The Apadana Reliefs

Two monumental stairways climb the terrace front of the Apadana at Persepolis, one on the north and one on the east, each a pair of flights set against a sculptured façade more than eighty metres long. The scholarly name is a convenience, borrowed from the audience hall of Susa, where the word apadāna is actually attested; the reliefs treated here are those of the Persepolis hall (for the building, the terrace and their history, see Persepolis). The two façades carry one programme twice over. "Each of the two stairways shows essentially the same scenes", Schmidt reported, but in mirror image: "Thus the reliefs on one stairway show the opposite sides of the persons depicted in the reliefs on the other stairway."^[1]

An accident of decay decided which version the modern world knows. The northern façade stood open to the air for over two millennia; the eastern lay under a deep bed of collapsed mud brick until Ernst Herzfeld's excavation in the early 1930s:

The sculptures of the northern stairway, exposed for many centuries to the elements and to vandalism and pilfering, have often been described. The eastern stairway, discovered by Herzfeld, had fortunately been protected and preserved by a thick layer of mud-brick debris.

Schmidt, Persepolis I, p. 82^[1]

Nearly every photograph, cast and textbook figure of "the Apadana reliefs" therefore shows the eastern stairway, whose burial kept the carving crisp to the fingernails. Herzfeld "planned a comprehensive treatment of the reliefs of the tribute procession, which was apparently in preparation at the time of his death", and it never appeared; the base description remains Erich Schmidt's excavation volume of 1953, whose notes "are based mainly on the infinitely better preserved reliefs of the eastern stairway".^[1]

The hall itself is Darius's: his gold and silver foundation tablets lay beneath its corners, and the building was under way by about 515 BCE (see Darius I). The staircase reliefs are another matter. The trilingual inscription on each façade is a text of Xerxes, XPb, and it names no builder except himself:

Says Xerxes the great king: What was built here by me and what was built elsewhere by me, all this I have built by the grace of Ahuramazda. May Ahuramazda protect me with the gods and my kingdom, and what was built by me.

Xerxes I, XPb §3, trans. Weissbach^[2]

Schmidt drew the chronological inference that has held ever since:

The omission in the stairway inscriptions of any reference to Darius' building activities suggests that the stairways were constructed during the reign of Xerxes and leaves little doubt that their reliefs were executed during his time.

Schmidt, Persepolis I, p. 82^[1]

"It has been suggested for stylistic reasons that the reliefs of the northern stairs are somewhat earlier than those on the east", he added.^[1] The design, however, is generally placed under Darius, since the audience panels later found in the Treasury were cut for these façades and belong stylistically to his reign (see below). The programme is thus best understood as a Darius conception carried out, and signed, by his son; the same divided credit runs through Xerxes's building texts across the terrace (see Xerxes I).

The centre of each façade is a panel of soldiers: "two antithetic groups of four alternating Persian and Median guards", standing rigidly at attention, each lance grounded on the forward foot.^[1] The Persians wear the fluted tiara and the flowing pleated gown Schmidt calls the candys; the Medes a domed hat, belted coat, trousers and short sword. These central guards are themselves ancient replacements; the panels they superseded showed the enthroned king. Above them a winged disc hovers between two human-headed, bull-eared sphinxes with the square-tipped beard of royalty and divinity (on the disc and its disputed meaning, see the winged symbol). In the triangular spandrels at either side, "the triangular panels flanking the central groups of guards each show a rearing bull attacked by a lion", beneath a terraced row of cypresses.^[1] Soldiers continue wherever the architecture offers a surface: pairs of Persian lancers on the newels, files armed with lance, bow and quiver along the inner faces of the parapets just above the steps, so that a visitor climbing the flights passed between carved guards before emerging in front of carved courtiers.^[1]

The wings flanking this centre carry the two processions, each disposed in three superimposed bands:

The main portion of the sculptured area is subdivided into three long horizontal panels, or registers, bordered by rosette frames and filled with rows of rather monotonous reliefs. In each register lines of guards (43 in the upper register, 28 in the middle, 21 in the lower) precede the other participants in the festival depicted.

Schmidt, Persepolis I, p. 82^[1]

On one wing the guards are followed by the court. In the top register comes the royal stable: ushers with staffs, attendants carrying whips and fringed saddle-cloths, one with the king's footstool strapped to his back, then three led horses and two small two-horse chariots, driven but empty.^[3] Below file thirty-two dignitaries, Persians and Medes alternating; "A Persian has precedence in each case."^[1] These nobles are the one informal note in the whole composition:

A pleasant change from the monotonous formalism of the other reliefs is provided by the unconventional postures of most of the other dignitaries; looking backward in many cases and obviously meant to be chatting with one another, they are shown holding hands or touching one another's shoulders or equipment in gestures of comradery.

Schmidt, Persepolis I, p. 83^[1]

Root reads the same figures as projecting "an impression of a rather mannered courtly intimacy".^[3] Some of the guard files, distinguished by twisted fillets, have been taken for Elamite (Susian) troops, and Schmidt allowed that they "may represent a unit of the elite corps, the 'Immortals'" (see the Immortals).^[1] One absence is total: "No woman is represented in the Apadana reliefs or in any of the other sculptures of the Achaemenid buildings and tombs at Persepolis and Naqsh-i-Rustam."^[1]

The balancing wing belongs to the subject peoples: in Schmidt's words, "a procession of twenty-three tribute-bearing delegations of the empire".^[1] Each delegation is a self-contained unit of three to nine figures. A Persian or Median usher, staff in hand, leads the delegation's chief by the hand; behind follow attendants with the offerings, vessels balanced on shoulders, folded garments over arms, animals on leads. "Each unit is set off from the next by a tree", Root observes, and "the trees are aligned with one another vertically, so that the units of figures are in effect set into a grid formed by trees and horizontal rosette borders".^[3] The effect is a tabular composition, an empire laid out in cells, walking. Within the cells the carving distinguishes the nations down to small things: the six-strapped boots of the Elamites, the long hanging tip of the Babylonian hat, a Bactrian ear-pendant, the tasselled corners of an Ionian scarf, the serrated edge of a Libyan cape.^[4] The precision is what makes the identification game possible at all, and it implies pattern-books of some kind behind the chisels, whether drawings, garments or memory.

In what order the cells were meant to be read is a real question. "There has been much debate about the order in which the tribute groups were meant to be 'read'", horizontally register by register, or vertically in columns of three; Root accepted the vertical reading "because it yields a list which agrees with that given by the platform carriers on the east door of the Central Building of Darius", against the horizontal order preferred by Muscarella and Barnett, while Herzfeld, Schmidt, Walser, Hinz and Tilia had likewise numbered vertically.^[3] Read either way, the sequence matches no surviving country-list of the royal inscriptions: "Western and eastern peoples are arranged in a pattern for which scholars have not yet understood a rationale."^[3] The procession is a counterpart of the inscribed lists of lands and of the labelled throne-bearers, and the fullest statement of that whole genre in any medium (see the peoples of the empire for the lists and their ideology); but it is a composition in its own right, and it keeps its own order.

No figure on either stairway carries a label. Every ethnic name attached to a delegation is a modern inference, and the reliefs' apparatus of identification is one of the more instructive episodes of Achaemenid scholarship. The key is the royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Persepolis, where the throne-bearing figures who support the king's platform are individually captioned in cuneiform; dress, headgear, footwear and weapons could be matched from the captioned tomb figures to the uncaptioned staircase ones. Delegations "not recognizable or not represented in the tomb reliefs" were then "tentatively identified by Herzfeld" from their gifts and animals, with further proposals from the young Julius Junge.^[4] The method's limits show in Schmidt's own punctuation: fourteen of his twenty-three entries end in a question mark. The identifications also moved under the excavators' feet: the delegation published as Arachosian in 1933 became the Parthians(?) of the final report.^[4] Gerold Walser's monograph of 1966 subjected every attribution to a fresh examination, and handbooks still differ over several groups.^[5]

Schmidt's catalogue, building on Herzfeld's scheme, runs as follows; the question marks are Schmidt's own, and part of the evidence.^[4]

• 1. The Medes: domed felt hats, belted coats, a short sword at the leader's side; a pitcher and bowls, heavy rings, folded coats and trousers.
• 2. The Elamites (Susians): pleated Persian gowns and twisted fillets; two bows tipped with ducks' heads, sheathed daggers, and a snarling lioness led on a rope while two attendants carry her cubs.
• 3. The Armenians (?): Median dress; a bridled stallion and a great two-handled vessel with griffin grips. The dress differs between the two stairways, an inconsistency Schmidt flags.
• 4. The Arians (?) (of Haraiva, Herat): Median coats, heads wrapped in the bashlyk (a hood-like cloth cap); bowls, a feline skin, a two-humped Bactrian camel.
• 5. The Babylonians: fringed robes and conical hats with hanging tips; bowls, draped cloth, a humped zebu bull.
• 6. The Syrians: long woollen gowns; amphorae with handles ending in winged bulls, ornamented armlets, and a two-horse chariot whose axle-pin is carved as the Egyptian dwarf-god Bes. Most later accounts, including the British Museum's 2005 catalogue, call this delegation the Lydians.^[6]
• 7. The Arachosians (?): Median coat and bashlyk; bowls, a camel, a feline skin.
• 8. The Cilicians (?): fillets and sashed gowns; bowls, skins, cloth, and a pair of rams.
• 9. The Cappadocians (?): bashlyks with muffler flaps, capes fastened by a pin; a stallion and garments.
• 10. The Egyptians: long ribbed gowns, barefoot; cloth and a bull. The upper half of the eastern relief is lost.
• 11. The Saka Tigraxauda, the "pointed-hat Scythians": tall pointed caps, and every member armed, with swords and the leader's bow-case; a stallion, rings, garments.
• 12. The Ionians (?): wavy woollen gowns, bareheaded; ribbed metal cups and bowls, folded cloth, and conical hanks of wool or yarn. The classic crux: Herzfeld read this delegation as the Lydians (see below).
• 13. The Parthians (?): Median coats, baggy trousers; bowls and a Bactrian camel.
• 14. The Gandarians (?): capes over bare legs; a humped bull, lances and a round shield. Herzfeld ended by calling them Sattagydians.
• 15. The Bactrians (?): fillets and Median coats; fluted bowls and a Bactrian camel.
• 16. The Sagartians (?): Median hat and coat; garments and a stallion. Herzfeld thought instead of a Caucasus people.
• 17. The Sogdians (?): caps with ear-flaps, and armed; a sword with a crescent pommel, rings, battle-axes, a stallion.
• 18. The Indians: bare torsos, skirts and sandals; baskets holding jars of gold-dust, battle-axes, and a donkey, "a strong well built donkey and not an onager" on the zoologist Bryan Patterson's inspection.
• 19. The Skudrians (?) (Thracians): pointed ear-flap caps and capes; lances, a shield, a stallion.
• 20. The Arabians (?): long robes; folded cloth and a one-humped dromedary. Oriental Institute records suggested the Macians instead.
• 21. The Drangians (?) (of Zranka): fillets, scarves and Median coats; a lance and shield and a long-horned bull.
• 22. The Libyans (Putāyā): capes with serrated edges; an antelope with twisted horns and a chariot.
• 23. The Ethiopians (Kušiyā): skirts and scarves; a lidded vessel, an elephant tusk, and the exotic animal Schmidt recorded as an okapi.

The gifts sometimes answer the written record: the Indians' gold-dust matches Herodotus's report that India paid its enormous tribute in gold-dust, and the animals map the empire's fauna from zebu to dromedary.^[7] Sometimes they answer nothing that survives, and the beasts themselves have been argued over: Patterson judged the Ethiopians' animal "a member of the giraffe family", like an okapi in most respects, and one later study makes it a giraffe outright.^[4][3]

Four cruxes show how the label-less method strains. The twelfth delegation, bareheaded gown-wearers with cups, cloth and wool, sits on the classic fault-line: Schmidt, in tentative agreement with Junge, took them for the Ionians of western Anatolia, while "Herzfeld identifies them with the Lydians", and the difficulty is structural, since on the tomb reliefs the Ionian throne-bearer is nearly indistinguishable from the Lydian.^[4] The twenty-first delegation collects three claimants: Schmidt catalogued the group as Drangian with his question mark, Herzfeld leant towards the Margians of Merv, and "Junge identifies the tribute-bearers under consideration with the Lydians", making a second Lydian candidacy in one procession.^[4] The fourteenth wavers between Gandarians and Sattagydians, two adjacent Indus-frontier peoples whose throne-bearers dress alike. And of the armed seventeenth Schmidt conceded that "there is a possibility that this delegation may represent the Saka Haumavarga, rather than the Sogdians".^[4] None of these disputes has been closed; the 2005 British Museum catalogue still labels one group "Probably Parthians, or Bactrians".^[6] What is secure is the principle of the array rather than every name in it: distinct peoples, distinctly dressed, each bearing the signature produce of a quarter of the earth.

Set beside the imperial art it descends from, the procession is defined by subtraction. Assyrian palace reliefs render subject peoples under the lash and the yoke: files of prisoners, severed heads, cities burning, tribute flung down before a colossal king. Root's study of the programme's ancestry places the Apadana in that compositional tradition and shows the tradition reversed:

These Achaemenid sculptures stand in stark contrast to a Near Eastern tradition which also makes use of the basic representational structure of the king above figures symbolic of his domain in order to express a succinct vision of imperial ethos and hierarchy.

Root, King and Kingship, pp. 131–132^[8]

The older tradition, she continues, rendered that relationship "as one of antagonism"; the Achaemenid version renders it as support freely given.^[8] The Egyptian ancestry makes the same point from the other side. Theban tomb paintings of the Eighteenth Dynasty parade foreign delegations, Nubians, Syrians, Aegeans, in native dress with native goods, and Egyptologists have long recognised that these scenes ideologically recast diplomacy and trade as submission, complete with prostrate chiefs and registrars tallying the take. The Apadana keeps the delegation-by-nation format and deletes the humiliation: no scribes counting, no goods piled in heaps, no one on the ground.^[9] Root reads the result as a deliberate statement: empire portrayed as a voluntary partnership of crown and peoples, composed to suggest a solemn, almost sacral compact between them.^[8]

The contrast runs inside Achaemenid art as well. At Behistun, Darius stands with his foot on a fallen rival while nine rebel leaders wait roped at the neck: coercion carved without embarrassment, where the subject is rebellion. The Apadana, addressed to the obedient empire rather than to its enemies, admits no rope and no foot on anyone; the two monuments divide the work of imperial imagery between punishment and concord, and the division looks like policy.^[10]

The delegates' own bearing is the strongest card in that argument:

The general demeanor of the foreign delegates, combined with the fact that some of them are shown to wear their weapons, indicates that they were meant to be understood as non-belligerent, willing participants in the ceremony shown to be taking place.

Root, King and Kingship, p. 235^[3]

The Saka and Sogdian delegations walk armed into the king's presence, swords at their belts. In a Near Eastern audience scene that detail is extraordinary, and it is difficult to read as anything except trust displayed on purpose. Whether the harmony pictured corresponded to the empire experienced is a separate question; the reliefs are evidence for the empire's self-presentation, and Briant's caution holds that neither the sculpted peoples nor the inscribed lists were meant as administrative documentation, both serving instead as vehicles of the idea of royal power.^[11]

What exactly is being handed over? The older literature called the scene a tribute procession and assumed a yearly ceremony of render behind it. Root's examination of the Greek and visual evidence complicated both halves of that assumption:

Herodotus does not mention any actual tribute ceremony which would correspond to what is portrayed on the Apadana relief. Here, representatives of virtually all the subject nations are shown bringing tribute. Conspicuously absent are men from Persia itself. … Yet the figures on the Apadana relief are bringing gifts which are suggestive not of an annual taxation, but, rather, of a symbolic encomium

Root, King and Kingship, pp. 230–231^[12]

The absence of Persis is the telling detail. Herodotus reports that Persia alone was exempt from assessed tribute, and the reliefs agree: no Persian delegation brings goods.^[7] Had the designers wished to carve the fiscal machine, its exempt centre would have been no obstacle; what they carved instead was a homage of characteristic gifts, the kind of symbolic offering Persians themselves could in principle have made. The British Museum's exhibition catalogue chose its noun accordingly, describing "files of Persian and Median nobles, and twenty-three delegations from all around the empire bringing presents to the great king".^[6] Greek writers distinguished assessed tribute (phoros) from gifts (dora); how the distinction worked in fiscal practice, and how far the king's own word for tribute swallowed both, is a separate question (see tribute and taxation). The goods themselves lean the same way: the delegations carry no grain, no silver by weight, none of the bulk staples the administrative tablets show the empire actually moving, but the signature crafts and beasts of their lands, closer to heraldry than to bookkeeping.^[12] On the staircase the question is ideological, and there the balance of scholarship now sits with Root: the procession renders the idea of the empire's render, willing, ordered and perpetual, rather than any one year's receipts.

For much of the twentieth century a stronger claim held the field: that the reliefs document an actual festival. A line of scholars culminating in Roman Ghirshman tied the procession to the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, at the spring equinox; "Ghirshman also reads the reliefs as an illustration in stone of an elaborately choreographed No Ruz procession", as Root summarises, and L'Orange explored an astral-kingship version of the same idea, while Krefter's reconstruction of the terrace went so far as to plot, in Root's words, "a week's worth of No Ruz ceremonies in and among the buildings".^[13] The theory animated a whole picture of Persepolis as a ritual city inhabited once a year (see Persepolis for that larger debate and its own demolition).

Root, drawing on Carl Nylander's work, dismantled the reading on two independent grounds. The first is evidential: "we know next to nothing about the No Ruz festival during the Achaemenid Period", and the elaborate festival reconstructions are retrojections from sources such as al-Bīrūnī, more than a millennium later.^[13] The second is physical, and was argued for the closely related throne-bearing scenes: Nylander stressed "the impossibility of negotiating a large podium and throne through the extremely awkward passageways" of the buildings on whose jambs they are carved; the architecture fights the ceremonies imagined on its walls, and Root's Apadana-specific point stands beside it.^[13] Root's verdict, that "the sculptures can no longer be taken as literal illustrations of specific ceremonies", is now the standard position, with her fair-minded coda that some ceremony of gift-giving may well have happened somewhere on the terrace; the stones simply do not record its choreography.^[13] The collapse of the festival reading strengthened the ideological one: once the reliefs stop transcribing an event, their want of any datable occasion reads as intended, an image of the empire's homage valid on any day of any year.^[13]

As excavated, the processions converge on files of guards; the king they were composed to approach is missing. That is the result of an ancient revision. Two large relief panels found by Schmidt's expedition, reburied in the Treasury, show the lost scene: the Great King enthroned before two incense burners, sceptre in hand, receiving a dignitary who bows slightly with his hand before his mouth, the crown prince standing behind the throne. Ann Britt Tilia's examination during the Italian conservation campaign demonstrated where they belonged: in the Cambridge Ancient History's words, "these reliefs were not intended for the Treasury, but rather were originally set in the centre panels of the stairways to the Apadana".^[14][15] At some date the panels were prised out, carried across the terrace and reburied, and the staircase centres refitted with the present orthostats of guards flanked by the lion-and-bull groups; in the British Museum catalogue's summary, the audience scenes were "removed in antiquity and replaced by panels showing a lion attacking a bull".^[6][16]

Who sits on the throne? Schmidt read Darius I enthroned with Xerxes as crown prince, and "Bruno Jacobs agrees with Schmidt's identification of the enthroned king as Darius I and of the standing figure as Xerxes".^[16][17] Tilia's findings opened the rival case, put by Shahbazi: the enthroned figure "is probably Xerxes, and the crown prince standing behind him is his eldest son named Darius", the heir "who was murdered together with his father and did not reign" in the palace conspiracy of 465 BCE.^[18][16] On that reading the relocation acquires a motive. "The removal of the panels from a position of honour and public view is thus explained as an act of Artaxerxes I", the surviving son who took the throne over his murdered brother's claim and had no wish to display him carved as heir; the Cambridge Ancient History presents the reconstruction as attractive rather than proven, and the identification remains open (see Xerxes I for the dynastic crisis and this crux within it).^[15]

Whatever the motive, the excision rewrote the programme. The enthroned king was the grammatical object of the entire composition, the figure towards whom every usher led every delegation; with the panels gone, a scene of audience became a parade towards nothing in particular, and the alteration is a rare case of an imperial image edited in antiquity, with the edit itself surviving (see Persepolis for the panels' later history in the Treasury).^[16]

The lion felling a bull fills the triangular panels of the central façade, as on every major stairway of the terrace, and after the revision it also occupied the Apadana's centre. The group is among the most reproduced images of Persian art: the lion's claws hooked into the bull's haunch, the bull's head wrenched back, the whole struggle compressed into the triangle's geometry. What it meant has never been established. The oldest proposal is calendrical. Herzfeld noted the pairing of zodiacal beasts:

Since lion and bull are figures of the zodiac and since they are apparently associated—at least on the building under consideration—with the celebration of the Iranian New Year (coinciding with the spring equinox), Herzfeld suggests that this scene has astronomical meaning.

Schmidt, Persepolis I, p. 83^[1]

On this reading Leo overtakes Taurus as spring overtakes the rains, a cosmic New Year in stone. A sharper theological variant has been proposed: the group "may have a more precise Mazdaean significance, referring to the assault of the evil spirit Akoman on the embodiment of Good Purpose (and cattle), Vohu Manu".^[19] Root, following Nylander, deflates both. The related royal-hero combats, she argues, "bear no particular relationship to the Iranian New Year's ritual described for other periods"; the quoted verdict — "a more generalized apotropaic significance" — is hers for the related royal-hero combats; extended to the animal group, the reading makes it a guarding image, the king's domain shielded against hostile forces, drawn from a Near Eastern repertoire many centuries old.^[20] No Achaemenid text mentions the motif. The honest summary is that one of the empire's most famous images is undeciphered, with a calendrical, a Zoroastrian and an apotropaic reading on the table and no evidence that can choose among them.

The carving itself was the work of a pan-imperial labour force. Darius's foundation charter for Susa states that "Lydians and Ionians are named as craftsmen who were involved in the building of the palace of Susa", as the 2021 Companion puts it, and the same mixed workforce built and decorated Persepolis.^[21] The Persepolis archives put payroll under the chisels: worker gangs (kurtaš) "recruited from all over the empire to serve the king in Fars", with sculptors and relief-decorators appearing in the Treasury accounts from early in Xerxes's reign (see the Persepolis Fortification tablets, and Persepolis for the labour figures).^[22] Nylander's studies of tool marks, above all the toothed chisel, traced Ionian stone-working technique at Pasargadae and after, giving the epigraphic picture a technical fingerprint.^[23]

How much the foreigners contributed beyond hands has been argued in both directions. Ann Farkas's 1974 study staked the maximal claim:

The view will be taken that foreign sculptors, including Greeks, were employed at the Persian court during the time of Darius and subsequent rulers, and that the custom of using foreign artisans had begun in Cyrus' reign.

Farkas, Achaemenid Sculpture, p. 7^[23]

These sculptors, largely Greek in her account, "incorporated Greek techniques and stylistic details into the sculptural programs probably dictated by the Great King".^[23] The position reads today as a dated maximalism: since Root and Nylander the emphasis has fallen on the coherence of the result, a new imperial style that no single contributing tradition can claim, designed from the centre and executed by whoever the empire could summon. Michael Roaf's study of the sculptors' marks on the Apadana, the standard treatment of the carving teams, reconstructed named gangs working side by side on the same façade.^[24] Even Farkas's own clause concedes the direction of control, and the inscriptions clinch it: Rüdiger Schmitt observes that the stonemasons who cut the royal texts "did not possess such knowledge since they were merely copying their text from a draft", reproducing a scribe's exemplar errors and all.^[25] Foreign chisels, royal cartoon: the reliefs are Persian art made by the empire's many hands.

The grey stone the visitor sees is a ghost. "One of Herzfeld's letters to the Oriental Institute mentions that traces of pigments were found 'everywhere at the sculptures which had been buried under the soil'", Schmidt reports, and concludes:

we must conclude that all stairway sculptures had been painted. It is unknown whether the whole surface of the gray limestone reliefs was colored or whether the background between the figures was left unpainted.

Schmidt, Persepolis I, p. 82 n. 90^[26]

"Traces of paint have been recorded since Texier's visit in 1844", Mousavi notes, reminding his readers that "these reliefs were all painted".^[27] The proof of the wider polychrome programme now extends beyond the terrace: inspection of the Egyptian-made statue of Darius in Tehran "revealed that the statue was painted", its folds in a reddish brown, with samples taken to establish whether the pigments were Persian or Egyptian work.^[28] A full pigment analysis of the staircase reliefs themselves remains a desideratum; for the palette recovered elsewhere on the terrace, Egyptian blue among it, see Persepolis. The delegations, in short, once advanced in colour, painted dress against painted ground, and the modern monochrome is an accident of weathering.

The programme was also never quite finished. On the eastern stairway "parts of the rosette decoration were left unfinished in several instances", and unfinished work is a signature of the terrace at large, whose abandoned Unfinished Gate, in Mousavi's phrase, "is a remarkable workshop for restorers where different phases of the working of the stone and the carving of reliefs can be studied".^[1][27] Tilia's study of working methods reconstructed the sequence, from blocked-out forms to final polish, that the unfinished patches freeze in mid-step.^[14]

The eastern stairway's burial, probably by collapsed mud-brick superstructure after the fire of 330 BCE, sealed it (for the burning and the site's later history, see Persepolis). The reliefs had already led a mobile life within the terrace's own antiquity: fragments of tribute-bearer reliefs, with a Babylonian inscription naming Artaxerxes I, were found re-set in a later palace-front on the central hill associated with Artaxerxes III, quarried from an earlier building and recombined.^[29] The excavation era added its own displacement: in November 1934 Herzfeld presented the visiting Swedish crown prince, without authorisation, with a relief fragment of a guard from the Apadana's eastern stairway, an episode that fed his forced departure and Schmidt's succession to the directorship.^[29]

Photography completed what excavation began. Schmidt's expedition photographed the freshly cleared eastern façade panel by panel, and published aerial views of the terrace, and those Oriental Institute plates became the source of the empire's modern image: the gift-bearing procession is now the visual shorthand for Achaemenid Persia on book covers, banknotes and museum walls. The image has been re-used as deliberately as it was made. At the Pahlavi monarchy's celebration of 2,500 years of kingship at Persepolis in 1971, "Thousands dressed up as ancient Medes and Persians" paraded below the terrace, a modern state re-enacting the stone procession as its own pedigree.^[30] The reliefs' first purpose, an ordered world walking willingly towards its king, has proved serviceable to more monarchies than the one that carved them.