Who ruled Susa?

Susa lay in the lowlands of south-western Iran, at the edge of the Zagros Mountains between the Karkheh and Dez rivers, about 250 kilometres east of the Tigris. Founded more than 6,000 years ago, it was for millennia the chief city of Elam, then a capital of the Persian kings, and it remained important under the Parthians and Sasanians. The modern town of Shush stands beside its ruin mounds, which were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2015.

Radiocarbon dates place the first settlement around 4200 BCE, at a time when nearby villages were being abandoned; the archaeologist Daniel Potts has suggested it may have been founded to replace the destroyed settlement of Chogha Mish to the west. Its first inhabitants raised a massive platform above the plain and buried their dead near its base with finely painted pottery; nearly two thousand of these vessels are now, for the most part, in the Louvre.

Between about 3800 and 3100 BCE Susa adopted much of the culture of Uruk in Mesopotamia, including cylinder seals, proto-writing and monumental building. How far this reflects Mesopotamian domination is debated: some scholars treat Susa as part of a greater Uruk culture, while others, Potts among them, stress its independence and its links with the Iranian highlands. Proto-Elamite tablets appear in the following period.

Susa then became the centre of Elam, and control of the surrounding plain of Susiana passed back and forth between Elam and the states of Sumer and Akkad. Sargon of Akkad absorbed it into his empire around 2330 BCE. About 2100 BCE its Akkadian governor, Kutik-Inshushinak, rebelled and made Susa an independent state, promoting the Linear Elamite script, which remains undeciphered. The city then fell to the Third Dynasty of Ur until the Elamite king Kindattu destroyed Ur's power around 2004 BCE.

From about 1500 BCE the Middle Elamite kings styled themselves "king of Anshan and Susa" and favoured the Elamite language and gods. Around 1175 BCE King Shutruk-Nahhunte carried the stele of Hammurabi's law code off from Babylonia to Susa, where French archaeologists found it in 1901; about fifty years later Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylon plundered the city in turn. In 647 BCE the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal levelled Susa, and an inscription found at Nineveh has him boast of wrecking its ziggurat, scattering its gods and carrying off the bones of its kings. Assyrian rule lasted until the Medes took the city in 617 BCE.

Cyrus the Great captured Susa in 540–539 BCE, bringing it under Persian rule for the first time. Under his son Cambyses II it became one of the four capitals of the Achaemenid Empire, and Darius the Great built a great palace there, recording in an inscription that its materials and ornament were brought from distant lands. Aeschylus set his tragedy The Persians at Susa, and the biblical Book of Esther takes place at the court of King Ahasuerus in the city.

The satrap of Susa surrendered to Alexander the Great, who in 324 BCE held a mass wedding there between Macedonians and Persians. Under the Seleucids, as Seleucia on the Eulaeus, it lost its rank as imperial capital but remained a trading city, and its many Greek inscriptions suggest a sizeable Greek population. It broke away from Seleucid rule around 147 BCE, came under the rulers of Elymais and then the Parthians, and was briefly captured by the Roman emperor Trajan in 116 CE.

Ardashir I, founder of the Sasanian Empire, destroyed the city in 224 and rebuilt it soon after. When its Christians rebelled, Shapur II destroyed it again in 339, reportedly using 300 elephants, then resettled it with prisoners of war and weavers. Arab armies under Abu Musa al-Ash'ari took Susa during the Muslim conquest of Persia in the 640s. It recovered as a regional centre known for luxury textiles, with Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities and a shrine held to be the tomb of the prophet Daniel. Mongol invaders razed it in 1218, and in the fifteenth century most of the remaining population moved to Dezful.

William Loftus identified the site in 1851, and French expeditions dug there from 1885 until 1979, at first with destructive methods, sending many finds to the Louvre. The ancient centre is now uninhabited; the adjoining town of Shush in Iran had 64,960 inhabitants in 2005.