traditions, and neither survives in a primary text that can be read directly; they reach us only through the Alexander-historians, refracted through two rival source-streams.

The first tradition, the "Vulgate" that runs from Cleitarchus into Diodorus, Curtius, Justin and in part Plutarch, made the fire a drunken act of revenge. In this version a banquet ends with the courtesan Thaïs, mistress of the general Ptolemy, urging Alexander to avenge the Greek temples Xerxes had burned by torching the palace of the Persian kings, and the king and his companions carry the torches in a revel.^[31][46] Briant traces how deeply Xerxes' memory saturates the story: Thaïs is "reputed to have led the procession that set fire to the palaces", and Plutarch even stages a mute encounter between the conqueror and the fallen Great King:

Alexander, observing a large statue of Xerxes which had been thrown down and was being carelessly trampled upon by the soldiers as they pressed into the royal palace, stopped, and addressed it as though it were alive. 'Shall we,' said he, 'leave you lying there, because of your invasion of Greece, or shall we set you up again because of your magnificence and greatness of soul?' He then stood musing for a long time, till at length he roused himself from his reverie and went his way.

Plutarch on Alexander at Persepolis, quoted in Briant, Darius in the Shadow of Alexander^[46]

The second tradition, the sober one, runs from Alexander's court historian Callisthenes and from Ptolemy into Arrian. Callisthenes had framed the whole campaign as a Panhellenic war of revenge, and the burning as "a deliberate demonstration of the successful revenge"; Arrian, taking Ptolemy as his main source, presents Alexander announcing the destruction as vengeance for the burning of Athens and the Greek temples, with Parmenion urging restraint and the king refusing to listen.^[47][31] The divergence of the two versions is a divergence of sources: the Vulgate's Cleitarchus gave Alexander despotic and impulsive traits, while Ptolemy and the writers who follow him idealise him.^[47] However refracted, the revenge frame had deep roots. In Oswyn Murray's account of the Ionian Revolt, "the burning of Sardis and its temple was a symbolic act which justified the Persian burning of Ionian temples after the revolt and of the Athenian Acropolis in the Great War", and "the hereditary curse was only finally laid to rest with the burning of Persepolis by Alexander the Great. Seldom has such a symbol reverberated through history with such consequences."^[36] Persepolis burned at the end of a chain of fires lit at Sardis a century and a half before.

The modern debate inherits the ancient split and recasts it: was the fire an impulse, the drunken symposium of the Vulgate, or a calculated act of policy? Briant states the reigning view without hedging:

Everyone agrees that it was a political decision that was carefully considered by Alexander.

Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander^[12]

His argument is that the destruction had no precedent in the whole Asian campaign: everywhere else, and above all at Babylon, Alexander presented himself as preserver and restorer, so the burning of Persepolis was "clearly situated in a specifically Persian context", a message that the age of the Great Kings was over unless the Persians came over to him; the regret the sources report afterwards implies that the decree was, in his own eyes, vengeance for a political failure.^[12] Other reconstructions cross this one. Ernst Badian tied the order to events in Europe, to the war of Agis of Sparta against Antipater, making Persepolis a signal to Greece.^[12] That thesis faces a standard chronological objection: Agis lost his life before the battle of Gaugamela, some eight months before the burning, and the news must have reached Alexander well before he came to Persepolis, which is why, as Mousavi notes, "Badian's thesis has been refuted by a number of scholars".^[8] Sancisi-Weerdenburg brought the argument down to the archaeology: the buildings that burned worst are those attributed to Xerxes, and the real target, she suggested, may not have been the palaces but the precious furnishings they held, the paraphernalia of royal gift-giving whose destruction would deny a Persian rival the material basis of kingship.^[12]

Her point turns on the destruction layer, and that is Schmidt's firsthand evidence. Excavation confirmed a violent conflagration: in the Apadana the mud bricks were baked light red and the floor blackened, the fuel the cedar roof-beams, the doors and shutters, and quantities of combustible goods and fabrics; in the Hall of a Hundred Columns the floor lay under a layer of ash and cedar charcoal that Herzfeld measured at one to three feet thick.^[6] Olmstead, drawing on the same excavation, gives the scene:

Burned beams of the roof still lay their print across stairways and against sculptures. Heaps of ashes are all that remain of the cedar paneling. Mud-brick walls, deprived of their cover by the burning roofs, have flowed down with the rains into the sunken courts.

Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire^[31]

The looting was thorough: only a handful of coins and a few scraps of gold leaf survived the searchers, and stone vessels were carried into the courts and smashed.^[31] The forensics, as Mousavi assembles them, point the same way as Briant's argument. Not a single complete vase or object in precious metal has been found in the excavations of the site; the jewelled insets and overlays that adorned the necks, arms, clothes and weapons of the royal figures were "systematically removed before the fire"; and the archaeological evidence confirms that fires were "deliberately started at several places simultaneously".^[8] The fire also discriminated. The Gate of All Lands and the fortifications show no burning at all; they probably housed Alexander's troops, who, as Schmidt put it, "presumably enjoyed the spectacle from the parapets".^[8] Nor was the destruction confined to the terrace: in the columned halls of the royal city on the southern plain Akbar Tadjvidi found charred beams and scorched floors, showing that, "contrary to what has been written by some Classicists", the conflagration hit the city as well.^[8] Even the ash layer had a history before Schmidt: Stolze and Andreas, examining the Hall of a Hundred Columns after Farhad Mirza's excavation of 1877, recorded the ash and charcoal across its floor, though they took it for the result of gradual decomposition.^[8]

There is even a case that there was no Macedonian fire at all. Jakob Seibert has argued that the whole story was a Greek invention, Callisthenes composing the panhellenic vengeance by analogy with the burnt Acropolis; the conflagration, on this view, was accidental, and the burned remains, lacking absolute datings, could belong to later periods.^[8] Mousavi rejects the theory, and the forensic record above is the answer to it. His own explanation of the four-month stay is deliberately unheroic: stripping and packing the treasure took weeks, and the pack animals summoned from Babylonia and Susa in mid-winter took time to arrive.^[8] Whatever the motive, the fire was an epoch's end. "With the burning of Persepolis," Olmstead wrote, "the older age of the independent oriental empires came to an end. Persepolis was never again occupied."^[31]

The terrace was never rebuilt, but Persis went on, and the memory of its royal centre took new forms. After Alexander the province passed under Seleucid and then Arsacid overlordship, and its local dynasts, styled fratarakā, built an official complex just north of the deserted terrace, shifting the ceremonial focus of Pārsa off the burnt platform.^[48] Known chiefly from their coins, the Frataraka (Baydād, Ardaxšīr, Wahbarz, Wādfradād and their successors) revived Achaemenid and satrapal costume and a fire-holder emblem, one early issue even showing a figure in Achaemenid royal dress cutting down a Macedonian soldier; yet, as Rolf Strootman and Matthew Canepa note, none of them claimed outright to be an Achaemenid king.^[49] From this same Persid line the Sasanians would rise, as local dynasts of Istakhr, a short way from the terrace, which became the seat of their power and a major Zoroastrian centre with a famous fire temple.^[4]

The true builders were forgotten, and legend filled the gap. The Sasanians already called the ruin sad-stūn, "hundred columns"; when the Xᵛadāy-nāmag tradition joined Ardashir to the ancient kings, it was natural to attribute the great site near Istakhr to the mythical Jamshid, and taxt-i Jamshīd became its name, beside hazār sutun and čihil-minār.^[4] After the Arab conquest many ancient sites were saved by legendary and biblical attribution; the Islamic-era geographers and historians read the ruins variously, Bīrūnī in the Āthār al-Bāqiya recording the invasion of Alexander and "the fire of Persepolis" and calling the place the Mosque of Solomon, of whose visible burn-marks people still spoke.^[5]

Nor did the destruction end with Alexander. European visitors report that Shah Abbas had pieces of marble carried off from the site for his palaces and mosques; that Imam Quli Khan, the celebrated governor of Fars, did the same for his capital at Shiraz; and that a local governor under Shah Safi, exasperated at paying the expenses of the Europeans who came to see the ruins, "sent a party of sixty men with orders to destroy every sculpture upon which they could lay hands", an operation suspended, the traveller Bembo reports, only by the king's command.^[8] Throughout the Qajar period a large number of sculptures "were used as targets for deliberate shooting by both government troops and armed brigands", vandalism halted only by the beginning of systematic excavation in 1931.^[8] The Achaemenid kings had raised a monument whose meaning was read and re-read across two and a half thousand years, and whose name, in the end, belonged neither to them nor to their god.

The European rediscovery began, perhaps, in the early fourteenth century, when the Franciscan Odoric of Pordenone, travelling toward China, recorded a ruined place he called Comerum, "which formerly was a great city".^[10][8] The name survives in several corrupt forms, Comerum, Coprium and Comum among them, and, as Ali Mousavi observes, all commentators agree that the identification with Persepolis remains uncertain.^[8] The first named European visitor to the ruins themselves was the Venetian envoy Giosafat Barbaro, who saw them in 1474 and, unaware of what he was looking at, took the reliefs for biblical figures; the name Chelmenar, the "Forty Columns", is first recorded in that century.^[8] The identification with the Persepolis of the classical authors was made by the Spanish envoy Don García de Silva Figueroa, who reached the site in 1617 with a copy of Diodorus at hand and recognised the ruins of Chelmenar as the palace Alexander had burned.^[10][8] Figueroa brought an artist who produced the first real representations of the sculptures, and had a whole line of the great inscription copied; the copy was lost, and the engraving, long thought lost with it, has been rediscovered and published only recently.^[8] In 1621 the Roman traveller Pietro della Valle went a step further with the script itself: he copied five characters from several passages of the inscription now called XPb and cautiously concluded, giving his reasons, that the characters were written from left to right, the first correct judgement about the writing; Jean Chardin and Cornelis de Bruijn recorded the standing monuments over the following decades.^[10][8] Chardin caught the method of these travellers, who read the ancient authors on the ground, "les auteurs anciens à la main".^[16] De Bruijn's own chapter of remarks, written after his visit of November 1704, shows that method at work: he rehearses the Persian and Arab traditions from d'Herbelot, that Jamshid founded the city and Queen Homai its palace of Chilminar, sets them aside as fables that agree neither with the ancient Greek histories nor with the sacred ones, and concludes that the ruins, their situation, their figures and dress and ornament, answer to the manners of the ancient Persians and to the description of the old palace of Persepolis, quoting Diodorus's account of its triple wall in full.^[50] The same travellers took as well as read. Curzon, unhappy "for the credit of these self-same Europeans", records reading "in the pages of Le Brun that he took a mason from Shiraz, and blunted all his tools, in the effort to break off and carry away desirable fragments", and that de Bruijn "confesses to having shattered several figures in pieces", out of the roughly 1,200 sculptured figures the Dutchman himself had counted at the site.^[8] By 1739 the traveller literature had condensed into a genre of its own: an anonymous London plate-book, Persepolis Illustrata, offered the ruins in twenty-one copper plates, its engraved text an English rendering of de Bruijn's remarks, the legends, their dismissal and the Diodorus comparison in the same order, decades before anyone could read a word of the inscriptions.^[51] In 1765 Carsten Niebuhr spent nearly a month at the terrace, made the first measured plan and the first accurate copies of all the visible inscriptions, and it was from these that Georg Grotefend began the decipherment of Old Persian in 1802.^[10][52] Nineteenth-century visitors left their own mark, literally: Lord Curzon counted twenty-seven European names carved into the Gate of All Nations, and added his own.^[52]

The camera reached the terrace before the spade. The first known photographs of Persepolis were taken in the autumn of 1857 by Luigi Pesce, an Italian instructor in the Qajar royal infantry, who presented an album to Naser al-Din Shah on 29 April 1858 with a proud dedication: nobody from the West had yet captured the images of the ruins "by the procedure of photography. Therefore, it is for the first time that your servant took photographs of the reliefs and ruined edifices of Takht-e Jamshid".^[8] A series taken in 1872 by Soltan Oveys Mirza, a son of the governor of Fars, was "the first systematic attempt to document the state of the ruins photographically" for scientific purposes.^[8] The governor himself, Prince Farhad Mirza, then turned to the spade, and the record of it is first-hand: Franz Stolze, whose expedition was then in Persia, writes that in the spring of 1877 the governor had excavated on the platform of Persepolis for two months, at his own cost, with six hundred men, and that the trenches had not yet been washed in by the winter rains.^[29] Stolze had already surveyed Persepolis in 1874 to 1876 by Meydenbauer's newly invented photogrammetric method, arguably the site's first such record; in June 1878, the expedition's funds exhausted, he and Friedrich Andreas spent its last 150 large and 250 smaller dry plates on the photographic campaign that the Fifth International Congress of Orientalists resolved in 1881 to publish, producing the two folio volumes of 1882.^[29] Mousavi's verdict is that the results "did not live up to the effort and cost expended" on them, but Nöldeke, in the essay that accompanied the plates, named the method's real gain: even correctly copied passages of the older hand-copies could invite doubt, and the photograph gave documentary confirmation of what was right. For the tomb inscriptions of Darius at Naqsh-e Rustam it came too late; the rain, Stolze reported, had already made them illegible.^[29][8]

Systematic excavation came only in the twentieth century, after the French archaeological monopoly (centred on Susa) gave way under a new Iranian antiquities law. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago began work in 1931 under James Henry Breasted; Ernst Herzfeld was field director until 1934, uncovering the eastern stairway of the Apadana and the Tripylon and, in soundings on the Apadana, the gold and silver foundation tablets of Darius, and Erich Schmidt directed the excavation from 1935 to 1939.^[6][45] The handover had a documented cause. Herzfeld's relations with the Iranian authorities had already soured, and during the visit of the Swedish crown prince Gustaf Adolf to Persepolis in November 1934 he presented his guest, without any permission, with two sculptured fragments, a Persian Immortal from the eastern stairway of the Apadana and a servant figure from the Central Palace. "With his previous problems with the authorities," the Iranian scholar Mohammad-Taqi Mostafavi wrote, "this antiquity offering resulted in his resignation, and he was replaced by Dr. Schmidt of the Oriental Institute."^[8] The two great archives were found in this campaign: the Fortification tablets in the north-eastern fortification wall in 1933 to 1934, the Treasury tablets in the royal Treasury in 1936 to 1938, along with the stone foundation records of Xerxes and the two reused audience reliefs.^[33][53] Schmidt's three volumes of Persepolis (1953 to 1970) remain the descriptive foundation of the site.

The terrace as a visitor sees it today owes much to the conservation and restoration carried out by the Iranian antiquities service with Italian help from the 1950s on, above all the work of Ann and Giuseppe Tilia, in the course of which the Tilias established that the Treasury reliefs had begun as the central panels of the Apadana stairways.^[16] In 1971 the site was the setting for the Iranian monarchy's celebration of what it called 2,500 years of Persian kingship, a piece of modern state ceremony staged among the ruins of the ancient one.^[54][10]

The celebration cut both ways. The asphalt road built for it along the western foot of the terrace destroyed a number of remains, over the objections of the excavator Akbar Tadjvidi, who was told by the ministry's adviser that "this is a national project, and has to be carried out even at the cost of some ancient remains"; and the association with the Pahlavi monarchy played against the site in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.^[8] Persepolis was registered on the World Heritage List of UNESCO in that same year, yet in the first weeks after the Revolution there were rumours of an attempt to bulldoze the site by a mob led by one of the early revolutionary figures; no such destruction is recorded, though some column bases and stone structures in the buildings below the terrace were vandalised.^[8] The official rehabilitation can even be dated: visiting Persepolis on 20 April 1991, President Rafsanjani wrote in the site's guest book that "visiting the incredible remains at Persepolis provokes considerable national pride in every individual".^[8] Within a single modern century, then, the terrace has been a scientific object, a royal stage, a suspect symbol and a national pride. The re-reading of Persepolis that began with Odoric's Comerum has not ended, and the name on the road signs is still Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of a king who never lived.