Persepolis

Persepolis is the ruined ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, standing on a great stone terrace at the edge of the Marvdasht plain in Fars province, south-western Iran. Begun by Darius the Great around 518 to 515 BCE and enlarged by his successors, it was the setting for the grandest displays of Persian royal power until Alexander the Great captured and burned it in 330 BCE.

The Persians called the place Pārsa; Persepolis, meaning "the Persian city", is the Greek name. Darius chose a site at the foot of Rahmat Mountain, near the Pulvar river, and had a platform of about 125,000 square metres built up and partly cut into the rock. Excavators of a gate at the nearby site of Tol-e Ajori have suggested that work began around 518 BCE; the earliest securely dated remains, including gold and silver foundation tablets of Darius buried under the Apadana, belong to about 515 BCE. Other writers give a later founding date of around 500 BCE.

Darius ordered the Apadana, a vast audience hall, and a smaller palace called the Tachara. After his death in 486 BCE his son Xerxes I finished the Tachara, built his own palace on the highest part of the terrace. Visitors entered through the Gate of All Nations, a square hall whose columns, about 16.5 metres tall, were crowned with paired bulls. Xerxes also began the Hall of a Hundred Columns, which his son Artaxerxes I completed; it was used for receptions and later as a kind of imperial museum. Building went on under later kings, and an unfinished gate shows that work was still in progress when the empire fell. The tombs of Artaxerxes II and III were cut into the hillside behind the terrace, while earlier kings were probably buried at nearby Naqsh-e Rostam.

The reliefs on the Apadana stairways show delegations from across the empire, each in its own dress, bringing gifts to the king, among them Lydians and Armenians carrying wine. Many archaeologists long believed the complex was used mainly for celebrations of Nowruz, the Persian new year at the spring equinox, and Ernst Herzfeld held this view, but the idea is no longer the consensus. It was probably occupied only seasonally. Clay tablets from the administrative archives survive; one, recording a commodity shared among five villages, shows that Old Persian was used in everyday business.

In 330 BCE Alexander forced the pass known as the Persian Gates, killed its defender Ariobarzanes, and entered Persepolis, which his troops looted. Soon afterwards fire destroyed the wooden roofs and much of the complex. Later Greek and Roman writers, including Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius Rufus, say the burning was proposed during a drunken feast by Thaïs, the mistress of Alexander's general Ptolemy. Whether the fire was an accident or deliberate revenge for the Persian burning of the Athenian Acropolis during the Greco-Persian Wars is unclear; many historians think it was a political act aimed at a symbol of Persian kingship.

Diodorus records that Persepolis was still a provincial capital in 316 BCE, but it declined, and the nearby city of Istakhr grew partly from its stones. In 311 CE a prince of the Sasanian Empire, Shapur Sakanshah, left an inscription there calling the site the Hundred Pillars. Persians later attributed the ruins to the legendary king Jamshid and called them Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, or Chehel Minar, the Forty Columns.

European travellers described the ruins from the fifteenth century onwards. In 1618 the Spanish envoy García de Silva Figueroa was the first Westerner to connect Chehel Minar with the Persepolis of classical writers, and in 1621 Pietro Della Valle counted only 25 of the original 72 columns still standing.

Systematic excavation began in the 1930s, when Herzfeld and then Erich Schmidt led eight seasons for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and recovered the archive tablets. In 1971 the Shah's government staged its celebration of 2,500 years of the Persian Empire at the site. UNESCO listed Persepolis as a World Heritage Site in 1979. In recent years concern has focused on the Sivand Dam, begun in 2006, which some campaigners fear could harm the area, and on lichens damaging the carved stone.