Pasargadae

Pasargadae is the ruined first capital of the Achaemenid Empire, on a plain in Fars province in southern Iran, roughly 90 kilometres north-east of Shiraz. Cyrus the Great, who ruled from 559 to 530 BCE, founded it in the sixth century BCE, and its best-known monument is the stone building generally held to be his tomb. Its palaces and gardens show the first stage of an imperial architecture drawing on many conquered traditions.

The city was laid out near the place where Cyrus defeated the Median king Astyages in 550 BCE, and it took its name from his own clan. Gardens ran for about three kilometres from the tomb to a hilltop fortress called Tall-i Takht, with palaces, pavilions and other buildings set among them. They are the oldest known Persian chahar bagh, a garden divided into four parts. A gateway on the east side of the palace grounds, known as Gate R, is the oldest known freestanding monumental gatehouse of its kind and may have inspired the later Gate of All Nations at Persepolis.

Its decoration and building methods borrowed from Elamite, Mesopotamian, Egyptian or Phoenician and Ionian Greek models, which scholars read as a statement of imperial rather than purely Persian kingship. Pasargadae remained the capital until Darius the Great moved the royal centre to Persepolis, about 40 kilometres away. Remains near Tall-i Takht were identified in 2006 as the tomb of Cyrus's son and successor, Cambyses II.

The tomb stands at the southern end of the site. It is built of pale limestone without mortar: a stepped platform of six levels about 13 by 12 metres at the base, topped by a small gabled chamber a little over 11 metres above the ground. The chamber itself is only about 3.2 metres long and 2.1 metres wide and high, with a low, narrow doorway. Its form has been compared with Mesopotamian and Elamite stepped temples, with earlier Urartian tombs and with the tomb of the Lydian king Alyattes, though not every scholar accepts these parallels.

Greek writers preserve the main ancient account. Arrian, writing in the second century CE from a lost report by Aristobulus, a companion of Alexander the Great, says that Alexander found the tomb robbed when he passed through after conquering Persia. It had held a golden coffin and couch and was guarded by Magi. Alexander questioned the guards, ordered the contents restored and had the entrance sealed. Arrian and Strabo both report a short inscription in which Cyrus asked the passer-by not to begrudge him his monument, but no trace of any text survives and its exact wording is disputed.

After the Muslim conquest of Iran the tomb's origin was forgotten, and local tradition called it the tomb of the "Mother of Solomon", a name that survives in the nearby town of Madar-e Soleyman. The fifteenth-century Venetian traveller Giosafat Barbaro was told it belonged to Bathsheba; others linked it to the mother of the Umayyad caliph Sulayman. The British diplomat James Justinian Morier argued in 1812 that it matched the classical descriptions of Cyrus's tomb, and Robert Ker Porter reached the same view, publishing it in 1821.

Ernst Herzfeld carried out the first archaeological work in 1905 and a season of excavation in 1928. Aurel Stein drew a site plan in 1934, and Erich Schmidt photographed the whole complex from the air in 1935. An Iranian team under Ali Sami excavated from 1949 to 1955, followed by a British team under David Stronach from 1961 to 1963. In the 1960s a hoard of gold and jewelled Achaemenid ornaments, the Pasargadae Treasure, was found near one pavilion; it has been suggested that it was buried as Alexander's army approached. Iranian, French and Italian teams have since surveyed and excavated further.

Pasargadae was entered on Iran's national heritage list in 1931 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004. The tomb was renovated in 1971, when Iran celebrated 2,500 years of the Persian Empire, and again between 2002 and 2009. The Sivand Dam, begun in 2007 between Pasargadae and Persepolis, raised fears of flooding and of humidity speeding decay; its water level was limited to reduce the risk. Each year at Nowruz, Iranians gather at the tomb to honour Cyrus, whom many regard as the founder of Iran.