Topic: archaeology (12)

• PlaceAnshan

  Anshan (Elamite Anzan) was the highland capital of Elam, on the Marvdasht plain in the province the Old Persian sources called Parsa, modern Fars. Its ruins are the tell of Tall-e Malyan, some 47 km north of Shiraz, identified as Anshan only in 1973, when inscribed bricks from the site were read.…

• PlaceBabylon

  Babylon was one of the largest cities of ancient western Asia and the centre of the Achaemenid empire's most heavily assessed province. It was a royal residence and, among the principal residences of the Persian kings, the only one whose densely built urban character is beyond dispute. Rebuilt on…

• PlaceEcbatana

  The chief city of the Medes and, after Cyrus took it in 550 BCE, one of the four working royal residences of the Persian empire, the one where the King and his court passed the height of summer. It lay on the flank of Mount Alvand (the ancient Orontes) on the great road from Mesopotamia into Iran,…

• ObjectGold plaque of a barsom-bearer (Oxus Treasure)

  The barsom plaque is one of the small gold votive plaques of the Oxus Treasure (British Museum 123949): a standing man in Median dress holding before him a slim bundle of rods, the barsom of Iranian worship. It is the clearest surviving material image of the rite the texts only name, one of about…

• PlaceNaqsh-e Rostam

  Naqsh-e Rostam is the perpendicular cliff about six kilometres north-west of Persepolis where the Great Kings of the Achaemenid house were entombed. Four cruciform tombs are cut into the rock: the oldest secured to Darius I by its inscriptions, DNa and DNb; the other three attributed on position…

• PlacePasargadae

  The first Achaemenid capital, raised by Cyrus the Great on the high, well-watered plain of the River Pulvar in the heart of Persis, some forty kilometres north-east of the later Persepolis. Here Cyrus built a dispersed royal park of columned stone halls (a free-standing gatehouse, Gate R, with its…

• PlacePersepolis

  Persepolis was the ceremonial and administrative heart of the Achaemenid empire in its Persian homeland, a vast terraced complex of palaces, audience halls and treasuries raised by Darius I from about 518 BCE on the Marv Dasht plain of Fars. The Persians called it simply Pārsa, the name of the…

• PlaceSardis

  Sardis, the old royal capital of Lydia at the foot of Mount Tmolus on the river Pactolus, became after its capture by Cyrus in 547 or 546 BCE the chief seat of Persian power in the west, and held that place for two centuries until it surrendered to Alexander in 334. Under the Mermnad kings it had…

• PlaceSusa

  Susa was the great lowland capital of the Achaemenid empire, the ancient city of Elam that Darius I rebuilt from about 520 BCE as a royal residence and working seat of government. It lay on the Susiana plain of south-western Iran, at the meeting point of the Iranian plateau and the Mesopotamian…

• ArtworkThe Apadana Reliefs

  The Apadana reliefs are the sculptured façades of the two great stairways of the Apadana, the audience hall of Persepolis: files of Persian and Median guards, courtiers and royal grooms on one wing and, on the other, twenty-three delegations of subject peoples, each in the costume of its land,…

• PeopleThe Saka (Scythians)

  The Saka (Old Persian Sakā), the horse-riding nomad peoples of the Eurasian steppe, were the empire's whole northern and eastern horizon: fought at the frontier, enrolled in the royal armies, carved on the monuments, and never wholly ruled. The name itself is the first problem. "Saka" was the…

• PlaceThe Xerxes Canal

  The Xerxes Canal was a navigable channel cut through the neck of the Athos peninsula in northern Greece on the orders of Xerxes I, during the regional preparations made over roughly the three years before his invasion of Greece in 480 BCE (see the invasion of Greece). Herodotus describes conscript…