Susa

The Persians called the city Çūšā, the form written in Darius's own Susa inscriptions; it renders a far older local name, Elamite šu-šá-an, which Akkadian scribes wrote the same way and the Greeks turned into Soûsa.^[1] The Hebrew of Esther and Daniel keeps the Semitic form as Shushan, and the modern town beside the ruins is still Shush. Unusually among the great Achaemenid centres, the name has never been lost: Loftus, opening the first trenches in 1851, wrote that "Whether we regard it in a geographical, historical, or scriptural point of view, there are few places throughout the East more replete with interest" than the mounds of Shush.^[2] The identification with the biblical city was nonetheless argued over for decades, against a rival claim for a site north of Shushtar, until the inscriptions Loftus dug from the great hall settled it: with their discovery, in Potts's words, "there was no longer any doubt about the identity of modern Shush and Biblical Shushan".^[3]

Susa stands on the Susiana plain of Khuzestan, between the Karkheh river, the ancient Choaspes, and the Dez, with the small Shaur flowing under the western edge of the site itself. The plain is an extension of the Mesopotamian lowlands walled off by the Zagros: rich, hot, and watered, it faces Babylonia rather than the Iranian plateau, and the city's history has always followed that double orientation.^[4] The ruin field is vast, some hundred hectares of tells rising up to two dozen metres above the plain. The excavators' names for the four principal mounds, the Apadana, the Acropole, the Ville Royale and the Ville des Artisans (with the Donjon spur at the south), date only from the nineteenth century; as Carter notes, only "Apadana" has any historical basis, taken from the inscription that names the great columned hall.^[5] Herodotus made the Choaspes part of the city's legend: he reports that

when the Great King marches he goes well provided with food and flocks from home; and water from the Choaspes which flows past Susa is carried with him, whereof alone, and of none other, the king drinks.

Herodotus 1.188, trans. Godley^[6]

By the time Darius chose it, Susa had already been a capital for some three thousand years. It was the chief lowland city of Elam, seat of its kings and of its god Inšušinak, "lord of Susa"; the deep Elamite past is a subject of its own, and only the threshold of the Persian city matters here. Two facts of that past shaped what the excavators found. First, the Elamite kings of the twelfth century BCE had made Susa a museum of Mesopotamian trophies: Šutruk-Nahhunte and his successors carried off to Susa the stele of Naram-Sin, the obelisk of Maništušu and the law code of Hammurabi, which is why the most famous monuments of Babylonian civilisation were dug out of an Iranian acropolis.^[7] Second, the city had been destroyed once already. Ashurbanipal of Assyria sacked Susa in 646 BCE in a systematic act of erasure; his annals claim the plundering of the treasuries and temples, and Potts summarises the climax: "statues of kings made of gold, silver, bronze and limestone were seized and taken back to Assyria as booty", the ziggurat was demolished, "The graves of former kings were opened and destroyed", and "The destruction lasted one month and twenty-five days".^[3]

Susa recovered. A Neo-Elamite city lived on the mounds through the seventh and sixth centuries, and the administrative tablets found on the Acropole, written under a Susian authority in the decades before Darius, already name suppliers with Iranian names: Persians and Elamites had long interpenetrated in the lowlands, and it is not even certain that the Persian takeover of Susa required a conquest. No source records Cyrus or Cambyses building or residing there, though later Greek writers assumed the city passed to Persia with Babylon in 539.^[4] The old view that a village on the eastern mound documented newly arrived Persian settlers, Ghirshman's "village perse-achéménide", has not survived re-examination: the earliest "level of the village dates to the Neo-Elamite II period", before Cyrus let alone Darius, though as the Louvre catalogue drily notes, the name Achaemenid Village remains.^[5]

It was Darius I, once his power was consolidated after the crisis of 522, who made Susa a Persian capital, beginning soon after 520 BCE.^[4] Strabo, writing five centuries later, rationalised the choice:

The Persians and Cyrus, after mastering the Medes, saw that their native land was situated rather on the extremities of their empire (ep'eskhatois), and that Susa was farther in and nearer to Babylonia and the other tribes, and therefore established the royal seat of their empire at Susa. At the same time, also, they were pleased with the high standing of the city and with the fact that its territory bordered on Persis

Strabo, Geography 15.3.2 (in Briant's rendering)^[8]

Briant remarks that "Only a Greek writer could consider the location of Persia peripheral in the new Empire." The geography is nonetheless real: Susa sat far closer than Persis to the empire's Mesopotamian tax base and to the roads west. What Strabo missed is the older logic. Persia had grown up in Elam's shadow, out of the highland half of the old Elamite world at Anshan, and in Briant's reading "the construction of the palace at Susa made the victory of the Persians and the unification of the two entities into a single entity evident to everyone".^[8] Choosing Elam's ancient capital annexed three millennia of lowland prestige to a young dynasty, exactly as Behistun's placement annexed the Median road. Elam kept its rank in the empire's own lists: in the royal inscriptions and on the reliefs it stands in the first three lands, usually beside Persia and Media.^[9]

Briant notes that "The archaeological evidence does not reveal a single irruption of Achaemenid culture until Darius's reign", after which the Elamite indexes vanish abruptly.^[8] Darius's engineers treated the ancient tell as raw material. The summits of the Apadana and Ville Royale mounds were cut down and the spoil pushed to their edges, producing a level royal platform; in the Companion's summary, "Darius leveled the two hills to a constant 18 m above the plain (to be compared with the Persepolis retaining wall which was 12–14 m high)".^[10] Ladiray's excavation account matches the earthworks to the texts:

The old Elamite tell which accommodated the Residence and the Hypostyle Hall was levelled; the earth taken from the summit was redistributed around the edges where it was contained by strong, beaten earth and mud-brick walls. A platform was established 18 m above the waters of the River Shaur, a place to build on, with courtyards and gardens, an area of more than 100,000 m2.

Ladiray, in Perrot 2013^[11]

Around the whole hundred-hectare lozenge of mounds ran not a curtain wall in the Mesopotamian manner but a colossal earthen glacis, in Potts's description "a monumental brick and earthen glacis some 20 m wide at the base and 10–12 m high", pierced on the east by a monumental gate.^[3][4] Darius himself recorded the refortification in the inscription DSe: "By the favour of Auramazda, there was much earlier building which was not in a good state; at Susa I saw that the fortress had collapsed; then I built there another fortress."^[12]

The human cost is glimpsed only obliquely. Perrot concluded that the indigenous population was pushed out of the royal quarter toward the eastern suburbs, and the stratigraphy shows a clean break: Miroschedji found "absolutely no trace of any continuity whatsoever between the ceramic traditions of the two eras" between Neo-Elamite and Achaemenid levels in the Ville Royale.^[3] Amiet pressed the question further, observing that the emptied mounds "seems to indicate a surprising demographic deficiency and therefore raises questions about the fate of the Elamite population. Were they forced to flee? If so, where to? Were they reduced to forced labour for the massive royal construction programme?"^[9] The excavated city is in fact strangely empty of ordinary houses. Boucharlat's explanation is that the walled space was deliberately kept open: "le périmètre de la ville, bien défini à Suse, enferme un espace très peu rempli, permettant ainsi de loger le camp royal lors de ses séjours", room for the royal camp, the tent city that travelled with the court.^[13]

Buried in the palace foundations and posted in copies about the site was the empire's most explicit building text, the trilingual foundation charter DSf, found in fragments from the 1911–12 season onward. After the creed and the royal titles, Darius describes the engineering:

This palace which I built at Susa, from afar its ornamentation was brought. Downward the earth was dug, until I reached rock in the earth. When the excavation had been made, then rubble was packed down, some 40 cubits in depth, another (part) 20 cubits in depth. On that rubble the palace was constructed.

Darius I, DSf §3e (trans. Kent)^[1]

The diggers, the rammers of rubble and the moulders of sun-dried brick were, the text says, "the Babylonian people". Then comes the catalogue that has made DSf famous, the empire itemised as materials and hands:

The cedar timber, this—a mountain by name Lebanon—from there was brought. The Assyrian people, it brought it to Babylon; from Babylon the Carians and the Ionians brought it to Susa. The yaka-timber was brought from Gandara and from Carmania. … The gold was brought from Sardis and from Bactria, which here was wrought. The precious stone lapis-lazuli and carnelian which was wrought here, this was brought from Sogdiana. The precious stone turquois, this was brought from Chorasmia, which was wrought here. … The silver and the ebony were brought from Egypt. The ornamentation with which the wall was adorned, that from Ionia was brought. The ivory which was wrought here, was brought from Ethiopia and from Sind and from Arachosia.

Darius I, DSf §§3g–3i (trans. Kent)^[1]

The stone columns came from "a village by name Abiradu, in Elam"; the stone-cutters were Ionians and Sardians, the goldsmiths Medes and Egyptians, the brick-makers Babylonians, and "The men who wrought the wood, those were Sardians and Egyptians".^[1] The charter closes with a sentence of plain royal satisfaction:

At Susa a very excellent (work) was ordered, a very excellent (work) was (brought to completion). Me may Ahuramazda protect, and Hystaspes my father, and my country.

Darius I, DSf §4 (trans. Kent)^[1]

DSf survives in an extraordinary number of copies: Kuhrt counts "thirteen pieces of the Old Persian text (one almost complete), twelve Elamite and twenty-seven Akkadian", on clay tablets, barrels, stone tablets and glazed bricks scattered across the site.^[12] Two further foundation texts, the Elamite DSz and the Akkadian DSaa, were found in 1970 exactly where the genre says they should be, laid in the wall foundations of the king's apartment; Perrot noted the paradox that "They describe, however, the palace as complete, whereas, according to their location, it was just beginning to be built", which places the composition early in the works, around 520–515 BCE, and marks the whole group as ideological statement rather than progress report.^[11] The versions differ instructively. DSz follows DSf's material-by-material recitation; DSaa instead lists the materials in one breath and then the contributors in another: "These are the lands who brought the materials and the decoration of the palace: Persia, Elam, Media, Babylon, Assyria, Arabia, Egypt" and onward to twenty-three lands, this time with Persia itself among the builders.^[12] The organising claim is the king's: "With the protection of Auramazda, the materials of the decoration of the palace were brought from far away and I organised it."^[12]

How literally to take the catalogue is a real question. The lists rework the empire's standing country-lists as much as any bill of works, and their geography of luxuries (gold from Sardis and Bactria, lapis from Sogdiana, ivory from three continents' edges) maps the empire's reach rather than a quartermaster's ledger; the fuller argument, including Stolper's observation that the one people absent from DSf's labour is the Persians themselves, and the debate over the charter's date, belongs with Darius I's building programme. Kuhrt's caution stands for the genre: with so many fragments and versions, "it is difficult to connect them directly with historical circumstances".^[12] Yet the archaeology has repeatedly touched the text. The excavated foundation trenches were, as Ladiray records, "filled with gravel as was indicated in the foundation charter", and the charter's Babylonian brick-masters fit a residence whose whole plan is Babylonian.^[11]

What Darius built on the levelled mound was a double organism with no exact parallel in Achaemenid architecture. To the south lay the Residence, in Curtis's summary "an enormous building, measuring 246 x 155 m and constructed from mud brick. Essentially, the rooms are arranged around three large courtyards, very much in the Assyrian and Babylonian style."^[11] Its passages and halls had floors of hard red-polished plaster; its gypsum-rendered walls have vanished to their foundations. Amiet saw in the building the empire's two architectural traditions deliberately fused: a Mesopotamian palace of courts, "L'une, mésopotamienne, a groupé les salles autour de cours", set against the Iranian instinct for the free-standing columned hall.^[14]

That hall, the Apadana proper, projected from the Residence's northern side: "In the central hall, measuring about 58m square, there had been 36 columns in six rows of six, on square bases, with porticoes on three sides." Each portico carried "two rows of six columns on circular bases, giving a grand total of 72 columns in all", and "Perrot estimates that the columns would have stood to a height of 20m."^[11] The bull-protome capitals that crowned them are the largest stone sculptures the site has yielded; one, reassembled, dominates the Louvre's Susa gallery. The logistics were on the charter's scale: the terrace and linking walls represent, in Perrot's estimate, "the movement of half to one million cubic metres of earth, which would have required the labour of several thousand men, displaced or recruited locally, during a period of two to three years", while "4,000 tons of stone would be necessary for the columns of the Hypostyle Hall", rolled some fifty kilometres from the quarries.^[11] The hall itself was "a place of assembly, reception, an audience hall or, if one so wishes, the throne room", with the probable throne position marked by a great slab between the fifth and sixth column rows.^[11]

The relation to Persepolis runs in one direction. Susa's hall came first: Wiesehöfer states the consensus plainly, "With its 72 columns in the main hall, this was to serve as a model for Persepolis."^[15] The two apadanas share plan and dimensions almost exactly, and Xerxes finished at both sites what his father had begun, recording at Susa in near-identical texts that "By the favour of Auramazda, King Darius, my father, built this palace" and, on the gate, "built this gateway".^[16]

Access to the royal platform was a processional sequence. From the Ville Royale a visitor passed a porticoed propylaeum, crossed a mud-brick causeway over the ravine between the mounds, and entered the Gate of Darius, a monumental building of about forty by twenty-eight metres whose central hall carried four columns; Xerxes' inscription on their bases names his father as builder. Kuhrt reconstructs the gate as twelve to thirteen metres high, approached over a ravine fifteen metres deep.^[17]

Against one of its doorjambs the excavators of December 1972 made the most celebrated find of the modern campaigns. Perrot, who was directing, recalled: "We were stunned the next day by the discovery, at the level of the Islamic walls already exposed by Ghirshman, of a grey stone which soon revealed itself to be the broken top of a colossal statue of Darius"; clearing showed that "this statue was still upright set against an unknown building", the gate itself.^[18] Headless, the figure still stands nearly two and a half metres, from an original of about three: the only over-life-size statue of an Achaemenid king yet recovered. It is a thoroughly Egyptian work. The stone is greywacke from the Wadi Hammamat; the pose, with advanced left foot and back pillar, is pharaonic; and the plinth carries the twenty-four subject lands as Egyptian fortress-cartouches, each surmounted by a kneeling figure with raised hands, from "Persia, Media, Elam, Areia, Parthia, Bactria, Sogdiana, Arachosia, Drangiana, Sattagydia, Chorasmia, Saca of Marsh and Saca of Plain" through Egypt, Nubia and India.^[17]

The inscriptions say why it was made. The cuneiform text on the robe declares: "This is the statue of stone, which Darius the king ordered to be made in Egypt", set up "so that whoever sees it in time to come will know that the Persian man holds Egypt".^[17] The hieroglyphic texts, edited by Yoyotte, speak another language entirely, presenting Darius in full pharaonic style as son of Atum and living image of Re, a king "who inspires fear in the heart of humanity, who commands prestige in the eyes of all who see him".^[17] One king, two theologies, on one monument: the statue is the empire's ideology of accommodation carved in a single block. Yoyotte concluded that it was made for a temple of Atum, probably at Pithom on the line of Darius's Nile-to-Red-Sea canal rather than Heliopolis as he first proposed, and brought to Susa, with a probable pair, early in Xerxes' reign, most likely after the Egyptian revolt of 486–484 made trophies of such monuments.^[18]

Stone was scarce at Susa and the palace's colour came from another medium altogether: moulded bricks glazed in polychrome, facing the mud-brick walls with processions and guardian monsters. The tradition was not imported. Elamite kings had built in glazed brick at Susa five centuries before Darius; a gate inscription of the twelfth century BCE announces the technique in the first person:

I, Shilhak-Inshushinak, son of Shutruk Nahhunte servant of the well-loved Inshushinak, King of Anshan and of Susa; the kings, my predecessors, had built this gate in baked bricks; I, Shilhak-Inshushinak, made it in enamelled bricks.

Šilhak-Inšušinak, glazed-brick gate inscription (trans. in Perrot 2013)^[9]

Caubet's study of the workshop traditions concludes that "the famous archers and the other coloured decorations owed much to local Elamite traditional know-how. For its part, Mesopotamia used only clay bricks": the Susa reliefs are siliceous bricks, quartz-bodied like a faience, a technology with an Elamite pedigree, and laboratory analysis confirmed as early as 1913 that they contain no clay at all.^[9] Some thirteen thousand decorated bricks now sit in the Louvre, the National Museum in Tehran and the museum at Shush, from friezes of striding lions, winged human-headed sphinxes, winged bulls and griffins as well as the archers.^[18] Almost none was found where it fell. Mecquenem insisted that no panel emerged in situ, and the bricks were recovered largely from Islamic-period water channels and Parthian foundations into which they had been reused; the single secure exception is the lion frieze: in Caubet's account, "The frieze of roaring lions was found, still intact", "where it had fallen: at the foot of the north wall" of the palace's eastern court.^[5] Every panel now displayed is therefore a modern assemblage: "Dieulafoy proposed to reconstruct them in 21 courses whilst Mecquenem, adopting a more minimalistic approach, limited them to 19", and Caubet argues the archers probably ran in superposed registers on pilastered façades rather than the single museum band.^[9][5]

The archers themselves are the site's signature: life-size guardsmen in profile, in long Persian robes worked with rosettes and citadel patterns, each with bow and quiver at the shoulder and a spear held upright before him, the faces and hands in browns against a turquoise ground. Jane Dieulafoy's journal records the moment of discovery in December 1885 with the frieze emerging "heaped up in irregular piles on a tiled floor 4 m below the floor of Artaxerxes' Apadana", and her delight: "Quel admirable modelé ! quel noble et large dessin! quelle technique surprenante de simplicité et de puissance!"^[18][19]

Who they represent has been argued ever since. Because "they held the spear upright, with a distinctive silver ball attached to the bottom end of the shaft", matching Herodotus's description of the royal guard whose spear-butts bore pomegranates, Marcel Dieulafoy identified them as Immortals, and, noting their dark skin against the paler guards of Persepolis, published the conclusion formally: "Nos soldats représenteraient donc le contingent" susien of the nine thousand Immortals, their skin, uniform, jewellery and the silver pomegranate on the spear-butt tending, he argued, to prove it.^[19] Olmstead read them the same way, as the Elamite detachment of the Ten Thousand: "Some are swarthy, almost black; others have a lighter complexion; but all are armed and clothed alike."^[20] The identification is now hedged rather than believed. In the 2013 synthesis the spectrum runs from royal bodyguard to something far less literal: "the archers were sometimes relegated to the ranks of simple guards of the royal residence whilst Amiet detects a more conceptual representation, that of 'the Persian people at arms'", while "For Perrot they represent the nobility of Susa whom Darius wanted to honour in this way".^[9] The frieze may be less a portrait of a regiment than an image of the armed people keeping the king's peace, and the parallel figures at Persepolis, along with Razmjou's re-reading of the Susa "servant" bricks as priests bearing offerings, warn against treating any of the palace processions as photography.^[18]

Susa was one of the four working residences among which the King and the court moved, with Ecbatana, Babylon and Persepolis; Pasargadae remained a ceremonial fifth. The Greek writers give the migration tidy seasons, Xenophon having Cyrus spend "three months in Susa" in spring, Athenaeus making Susa the winter station, and the schemes disagree enough to show that they are literary constructions; the divergences, and what the tablets do and do not confirm, belong with the seasonal capitals (see Ecbatana). What is not in doubt is Susa's working rank. For the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries it was simply the royal city, where embassies went, where Themistocles and the exiled Pisistratids directed themselves, and where the King was assumed to be unless campaigning.^[4]

The Persepolis Fortification tablets document the road traffic that bound Susa into the empire's administration. Travellers on the King's business drew rations along the Persepolis road against sealed authorisations: one party "set out from India. They went to Susa."; another went from Arachosia to Susa; a third from Bactria; and the traffic ran both ways, as when "1 woman went from Susa (to) Kandahar. She carried a sealed document of the king, and she received (it)."^[21] Fast couriers on the Susa road appear in the same archive, and the treasury network moved silver between Susa and the Persepolis region.^[8] Babylonian business followed the court: the Murašû firm of Nippur kept agents in the city, and Kuhrt observes that "members of the family also operated in Susa is now amply established" is what the tablets show.^[21] The city held one of the empire's principal treasuries, the hoard Alexander would eventually weigh; a bronze lion-weight of 121 kilograms found on the Acropole, and a Greek knucklebone-weight looted from Didyma after the Ionian Revolt, are its stray physical survivors, as the Milesians deported to the Persian Gulf via Susa in 494 are its human trace.^[4]

In Greek imagination Susa was the end of the world's longest road and the seat of unspendable wealth. Aristagoras of Miletus, courting Sparta with a bronze map in 499, walked Cleomenes stage by stage across Asia until, in Herodotus's telling, he reached the Cissian land where "on the Choaspes (yonder it is), lies that Susa where lives the great king" with his storehouses: "take that city, and then you need not fear to challenge Zeus for riches".^[6] Herodotus then audits the same road in his own voice: on the royal road from Sardis "the road is in the Cissian land, where are eleven stages and forty-two and a half parasangs, as far as yet another navigable river, the Choaspes, whereon stands the city of Susa", reckoning that "between Sardis and the king's abode called Memnonian there are thirteen thousand and five hundred furlongs", a three-month walk.^[6] The epithet is its own datum: calling Susa "Memnonian", after the legendary eastern king who fell at Troy, let the Greeks file the Persian capital inside their own heroic geography.

The road carried news as well as armies, and Susa is the stage for one of Herodotus's finest scenes:

When the first message came to Susa, telling that Xerxes had taken Athens, it gave such delight to the Persians who were left at home that they strewed all the roads with myrtle boughs and burnt incense and gave themselves up to sacrificial feasts and jollity

Herodotus 8.99, trans. Godley^[6]

The second message reported Salamis. Aeschylus, staging that news two years later for the Athenians, set his whole tragedy at Susa, before the council-house of the Persian elders, and made the city's name a metonym for the empire's grief:

O sovereign Zeus, now indeed that thou hast destroyed the armament of the high-vaunting and multitudinous Persians, thou hast shrouded in the gloom of grief the city of Susa and of Agbatana!

Aeschylus, Persians 532–539, trans. Smyth^[22]

In the same play the chorus remembers Darius as "leader beloved to the men of Susa". The tragedy's Susa is a Greek construction, but its choice of setting registers a fact: for the Aegean world, what happened at Susa was what happened to Persia.^[22]

The Hebrew Bible preserves the view from inside the empire's provinces. Nehemiah, cupbearer to Artaxerxes, dates his commission "in Shushan the palace", the fortified royal quarter, using the same Persian loanword (bīrā, citadel) that the book of Esther makes its stage; Daniel places his vision there too, "at Shushan in the palace which is in the province of Elam".^[23][3] Esther's tale of the Jewish queen of "Ahasuerus", Xerxes, who reigned "over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces", is a court novella of the later Persian or early Hellenistic age, not a chronicle; no Persian source knows its events, and its historical value has to be staged carefully. What it preserves is atmosphere rather than fact: the fortress-palace above the town, the seven counsellors, the irrevocable sealed decree, the gold couches on a mosaic pavement at a garden feast, the gallows and the harem. The court colour is close enough that the book's editors evidently knew what a Persian royal city was like, and the Jewish community it presupposes at Susa is independently plausible; Boucharlat notes that Babylonian and Jewish groups are among the population the sources attest for Achaemenid Susa.^[4] Nehemiah's own memoir, opening at Susa in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes I, is the soberer witness: a real provincial official at the winter court, whose request the King granted, as he records, "according to the good hand of my God upon me".^[23]

The association with the prophet Daniel never left the site. The reputed Tomb of Daniel stands beside the Shaur at the foot of the mounds, rebuilt in the nineteenth century, and Loftus found it "held in the utmost reverence" by Jews, Muslims and Sabaeans alike; pilgrimage to it shaped the site's whole later history, and the first archaeological observations at Susa were made in its shadow.^[2]

The palace did not stand unchanged for two centuries. Xerxes completed his father's buildings; then, in the reign of Artaxerxes I, the great hall burned. The record of the disaster is its repair, two generations later, in the inscription Loftus found on the column bases in 1852:

Darius my ancestor built this Apadana; afterwards, in the time of my grandfather Artaxerxes, it then burnt down, then by the grace of Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra, I had the Apadana rebuilt.

Artaxerxes II, A2Sa (trans. in Perrot 2013)^[11]

The text is a triple landmark: the first Achaemenid inscription recovered at Susa, the first royal text to set Anahita and Mithra beside Ahuramazda, and the only place in Achaemenid architecture, as the Companion notes, "where the term Apadana is directly associated with an existing building", the word that archaeology has borrowed for every such hall since.^[10]

Artaxerxes II also built anew. Across the Shaur, on the plain outside the walls, a second palace was found by chance in 1969 when a bulldozer turned up column bases: a hypostyle hall of sixty-four columns fronting a complex of some 220 by 150 metres arranged around what was probably a garden, with the first substantial Achaemenid wall paintings yet recovered, life-size profile heads in blue and red.^[11][4] Its inscription, A2Sd, contains a word once read as "paradise"; the translation has swung from Kent's "pleasant retreat" through Steve's "outside the walls" to Lecoq's scepticism and a partial rehabilitation, and the debate belongs with the paradise garden. Why the king built it is equally open: Perrot took it for a stopgap audience hall while Darius's Apadana lay in ruins, but Boucharlat objects that the Residence itself never burned and finds no reason to link the fire and the Shaur palace at all, reading it instead as a pleasure palace in the tradition of the riverside garden residences.^[11]

Susa fell to Alexander without a fight in December 331, a few weeks after Gaugamela, and the city's role in the story of the conquest is its treasury. Diodorus reports the take:

Alexander entered the city and found the treasure in the palace to include more than forty thousand talents of gold and silver bullion, which the kings had accumulated unused over a long period of time as a protection against the vicissitudes of Fortune.

Diodorus Siculus 17.66.1–2, trans. Oldfather^[24]

Curtius gives fifty thousand talents of silver; the figures cannot be audited, but every source agrees the Susa hoard was among the greatest concentrations of bullion in the ancient world, and its release into circulation reshaped the economy of the eastern Mediterranean.^[4] Seven years later Susa staged the conquest's strangest ceremony: the mass weddings of 324, in which Alexander and some ninety of his companions took Iranian brides in a single festival, Alexander marrying Stateira, daughter of Darius III. Arrian's account stresses that the rite itself was Persian:

They were celebrated in the Persian way (nomoi toi persikoi); they arranged several rows of armchairs for the future spouses, and after they drank each other's health, each bride sat beside her intended; the men took them by the hand and kissed them, following the king's example. For all the weddings were celebrated at the same time.

Arrian, Anabasis 7.4.7 (in Briant's rendering)^[8]

Ghirshman, excavating the hall where tradition places the feast, allowed himself the observation that the Conqueror's historians set in "notre palais le mariage de dix mille Macédoniens avec des Iraniennes".^[25] Unlike Persepolis, Susa was never burned: the palace was still in use when Alexander returned from the east in 325, lost its function after his death, and decayed rather than died. The statue of Darius stood at its gate for centuries more. Under the Seleucids the city was refounded as Seleucia-on-the-Eulaeus, a Greek polis with Greek inscriptions and coinage; it passed to the Parthians and the local kings of Elymais, flourished under the Sasanians, and lived as an Islamic town until the Mongol period, which is why five further metres of occupation lay over Darius's floors.^[3][4]

European travellers knew the mounds long before archaeology did. Kinneir in 1813 found the site "a gloomy wilderness, infested by lions, hyaenas, and other beasts of prey"; Layard, passing in 1841, judged that "the ruins are of no importance, and there is only one inscription in cuneiform, which I was unable to copy as it was with difficulty that I escaped, [having been] robbed and fleeced by the Dinarounis tribe".^[18] The first excavations came out of a boundary commission: in 1850–52 Colonel Williams and then William Kennett Loftus, geologist to the Turco-Persian frontier survey, opened some thirty trenches. Loftus recognised the great columned hall, recovered the trilingual bases of Artaxerxes II, and concluded, "I was now satisfied that the structure was one of similar description to the so-called Great Hall of Xerxes at Persepolis."^[2] He also found the first glazed bricks, and inferred from their positions that the palace wings had been decorated in that medium externally. His reward was dismissal: Rawlinson reported that Loftus had "turned the mound of Susa topsy-turvey without finding much", and the British Museum declined to continue.^[18]

The Dieulafoys reopened Susa in 1884–86 and made it famous. In trenches beside the Apadana they found the lion frieze and then, in the last days of 1885, the archers; the finds, 327 cases of them, went to Paris on a naval cruiser, and Jane Dieulafoy defended the removals without apology. Their reassembly was a public sensation: the panels were rebuilt like a giant jigsaw in the Louvre basement, a Paris newspaper marvelling that "Les briques de pierre artificielle qui composent cette frise sont au nombre de trois mille environ", and on 6 June 1888 the President of the Republic opened the Louvre's first Persian rooms, where the bull capital and the archers made ancient Persia visible to Europe for the first time.^[18][26] The Shah, Perrot records, "irritated, accused Dieulafoy of 'having robbed him'".^[18] France's answer was law: the 1895 concession and its 1900 renewal, under which "the government of his Imperial Majesty the Shah of Persia grants France exclusive and perpetual rights to excavate over the whole of the Persian Empire", with the whole product of Susa's excavation assigned to France against compensation for precious metals. The monopoly held until 1927, and the finds-division regime it created is why the Code of Hammurabi and the archers are in Paris; France renounced its share of new finds only in 1969.^[18][7]

Jacques de Morgan arrived in December 1897 with the new Délégation en Perse and a mining engineer's method. His interest was Elam, not the Achaemenids: the palaces "had nothing to do with my choice of site at Susa; it was the history of Elam that I was seeking".^[18] He fortified his mission in a castle built on the Acropole spur from ancient bricks, "a building that still dominates the site of Susa and is by far the grandest archaeological expedition house in the Middle East", and attacked the mound itself with the grande tranchée, a trench eventually 180 metres long driven through the tell on the doctrine he stated himself: "L'exploitation générale s'imposait donc, sans tenir compte des niveaux naturels qui sont insaisissables et dont il serait même enfantin de rechercher les limites."^[18][27] Carter's verdict is that Morgan devised a plan of almost frightening efficiency for the complete excavation of the Acropole mound, worked by up to twelve hundred men; Chevalier's, that "Morgan and his collaborators were never able to distinguish and hence reveal the remains of an architecture essentially of mud brick".^[5][7] The trench's yield was nonetheless staggering: Naram-Sin's victory stele, Maništušu's obelisk, and in January 1902 the Code of Hammurabi, Elam's plunder surrendered a second time.^[7]

The cost fell heaviest on the Achaemenid levels, which lay uppermost. From 1908 Roland de Mecquenem cleared Darius's palace with the same methods, and the architect Maurice Pillet, joining in 1912, saw what they had cost:

for several seasons, the mission was committed to the clearing of this building, without, however, worrying about its mud brick walls which had all been removed bit by bit … the excavators did not distinguish them from the surrounding earth and they destroyed them, stopping only at the tiled floor of the building

Pillet, quoted in Perrot 2013^[18]

Pillet, who on his first night mistook the spoil-faces of the trenches for city ramparts, salvaged what could be salvaged, reading the vanished walls as damp shadows in the ground after rain and fixing the palace plan by its thirty-five stone door-sockets; his judgement that "Mecquenem's findings were inexact and incomprehensible" stands in the mission's own record.^[18][7] Mecquenem dug on across the wars until 1946, when Roman Ghirshman inherited an Apadana that was, in his words, "un chaos de trous et de tranchées allant en tous sens". Ghirshman measured what was gone, the Acropole summit lowered by six or seven metres, settled the disputed northern portico, established the first real stratigraphy in the Ville Royale, and dug the artisan quarter's village.^[25]

Jean Perrot, taking over in 1968, was the first to apply modern stratigraphic excavation to Susa, in partnership with the Iranian archaeological service. His decade rewrote the palace: the misread southern "entrance" became the King's Apartments once the door pivots were understood, the foundation tablets DSz and DSaa were found in place, the propylaeum, the eastern gate and the causeway restored the ceremonial approach, the Shaur palace emerged, and on 22 December 1972 the statue of Darius came out of the ground. The mission ended with the Revolution in 1979; the synthesis of the whole century, Perrot's The Palace of Darius at Susa, appeared in French in 2010 and English in 2013, and Iranian teams have worked at the site since.^[18][28] What no method can now recover is the city around the palaces: the Companion's flat summary of the vast southern enclosure is that decades of work "unearthed only flimsy remains", and Perrot found the Great King's residence itself reduced to "a few courses of baked brick and the remains of plaster floors", its courtyards "full of craters marking ancient digging for Elamite tombs", a moonscape a century of archaeology had helped to make.^[10][18]